Out In The Cold
A running gag among skeptics of the catastrophic version of global warming theory is the attribution of everything under the hot sun to human-induced climate change. This includes this bit of sophistry masquerading as "science:"
This isn't news, it isn’t science, it isn’t even a theory. It's insinuation, nothing more.
If, however, it can be implied under the aegis of "we are all going to die unless...!" alarmism, well, ends justify the means and all that, and scaring the reluctant, the skeptical, and the unsure into submission is the fall-back approach when facts don’t conform to the narratives.
Before you ponder "well, we should give the idea a chance..." contemplate this correlation:
Again, correlation is not causation. Two things that happen in parallel are not connected until someone provides evidence as to a causative interrelation. Evidence, not hand-waving, not “we can come up with some tortured logic if asked.”
That out of the way, consider next what the alarmists don't want to talk about. Warm is always and everywhere a Bad Thing, but cold is objectively worse.
Germany's green energy aspirations have been gobsmacked by both technological and geopolitical realities, and now the geniuses who tried to decree “green” are rushing to restart sixteen coal-fired power plants and urging rationing to help stave off a massive wave cold deaths come winter. Ghana, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and The Netherlands are similarly suffering from the "green" hubris of their supposed Best-and-Brightest in other ways.
Alas, our Best-and-Brightest are either too boneheaded or (in the grand tradition of all things statist) quite certain that they will get it right where others failed. So, we get pointless, expensive garbage like the Inflation Reduction Act, we get dozens of executive orders intended to hamstring the oil and gas industry in America, we see our brief moment of net-energy-export squashed like a bug, and we get a continued insistence that ‘Net-Zero’ is within our grasp if only we exercise the political.
It's not. It's a giant bottle of snake oil that does what most versions of that itinerant Old West salesman's product did: give a temporary feeling of "good" with no payoff.
“Snake oil” was often just opium or cocaine in alcohol - great for giving you a buzz or making you forget your pain, but useless as an actual treatment. "Net-zero" is the emotional payoff for the gullible and motivated - support "green" and you can feel good about yourself. It's like city recycling programs - mostly useless and a drain of taxpayer dollars, but very "feel-good" on the surface. As National Review's Kyle Smith wrote a bit ago, recycling is wasteful, expensive, and pointless.
Those adjectives are just as applicable to wind-and-solar-and-battery aspirations than to recycling. There are a few things where recycling (e.g. metals) makes economic sense. The rest? It's just a "feel-good" program based on a load of BS peddled to the public by people who often couldn't logic their way out of a paper bag.
Net-zero is the same thing. Wind and solar, in advantageous locations, make economic sense as additional supply, but barring a passel of technological breakthroughs, will not displace reliable base load sources such as gas, coal, and nuclear. We simply do not have the tech or the resources to achieve anywhere near that aspiration.
Net-zero is the equivalent of what radio personality Ron Bennington once called "pot talk" - the pseudo-philosophical musings of fully-baked stoners. It feels so intellectual in the moment and in the abstract, but the cold-water realities are either waved off or never considered in the first place.
That cold water is splashing us all in the face now. To be followed by nations possibly failing in that which humans have been doing ever since they learned to create shelter: generate heat to stave off the cold. As I noted, Germany's leaders are scrambling to correct their mistakes, because the alternative is a lot of frozen people this winter. They didn’t care about drastically increasing energy costs for those people, but frozen grannies would be a real threat to their cushy jobs.
There are many things attributed to global warming that have no actual connection, correlations aside, and there are many predicted effects that have not materialized. Deaths from the cold, on the other hand, will be caused from the premature and reckless rush to decarbonization that Western leaders are forcing upon their people.
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Yours in liberty,
Peter.