Environment
Climate Alarmists Want To Fight The Sun. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
What should we say when one of America’s pre-eminent media platforms endorses a plan so fraught with unknowns and pitfalls it invites potential global catastrophe?
That’s what the editorial board at the Washington Post did on April 27 in a 1,000-word editorial endorsing plans by radical schemers and billionaires to engage in various efforts at geoengineering.
The Post’s editors engage in an exercise of saying the quiet part out loud in the piece, morphing from referring to monkeying around with the world’s ability to absorb sunlight as “a forbidden subject,” to concluding it is “indispensable” and “urgent” in the course of a single opinion piece. Sure, why not? What could possibly go wrong with such a plan?
What could go wrong with plans to, say, block sunlight with thousands of high-altitude balloons? Or with a plan that involves spraying the upper atmosphere with billions of tons of sulfur particles? Or with a plan to spend trillions of debt-funded dollars to build a gargantuan shield placed in stationary orbit in outer space?
The editors are so cocksure in their arrogance that they even admit some such concepts have already been tried out, writing, “Climate geoengineering is so cheap and potentially game-changing that even private entrepreneurs have tried it out, albeit at small scales.”
The “small scale” experiment to which the editors refer took place in Baja, Mexico, where researchers launched two large balloons filled with sulfur dioxide particles into the stratosphere. The goal was to measure the sun-dimming effects of the sulfur dioxide, a real, actual pollutant that the Environmental Protection Agency and regulators all over the world have spent the last half century attempting to remove from the atmosphere.
It turned out that Luke Eisman, an entrepreneur who financed the experiment, launched the balloons without seeking prior approval. When Mexican officials found out it had been conducted, they quickly moved to ban such geo-engineering projects on the grounds that they violate national sovereignty. Reuters reports that Mexico’s environment ministry statement said it would seek a global moratorium on such geoengineering projects under the Convention on Biological Diversity.
But despite such concerns in Mexico, here come the Post’s editors advocating we simply just have to trust the science. You know, like we trusted the “science” of COVID vaccines and the “science” of locating giant offshore wind farms in the middle of a whale migration corridor off the Northeast coast, right? Sure. After all, what could go wrong?
The editorial writers go on to cite a similar, larger scale project being promoted by climate-engineering scholars David Keith at the University of Chicago and Wake Smith at Yale. These gentlemen propose to try to lower temperatures by spewing out 100,000 tons of sulfur dioxide – again, a real pollutant humanity has worked decades to eliminate – at an annual cost of $500 million (no doubt to be paid for by more taxpayer debt) using what they refer to as “15 souped-up Gulfstream jets” to create what could accurately be called chemtrails.
In a piece published in February at the MIT Technology Review, the scientists say the project could be mounted as soon as five years from now, which we should all probably consider a threat rather than a mere projection.
Talk of mounting similar geoengineering projects has been ramping up in recent years. In 2021, Bill Gates said he was investing in a project based at Harvard University to spray tons of calcium carbonate particles into the stratosphere above Scandinavia, but the project was ultimately cancelled due to understandable outrage from indigenous groups and environmentalists.
Fellow billionaires Jeff Bezos and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz have also plowed millions into bioengineering projects.
But until recently, the thought of mounting projects designed to block out sunlight was, like the agenda to intentionally reduce the global population, a subset of their agenda that climate alarmists have tried to keep mainly under wraps. The reason is obvious: Whenever such radical and frankly dangerous ideas are made public, people tend to look at one another and ask, “who in the world would want to do that?”
Now come the members of the Washington Post editorial board, joining Gates and Bezos and Moskovitz in answering that question. Way to go, folks.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Daily Caller
Climate Change Fanaticism Was The Big Election Loser
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Stephen Moore
A few days before last week’s election, Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a dire warning to voters. If Trump won, “the struggle against climate change will be over.”
He had that right.
Climate change fanaticism was effectively on the ballot last week. That green energy agenda was decisively defeated.
It turns out the tens of millions of middle-class Americans who voted for Trump weren’t much interested in the temperature of the planet 50 years from now. They were too busy trying to pay the bills.
The result shouldn’t be too surprising. Polls have shown climate change ranks near the bottom of voters’ concerns. Jobs, inflation and illegal immigration register much higher on the scale of concerns.
But if you asked the elite of America in the top one percent of income, climate change is seen as an immediate and existential threat to the planet. Our poll at Unleash Prosperity earlier this year found that the cultural elites were so hyper-obsessed with climate issues, they were in favor of banning air conditioning, nonessential air travel and many modern home appliances to stop global warming. Our study showed that not many of the other 99 percent agree.
Wake up, Bernie and Al Gore.
Climate change has become the ultimate luxury good: the richer you are, the more you fret about it.
Among the elite, obsessing about climate change has become a favorite form of virtue-signaling at the country club and in the faculty lounges. There is almost no cross that the green elites — the people who donate six figures or more to groups like the Sierra Club — aren’t willing to make lower income Americans bear to stop global warming.
Herein lies the political curse of the climate issue. A millionaire doesn’t care much if the price of gas rises by $1 a gallon or if they have to pay another $100 a month in utility bills. But the middle class hates paying more.
It wasn’t just economic concerns that turned the voters against climate crusaders like President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Workers weren’t too thrilled with the heavy fist of government commanding them to buy an electric vehicle — whether they wanted one or not.
It hasn’t helped the greens’ cause that the same progressives who are out to save the planet with grandiose transformations and global government, seem to have no problem with the garbage polluting the streets of our major cities or the graffiti or the feces and urine smell on the street corners of San Francisco and New York. That’s real pollution. And it’s affecting us here and now.
The good news is this year’s voter revolts against the radical green agenda are not a vote for dirtier air or water. The air that we breathe and the water we drink is cleaner than ever — a point that President Donald Trump correctly made. We will continue to make progress against pollution.
To try to sell middle America on the climate-change agenda of abolishing fossil fuels, the greens peddled bogus arguments that climate change would hurt poor communities most. In reality the financial costs of the climate policies and the paychecks lost were felt by the non-elite.
Democrats forgot to visit the steel-mill construction sites or the auto plants or the oil patch and ask those workers what they thought.
Well, now we know the reality. Americans think their shrinking paychecks and the higher price of gas they pay at the pump is the real clear-and-present danger. If Democrats don’t start to get that, they too will go to bed worrying about their jobs.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity. His latest book is titled: “The Trump Economic Miracle.”
Business
Biden-Harris Admin Reportedly Backs Off On Major Emissions Initiative At UN Climate Summit
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Nick Pope
The Biden-Harris administration is quietly backing away from a plan to use the ongoing U.N. climate conference to announce an international call for emissions reductions, according to Politico.
It is not clear whether it is because President-elect Donald Trump decisively won last week’s presidential election, but Biden-Harris officials reportedly intended to partner with several other countries in announcing “ambitious” carbon emissions reduction goals for 2035 before the announcement fell through, according to Politico, which cited a draft press release it obtained and several unnamed officials. Had it not fallen through, the announcement could have gone live as early as Monday, the first day of the conference — commonly referred to as COP29 — in Azerbaijan, a Caucasian petrostate with a questionable human rights record.
The aborted call to action would not have been legally binding, though it would have served as a signal to corporations to invest in emissions reduction initiatives and pave the way for other nations to get on board, according to Politico. The countries that would have been named in the announcement would have committed to slashing emissions across nearly every sector of their respective economies, and they would have taken aim at specific chemicals like carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.
The press release announcing the commitments “clearly won’t be published” at this point, one senior foreign diplomat told Politico, which granted the source anonymity to speak freely on the matter. Beyond Trump’s victory, other potential factors that may have interfered with the plan to roll out the 2035 targets include ambivalence from potential partners or bureaucratic logjam in the European Union, an American ally that typically collaborates on similar climate targets.
The U.S. circulated the idea of putting out a statement ahead of COP29 with “a lot of parties but never pushed for it to become something more,” a European official involved in climate negotiations told Politico.
Trump’s pending return to the White House is looming large at COP29, given the president-elect’s pledges to roll back green spending, regulations and initiatives and jack up fossil fuel production, according to CBS News. Moreover, Trump has also promised to withdraw again from the U.N.’s Paris Climate Accords, which he did in his first term before the Biden-Harris administration rejoined the deal.
The White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
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