Chicken Littles and Cherry-Pickers

Fifty eight years ago, the Lovin' Spoonful released the song Summer In The City, which opens with a palpable description of... we might presume New York City, given that it was recorded there:

Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty
Been down, isn't it a pity
Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city
All around, people looking half-dead
Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head

As I edit this, the New York City metro area (where I live) is enjoying another heat wave (defined by three or more days that exceed 90°F), and it's not alone. Naturally, this is all due to global warming, we are told. Naturally, and more frequently, the people tired of the perpetual "all bad things are due to humans using carbon energy" scolding are peppering social media with rebuttal memes. Those memes vary, with some pointing out that many of the recorded high temps in the US on particular dates or months occurred a century ago, and others noting that "warming" depends on when we started measuring it.

Both are factually correct. Both fall prey, however, to the "weather is not climate" challenge. A challenge that the warm-mongers abuse, misuse, and overuse, but one that is not invalidated by their excesses.

Nevertheless, pointing out that, yes, it's been hot before (as the Lovin' Spoonful song reminds us) is a reasonable response to those who tell us that our air conditioners are contributing to a planetary death spiral.

Anyone with any sense knows that screaming 'the sky is falling' for extended periods of time without doomsday actually arriving will eventually create deaf ears, and once those ears seal up, getting them open again is nigh-on impossible. The warmists, being fanatics and thus putting their cause ahead of reality, persist despite hundreds of doomsday predictions having come to naught.

The fact of that sheaf of failed predictions is, by itself, proof that warming has been overstated and exaggerated. But, to paraphrase Vince Vega, excess doesn't mean it's not happening. Unfortunately, in hot button issues today, too many people default to a binary "disaster" vs "hoax" dichotomy, no matter that neither is supported by the evidence. Here, I reiterate my "lukewarmism" position.

This debate, however, misses the forest for the trees. What we should be talking about are the remedies. That is where the rubber meets the road.

The leadership and brain trust in the West has thrown itself all-in on a brute-force decarbonization mission it calls "net-zero." The goal, or more accurately the fantasy, is to replace all carbon-based energy generation with windmills and solar panels, and to remove all gasoline and diesel powered vehicles from the road and replace them with battery powered cars and trucks.

This fantasy ignores a laundry list of realities, including resource availability, the unsolved storage problem, multi-trillion dollar costs, environmental impact, massive wealth destruction, land use and availability, deterioration of living standards, and the sheer magnitude of the endeavor. All that's before we consider that the world's energy demands are only going one direction: up. In fact, even with the massive, coercive push into wind and solar, the use of coal, oil, and natural gas continues to increase.

It also ignores an even bigger problem: the rest of the world. It is beyond doubt that the BRICS nations, the rest of Africa and South America, the Middle East, and much of the rest of Asia will not follow the US, Canada, and Western Europe down the path of energy suicide that is Wind and Solar and Batter Idiocy.

There is an outfit that calls itself the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) that sends earnest young fools people door-to-door to get petition signatures calling for the state to accelerate its decarbonization. Whenever they ring my doorbell, I ask them what NYPIRG's position is on nuclear power. "At this time, NYPIRG is neutral on nuclear power" is the usual response, at which time I tell the earnest young person that until they move it to the front of their agenda, I'm not signing diddly.

I still wouldn't sign, because I cannot imagine a greater idiocy than a state-level government imposing draconian energy mandates on its residents in the face of a planet-wide rejection of the same.

Which brings me to repeating my warming prescriptions:

1 - Go all-in on modular nuclear power.

We currently have 94 nuclear plants generating about 19% of the country's total power. Get the regulatory roadblocks out of the way and work with industry to build several hundred modern, modular plants. Export more to friendly countries.

This will provide us with continuous clean power, free of the vagaries of the wind blowing and the sun shining, and absent the need to develop massive power storage facilities and even more massive alterations to the distribution grid. This will also liberate huge quantities of domestically harvested natural gas and petroleum - which we should then export to the rest of the world. The geopolitical ramifications of this cannot be understated. Friendly nations could liberate themselves from energy slavery to hostile and oppressive regimes, hostile nations would have their economic legs cut out from under them, and America could fulfill the 'globocop' notion by providing energy security instead of military might.

2 - Invest in geoengineering research, as a safety net against the possibility of a worst-case outcome.

That's it. It's not complicated. It'll work a LOT better, in myriad ways, than the current "we hate humanity" approach, and the amount of public money required will be trivial compared to what's being spent on trying to push the wet WASABI noodle.

Unfortunately for us, warmism is seen by the Best-and-Brightest as an opportunity to impose a command economy on the world, to force us to alter our behaviors, and to accrete even more power to a ruling class that doesn't give one whit about the health, wealth, and prosperity of the masses it would manage.