The United Nations Couldn’t Be More Wrong When It Comes To Climate Change

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

They still haven’t learned their lesson.

For decades, politicians and climate activists have been setting deadlines for humanity, brazenly preaching that we have just a few years left to stave off our fiery doom. In fact, we were supposed to have passed the deadline for taking dramatic action to save the world in 2000, 2012, 2016 2020, and 2023.

The United Nations is now ramping up their rhetoric again, with climate executive secretary Simon Stiell boldly (and, apparently, not rhetorically) asking: “Who exactly has two years to save the world? The answer is every person on this planet.”

As usual, the U.N. couldn’t be more wrong when it comes to climate change. In fact, the science to which it demands blind loyalty shows there has never been a better time in human history to be alive.

One Obama energy advisor described our culture’s understanding of climate change as having “drifted so far out of touch with the actual science as to be absurdly, demonstrably false.” He was not wrong. While celebrities, activists, politicians, and left-leaning CEOs are crying that the sky is falling, data shows that “[c]limate-related disasters kill 99% fewer people” than they did a century ago. Even though the world’s population has quadrupled over the same time period, the risk presented by mild warming has grown smaller and smaller.

Interestingly, our resilience to climate-related disasters is improving at a far faster rate than deaths from other natural disasters like volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Clearly, the weather isn’t the culprit here.

In fact, even if the U.N. and its climate cartel were right, there is remarkably little we could do anyway. The data models their scientists use to project future warming show that even cutting every drop of oil and every grain of coal from our society would change global temperatures by at most a few hundredths of a degree. Those models, by the way, have overshot warming every time, making them a highly suspect justification for spending trillions to force our society to make dramatic changes for climate change.

In fact, new studies cataloging 420,000 years of historical geological and weather data suggest that manmade greenhouse gas emissions are not strong enough to affect global temperatures.

So many of us, in our comfortably air-conditioned and Wi-Fi-enabled lives — far removed from the blue-collar energy producers toiling every day to power our society — have forgotten just how essential fossil fuels are to our existence. Our agriculture, manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, public safety, utilities, banking, construction, entertainment and more would collapse without constant access to affordable, reliable energy.

Fossil fuels are the reason that the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has plummeted all over the world. In the pre-Industrial Revolution era, most of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty; 50 years ago it was about half the world population; today, it is less than 10%. Infant mortality, malnutrition and infectious diseases have plummeted while GDP, education, gender equality, economic freedom and life expectancy have skyrocketed.

The average child born today in any part of the world has a better chance at a long, healthy, and fruitful life than ever before — thanks, in part, to the life-saving and life-improving benefits of abundant energy.

We need only look to the pockets of the world still suffering from energy poverty to understand just how fortunate we are to live in 2024 instead of 1724. In communities without electricity — which nearly a billion people still don’t have and billions more have only sporadic access to — life expectancies still hover in the 50s and mere survival requires physical toil unimaginable to the average American.

Women walk for hours to collect unsanitary water and firewood or dung to burn in close quarters, exposing themselves to sexual assault and their whole families to deadly water-borne and lung disease. Children are fortunate to reach adulthood at all, let alone receive an education. Economic opportunity is close to nonexistent, even for men, outside subsistence farming.

Instead of protesting the fossil fuels that power our comfortable lives and spending trillions to possibly produce minute temperature change centuries from now, perhaps our world leaders should focus on solving the real problems facing real men, women, and children today. One of the easiest ways to do so is sharing the access to affordable, reliable energy we take for granted in the West.

I’ll keep embracing my high carbon lifestyle and hope that others get to do the same. See you in two years.

The Honorable Jason Isaac is CEO of the American Energy Institute and a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He previously served four terms in the Texas House of Representatives.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Related Topics:#DailyCaller #JasonIsaac #UNClimateChange #UnitedNationsClimateChange

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Ottawa should end war on plastics for sake of the environment

Published on May 20, 2024

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Kenneth P. Green

Here’s the shocker: Meng shows that for 15 out of the 16 uses, plastic products incur fewer GHG emissions than their alternatives…

For example, when you swap plastic grocery bags for paper, you get 80 per cent higher GHG emissions. Substituting plastic furniture for wood—50 per cent higher GHG emissions. Substitute plastic-based carpeting with wool—80 per cent higher GHG emissions.

It’s been known for years that efforts to ban plastic products—and encourage people to use alternatives such as paper, metal or glass—can backfire. By banning plastic waste and plastic products, governments lead consumers to switch to substitutes, but those substitutes, mainly bulkier and heavier paper-based products, mean more waste to manage.

Now a new study by Fanran Meng of the University of Sheffield drives the point home—plastic substitutes are not inherently better for the environment. Meng uses comprehensive life-cycle analysis to understand how plastic substitutes increase or decrease greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by assessing the GHG emissions of 16 uses of plastics in five major plastic-using sectors: packaging, building and construction, automotive, textiles and consumer durables. These plastics, according to Meng, account for about 90 per cent of global plastic volume.

Here’s the shocker: Meng shows that for 15 out of the 16 uses, plastic products incur fewer GHG emissions than their alternatives. Read that again. When considering 90 per cent of global plastic use, alternatives to plastic lead to greater GHG emissions than the plastic products they displace. For example, when you swap plastic grocery bags for paper, you get 80 per cent higher GHG emissions. Substituting plastic furniture for wood—50 per cent higher GHG emissions. Substitute plastic-based carpeting with wool—80 per cent higher GHG emissions.

A few substitutions were GHG neutral, such as swapping plastic drinking cups and milk containers with paper alternatives. But overall, in the 13 uses where a plastic product has lower emissions than its non-plastic alternatives, the GHG emission impact is between 10 per cent and 90 per cent lower than the next-best alternatives.

Meng concludes that “Across most applications, simply switching from plastics to currently available non-plastic alternatives is not a viable solution for reducing GHG emissions. Therefore, care should be taken when formulating policies or interventions to reduce plastic demand that they result in the removal of the plastics from use rather than a switch to an alternative material” adding that “applying material substitution strategies to plastics never really makes sense.” Instead, Meng suggests that policies encouraging re-use of plastic products would more effectively reduce GHG emissions associated with plastics, which, globally, are responsible for 4.5 per cent of global emissions.

The Meng study should drive the last nail into the coffin of the war on plastics. This study shows that encouraging substitutes for plastic—a key element of the Trudeau government’s climate plan—will lead to higher GHG emissions than sticking with plastics, making it more difficult to achieve the government’s goal of making Canada a “net-zero” emitter of GHG by 2050.

Clearly, the Trudeau government should end its misguided campaign against plastic products, “single use” or otherwise. According to the evidence, plastic bans and substitution policies not only deprive Canadians of products they value (and in many cases, products that protect human health), they are bad for the environment and bad for the climate. The government should encourage Canadians to reuse their plastic products rather than replace them.

Author:

Kenneth P. Green

Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute

Economy

Biden signs suicidal ‘No Coal’ pact, while rest of world builds 1,000 new plants

Published on May 19, 2024

Todayville

From Heartland Daily News

By James Taylor

Since 2000, the United States has reduced its carbon dioxide emissions more than any other country in the world. U.S. emissions are down 21 percent, while the rest of the world has increased its emissions by 47 percent. Clearly, America “showing leadership” reducing carbon dioxide emissions is leading to nothing other than the rest of the world free license to jack up their own emissions.

The Biden administration has just signed an economic suicide pact that would require the United States and six other Western democracies to shut down its coal power plants by 2035, while China, India and the rest of the world currently have more than 1,000 new coal power plants in the planning or construction phase. The no-coal pact allows all nations but the Suicidal Seven to continue using as much affordable coal power as they like.

Climate activists often point to China as a climate role model, noting that China manufactures more wind and solar power equipment than any other nation. China, however, isn’t stupid enough to use much of that equipment. Realizing that conventional energy – and especially coal power – is more affordable and reliable than wind and solar power, China manufactures wind and solar equipment, sells the equipment to America and Western Europe, and then powers its own economy primarily with coal power.

In America, government intervention has already caused the shutdown of many coal power plants and the construction of expensive wind and solar projects. In more than half the states, renewable power mandates require a certain percentage of electricity in the state to come from wind or solar. Federal laws and regulations punish coal power at nearly every step of coal mining and utilization. Massive subsidies for wind and solar allow wind and solar providers to charge substantially reduced prices for their product at taxpayers’ expense.

Even with government tipping the scale so heavily in favor of wind and solar power, the so-called green transition is coming with an enormous price tag. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, there was a 21 percent increase in wind and solar power since Joe Biden took office in January 2021 through the end of 2023. At the same time, electricity prices also rose by 21 percent. Prior to Biden taking office, the long-term electricity price trend was an increase of approximately 1 percent per year. The green transition has increased the pace of electricity price inflation by 700 percent. And that doesn’t account for all the wind and solar subsidies that are hidden in our tax bills.

There is little reason to believe we are on the verge of a climate crisis. A good resource documenting this good news is ClimateRealism.com. Yet, even if a climate crisis were imminent, unilateral coal disarmament is a foolish way for America to approach carbon dioxide emissions.

Since 2000, the United States has reduced its carbon dioxide emissions more than any other country in the world. U.S. emissions are down 21 percent, while the rest of the world has increased its emissions by 47 percent. Clearly, America “showing leadership” reducing carbon dioxide emissions is leading to nothing other than the rest of the world free license to jack up their own emissions. Even if the United States and the rest of the Suicidal Seven could somehow eliminate all of their emissions, it would have little impact on the global trend.

Ultimately, Biden’s pact to eliminate American coal use will further ramp up inflation. After all, energy is an important cost component in almost every product bought and sold in the economy. In addition to the inflation impact, Biden’s pact will force American businesses into a major competitive disadvantage versus businesses in China, India, and the rest of the world, which will be paying substantially lower energy costs than American businesses.

Under Biden’s plan, we will end up sinking vast economic resources into eliminating coal power and as much carbon dioxide as possible from the American economy. Even then, we will still be looking at global emissions continuing to rise. At that point, Biden’s plan is for America to assume the lion’s share of global “climate reparations” and financial bribes to induce China, India, and the rest of the world to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. After sabotaging our own economy with higher energy prices, we will literally borrow money from China in order to then bribe China to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions.

It would be hard to think of a crazier domestic energy policy.

James Taylor ([email protected]) is president of The Heartland Institute.

Originally published by The Center Square. Republished with permission.

For more on the U.S. electric power system, click here.

For more on coal, click here.