‘Anti-human’: Tucker Carlson, Michael Shellenberger blast John Kerry’s COP28 speech

‘I think it’s fair to call it a death cult at this point, when you’re stifling energy supplies that are necessary to keep people alive, allow poor people to escape the use of wood and dung, I don’t know what else you call it than an anti-human death cult,’ Shellenberger told Carlson.

American conservative firebrand Tucker Carlson and journalist Michael Shellenberger recently blasted Democratic climate czar John Kerry for giving an “anti-human” speech at this year’s United Nations COP28 “climate change” conference.

Making the strong statements during the Monday edition of his X (formerly Twitter) show, Carlson played a clip of Kerry, who serves as U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, explaining at the COP28 conference in Expo City, Dubai on Sunday that he sees the global elimination of coal-fired power plants as an essential measure in tackling so-called “climate change.”

Ep. 44 Another half-demented 80-year-old yelling about things he doesn’t understand. These are our leaders. They don’t care about our future because they don’t have one of their own. pic.twitter.com/iylpXALJjZ

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) December 4, 2023

Calling Kerry and many in U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration “half-demented 80-year-olds,” Carlson pointed out that despite the pleas of Kerry and others like him, other nations are moving full-stream ahead with the burning of coal as a means of powering their countries, and thereby sustaining their populations and economies.

“China, for example, burns more coal each year than the rest of the world combined… this year, the Chinese have generated 14 percent more electricity from coal than they did last year; same thing in India,” Carlson said, adding that other large nations such as Indonesia have also ramped up their use of coal.

Carlson argued that this presents a hypocrisy among the Biden administration, which often talks about “climate change” and the purported role of the West in the creation of the so-called crisis while ignoring the behavior of China, India and other nations.

Continuing his show, Carlson interviewed journalist Michael Shellenberger about the behavior of Kerry and other members of the political establishment, inquiring what he sees as the true motivation behind the climate “religion.”

Shellenberger replied by accusing the global “elite” of having an outright hatred for humanity, pointing to the fact that politicians, including the British prime minister, took private jets to the recent U.N. conference in Dubai, all the while increasing energy costs for ordinary citizens and harping on the need for their citizens to reduce energy consumption.

“I think that what’s so different now is that the elites are just openly and blatantly expressing their hatred of humankind, particularly the hatred of working people, of poor people,” Shellenberger told Carlson “the obvious alternative to coal is natural gas… if this was actually about ‘climate change’ you would just produce more natural gas because it produces half the carbon emissions of coal.”

Pointing to the fact that cheap and reliable energy is one of the main factors that keeps the masses out of poverty, particularly in places like India and China, Shellenberger characterized the West’s plans as akin to a “death cult,” in which Western leaders use “apocalyptic” language about the climate in an attempt to stop or limit the production of cheap energy, regardless of its human consequences.

“I think it’s fair to call it a death cult at this point, when you’re stifling energy supplies that are necessary to keep people alive, allow poor people to escape the use of wood and dung, I don’t know what else you call it than an anti-human death cult.”

Carlson replied in agreement, telling Shellenberger that far from being motivated by the health of the environment, the true goal is “tyranny.”

Kerry, under former President Barack Obama, was on the team that negotiated the Paris Accords, which demanded that successful, wealthy countries drastically cut back emissions. It was never voted on in the U.S. Senate as an official treaty. President Donald Trump pulled the country out of the accords, but the U.S. has rejoined the agreement under the Biden administration.

“A global transition away from oil, gas, and coal would not only harm U.S. economic development but also afflict harm on the poorest nations,” according to Alex Epstein, an energy policy commentator. “Fossil fuels are so uniquely good at providing low-cost, reliable energy for developing nations that even nations with little/no fossil fuel resources have used fossil fuels to develop and prosper. E.g. South Korea (83% FF), Japan (85% FF), Singapore (99% FF),” Epstein wrote recently on X.

The net-zero movement led by COP is particularly dangerous to Africa and other poor regions.

Consider: ⅓ of the world uses wood/animal dung for heating/cooking. 3B use less electricity than a typical American refrigerator.

Only FFs can provide the energy they need to develop. pic.twitter.com/u2f3uZpvPc

— Alex Epstein (@AlexEpstein) November 29, 2023

“Every prosperous country has developed using fossil fuels,” he wrote. “No poor country has been able to develop to the point of prosperity without massive FF use. The reason is that development requires energy, and FFs are a uniquely cost-effective, including scalable, source of energy.”

LifeSiteNews co-founder Steve Jalsevac, who has researched this topic for decades, says “implementing Kerry’s policies would result in hundreds of millions more deaths than they would save. That is the real intention,” he says, “world depopulation on a massive scale.”

Related Topics:#COP28 #JohnKerry #LifeSiteNews #MichaelShellenberger

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Federal government’s GHG reduction plan will impose massive costs on Canadians

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Federal government’s GHG reduction plan will impose massive costs on Canadians

Published on July 26, 2024

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Ross McKitrick

Many Canadians are unhappy about the carbon tax. Proponents argue it’s the cheapest way to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which is true, but the problem for the government is that even as the tax hits the upper limit of what people are willing to pay, emissions haven’t fallen nearly enough to meet the federal target of at least 40 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. Indeed, since the temporary 2020 COVID-era drop, national GHG emissions have been rising, in part due to rapid population growth.

The carbon tax, however, is only part of the federal GHG plan. In a new study published by the Fraser Institute, I present a detailed discussion of the Trudeau government’s proposed Emission Reduction Plan (ERP), including its economic impacts and the likely GHG reduction effects. The bottom line is that the package as a whole is so harmful to the economy it’s unlikely to be implemented, and it still wouldn’t reach the GHG goal even if it were.

Simply put, the government has failed to provide a detailed economic assessment of its ERP, offering instead only a superficial and flawed rationale that overstates the benefits and waives away the costs. My study presents a comprehensive analysis of the proposed policy package and uses a peer-reviewed macroeconomic model to estimate its economic and environmental effects.

The Emissions Reduction Plan can be broken down into three components: the carbon tax, the Clean Fuels Regulation (CFR) and the regulatory measures. The latter category includes a long list including the electric vehicle mandate, carbon capture system tax credits, restrictions on fertilizer use in agriculture, methane reduction targets and an overall emissions cap in the oil and gas industry, new emission limits for the electricity sector, new building and motor vehicle energy efficiency mandates and many other such instruments. The regulatory measures tend to have high upfront costs and limited short-term effects so they carry relatively high marginal costs of emission reductions.

The cheapest part of the package is the carbon tax. I estimate it will get 2030 emissions down by about 18 per cent compared to where they otherwise would be, returning them approximately to 2020 levels. The CFR brings them down a further 6 per cent relative to their base case levels and the regulatory measures bring them down another 2.5 per cent, for a cumulative reduction of 26.5 per cent below the base case 2030 level, which is just under 60 per cent of the way to the government’s target.

However, the costs of the various components are not the same.

The carbon tax reduces emissions at an initial average cost of about $290 per tonne, falling to just under $230 per tonne by 2030. This is on par with the federal government’s estimate of the social costs of GHG emissions, which rise from about $250 to $290 per tonne over the present decade. While I argue that these social cost estimates are exaggerated, even if we take them at face value, they imply that while the carbon tax policy passes a cost-benefit test the rest of the ERP does not because the per-tonne abatement costs are much higher. The CFR roughly doubles the cost per tonne of GHG reductions; adding in the regulatory measures approximately triples them.

The economic impacts are easiest to understand by translating these costs into per-worker terms. I estimate that the annual cost per worker of the carbon-pricing system net of rebates, accounting for indirect effects such as higher consumer costs and lower real wages, works out to $1,302 as of 2030. Adding in the government’s Clean Fuels Regulations more than doubles that to $3,550 and adding in the other regulatory measures increases it further to $6,700.

The policy package also reduces total employment. The carbon tax results in an estimated 57,000 fewer jobs as of 2030, the Clean Fuels Regulation increases job losses to 94,000 and the regulatory measures increases losses to 164,000 jobs. Claims by the federal government that the ERP presents new opportunities for jobs and employment in Canada are unsupported by proper analysis.

The regional impacts vary. While the energy-producing provinces (especially Alberta, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick) fare poorly, Ontario ends up bearing the largest relative costs. Ontario is a large energy user, and the CFR and other regulatory measures have strongly negative impacts on Ontario’s manufacturing base and consumer wellbeing.

Canada’s stagnant income and output levels are matters of serious policy concern. The Trudeau government has signalled it wants to fix this, but its climate plan will make the situation worse. Unfortunately, rather than seeking a proper mandate for the ERP by giving the public an honest account of the costs, the government has instead offered vague and unsupported claims that the decarbonization agenda will benefit the economy. This is untrue. And as the real costs become more and more apparent, I think it unlikely Canadians will tolerate the plan’s continued implementation.

Author:

Ross McKitrick

Professor of Economics, University of Guelph

Economy

Kamala Harris’ Energy Policy Catalog Is Full Of Whoppers

Published on July 25, 2024

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By DAVID BLACKMON

The catalog of Vice President Kamala Harris’s history on energy policy is as thin as the listing of her accomplishments as President Joe Biden’s “Border Czar,” which is to say it is bereft of anything of real substance.

But the queen of word salads and newly minted presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has publicly endorsed many of her party’s most radical and disastrous energy-related ideas while serving in various elected offices — both in her energy basket-case home state of California and in Washington, D.C.

What Harris’s statements add up to is a potential disaster for America’s future energy security.

“The vice president’s approach to energy has been sophomorically dilettantish, grasping not only at shiny things such as AOC’s Green New Deal but also at the straws Americans use to suck down the drinks they need when she starts talking like a Valley Girl,” Dan Kish, a senior research fellow at Institute for Energy Research, told me in an email this week. “To be honest, she’s no worse than many of her former Senate colleagues who have helped cheer on rising energy costs and the fleeing American jobs that accompany them. She doesn’t seem to understand the importance of reliable and affordable domestic energy, good skilled jobs or the national security implications of domestically produced energy, but maybe she will go back to school on the matter. No doubt on her electric school bus.”

During her first run for the Senate in 2016, Harris said she would love to expand her state’s economically ruinous cap-and-trade program to the national level. She also endorsed then-Gov. Jerry Brown’s harebrained scheme to ban plastic straws as a means of fighting climate change.

Tim Stewart, president of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, told me proposals like that one would lead during a Harris presidency to the “Californication of the entire U.S. energy policy.” “Historically,” he added, “the transition of power from a president to a vice president is designed to signal continuity. This won’t be the case, because a Harris administration will be much worse.”

But how much worse could it be than the set of Biden policies that Harris has roundly endorsed over the last three and a half years? How much worse can it be than having laughed through a presidency that:

— Cancelled the $12 billion Keystone XL Pipeline on day one.

— Enacted what many estimate to be over $1 trillion in debt-funded, inflation-creating green energy subsidies.

— Refused to comply with laws requiring the holding of timely federal oil and gas lease sales.

— Instructed its agencies to slow-play permitting for all manner of oil and gas-related infrastructure.

— Tried to ban stoves and other gas appliances.

— Listed the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard as an endangered species despite its protection via a highly-successful conservation program.

— Invoked a “pause” on permitting of new LNG export infrastructure for the most specious reasons imaginable.

— Drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for purely political reasons.

As Biden’s successor for the nomination, Harris becomes the proud owner of all these policies, and more.

But Harris’ history shows it could indeed get worse. Much worse, in fact.

While mounting her own disastrous campaign for her party’s presidential nomination in 2020, Harris endorsed a complete ban on hydraulic fracturing, i.e., fracking. She later conformed that position to Biden’s own, slightly less insane view, but only after being picked as his running mate.

Consider also that while serving in the Senate in early 2019, Harris chose to sign up as a co-sponsor of the ultra-radical Green New Deal proposed by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. It is not enough that the Biden regulators appeared to be using that nutty proposal and climate alarmism as the impetus to transform America’s entire economy and social structure: Harris favors enacting the whole thing.

As I have detailed here many times, every element of climate-alarm-based energy policies adopted by the Biden administration will inevitably lead the United State to become increasingly reliant on China for its energy needs, in the process decimating our country’s energy security. By her own words and actions, Harris has made it abundantly clear she wants to shift the process of getting there into a higher gear.

She is an energy disaster-in-waiting.

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.