‘In this Climate Discussion Nexus “Backgrounder”, Dr. John Robson offers a constructive alternative to the infuriating tendency to label people and consign them to pigeonholes such as “denier” when the climate “mainstream” is actually broad and complex with plenty of room for skepticism about the supposed crisis.’
Genesis 8:22
All posts tagged Genesis 8:22
This is coming to your neighborhood if you are depending on renewables! Renewables will NEVER replace COAL for reliability! While CHINA gets more wealthy due to wind turbines and solar panels we underlings will pay for it dearly! Thank you to the elite politicians pushing this agenda! NOT!!
Believe it or not these people at the World Economic Forum are not only Communist/Marxist/Socialist/Globalists but they are NUTS as they seek to save the planet from you!
- ‘Weeds can be nutritious and tasty, if we know which ones to pick.
- As the global population grows, they can be a reliable food source.
- Their ability to capture carbon can help tackle climate change.
- Weeds can also assist farmers by identifying soil problems to boost yields.
A “plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered” was how the 19th-century American poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, described a weed – and he may have been on to something.
Finding new plant-based foods is becoming increasingly urgent with the world’s population forecast to grow by two billion in the next 30 years. While farming animals for meat generates 14.5% of total global greenhouse emissions, weeds capture carbon from the atmosphere and can therefore help to control climate change.’https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/weeds-good-food-control-climate-change?fbclid=IwAR3Xr0itC5Li8GcpAYmjkJxMiUxyD63cczko6f0pi9bqMtooiEykDTzl_Oc
Climate change is a religion to many and they will go to any length to dispose of those who do not agree.
‘Five years ago, I said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) behaves like Torquemada, using Inquisition-like tactics to harass “manmade climate crisis” skeptics, and threatening to prosecute them for racketeering. Tomas de Torquemada was the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition that interrogated, tortured, imprisoned and executed thousands for religious heresy.
The senator took great umbrage, and denounced me in Senate chambers where I once worked. But he didn’t change his ways. If anything, he has become more intolerant and vindictive.
He recently said Democrat control of the Senate would enable him and his colleagues to launch investigations, haul climate realists before committees (for star-chamber show trials), and even employ grand juries and criminal prosecutions – to intimidate, silence and punish climate crisis nonbelievers.
People could certainly conclude that the thin-skinned senator would feel right at home in Inquisition Spain, Stalinist Russia, Red Guard and Xi Jinping China, or book-burning pre-Holocaust fascist Europe. Their history of silencing dissenters, erasing them from history, and sending them off to gulags and salt mines (or worse) is legendary. Their economic and governing ideology is classic fascism:
an extreme, intolerant system, under which an authoritarian government does not own businesses and industries outright, but does dictate what they can make, do, sell and say – while controlling citizens’ thoughts, speech and choices – through intimidation, silencing, arrest, prosecution, and fear of being fined, jailed, fired, sent to penal or reeducation colonies, and being beaten or executed.
These tactics are reprehensible and dictatorial. They are un-American and anti-science. Indeed, science achieves no progress without dissent, discussion and debate. It requires not just hypotheses, theories and computer models, but solid, empirical evidence to confirm or disprove hypotheses, models and predictions.
Discussion, debate, dissent and evidence are especially vital in addressing the assertion that humanity faces an unprecedented manmade climate crisis. That assertion is being used to justify demands that the United States, Europe and developed world eliminate the fossil fuels that provide over 80% of our energy, petrochemical and pharmaceutical raw materials, fertilizers and countless other benefits.
It is being used to justify demands that we replace this reliable, affordable energy and raw material base with wind, solar, battery and biofuel power. Not only are these alternatives intermittent, weather-dependent and far more expensive. They involve extensive mining, land use, wildlife, pollution and other environmental impacts. They are not renewable, sustainable, environment-friendly or climate-safe.
In the United States alone, we would have to replace some 7.5 billion megawatt-hours of electricity and electricity-equivalent fossil fuel use per year; replace enormous amounts of oil and natural gas raw materials; and overhaul our transportation, home heating and other systems. That would require millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of 1000-pound battery modules, tens of millions of acres of corn, canola, soybean and other biofuel crops – and tens of trillions of dollars.
Democrat urban population and voter centers will likely oppose those industrial-scale installations in their backyards. They would have little objection to locating them in what many ruling, media and Hollywood elites imperiously and derisively refer to “flyover country” – western, Midwestern and southern states.
This “transformation” – under the Paris climate treaty, a Green New Deal or a Biden-Harris regulatory program – would massively disrupt America’s economy, jobs, living standards, health and wellbeing, especially for poor, minority, blue-collar, fixed-income and flyover country families and communities.
Climate alarmists insist that any lost jobs would be replaced with “green” jobs. But those would be mostly minimum-wage positions: hauling, installing, maintaining, dismantling, removing and landfilling turbines, panels and batteries. Moreover, most of those green technologies would be manufactured overseas, especially in China, because environmentalists battle any mining in the USA, and a climate-focused energy system would provide insufficient reliable, affordable power for factories.
Those huge and unprecedented amounts of mining and manufacturing would require fossil fuels. So the only thing that would change is where the fossil fuel use and emissions occur.
It would be mostly in Asia and Africa, in countries that are not obligated under the Paris climate treaty to reduce their fossil fuel use or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; countries that will build as many hundreds or thousands of coal and gas-fired power plants as needed to lift their people out of poverty … and make “green energy” technologies they will happily sell to America, Australia, Canada and Europe.
That means, even if the US went cold-turkey on fossil fuels, it would make no difference to global GHG emissions or global atmospheric concentrations. And that means, even if carbon dioxide is the primary factor in climate change, destroying US and other modern economies would bring no climate benefits.
The EU’s and UK’s unwavering belief in human-caused climate cataclysms is already hammering its industries, workers and families, as numerous articles attest: here, here, here and here, for instance.
Thankfully, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that assertions of Climate Armageddon have been miscalculated, exaggerated or fabricated. Average global temperatures are rising far less rapidly than predicted by climate models: by at least a half-degree F.
Violent (F4-F5) US tornadoes have actually declined in number the past 35 years (1985-2020) versus the previous 35 years (1950-1984); and in 2018 not one F5 tornado touched down in the United States. For a record twelve years, from Wilma in 2005 until Harvey and Irma in 2017, no Category 3 to 5 hurricane struck the US mainland. Overall, there is little or no trend in tropical cyclone activity or intensity.
All that is not surprising in light of new research by Drs. William Happer and Willem van Wijngaarden that strongly indicates even doubling carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) in Earth’s atmosphere would have minuscule effects on global temperatures and climate (but would benefit plant growth).
Indeed, it is impossible to distinguish human influences from natural factors, fluctuations and cycles regarding temperatures, polar ice, storms and droughts. Some scientists certainly claim otherwise – and generally just blame humans. But they have little or no actual, empirical evidence to support their claims, predictions and models. They simply say the science is settled, and we must ban fossil fuels, so shut up.
With so much at stake for America and the world, this is completely intolerable. At the very least, those claiming we face a climate calamity must be required to present solid empirical evidence to support their assertions – and engage in in robust, transparent debates with manmade climate change skeptics.
That is precisely what Senator Torquemada seems determined to prevent and punish, while transforming “the world’s greatest deliberative body” into a Russian Politburo or Chinese National People’s Congress – and an integral part of the $multi-trillion-per-year Climate Industrial Complex.
In that quest he would certainly be aided by the Big Media and Big Tech moguls who share his views on climate change, silencing scientists and evidence that contradicts climate cataclysm catechism, and blacklisting “climate heretics” in government, academic and corporate circles.
People have been conditioned to kowtow to government lockdown edicts, to save humanity from Covid. Climate alarmists assume we will now be sufficiently compliant about banning fossil fuels to “save the planet,” when we’re trying to recover from Covid. Or their Torquemadas will make us compliant.
It’s time to reject politicized junk science, demand debate, and resist green climate and energy edicts. Perhaps most of all, the US Senate must assert its Advice and Consent responsibilities on the Paris climate treaty, the most far-reaching international agreement Americans were ever asked to ratify.’https://papundits.wordpress.com/2020/12/03/sheldon-whitehouses-climate-inquisition/
Do you purchase something because some celebrity advertises it? Well, the climate scam has brought Oprah and Katy Perry together to push their pantheistic religion.
‘Food science startups aren’t your typical magnet for celebrity investors. But today, Apeel Sciences, which creates a natural coating for the exterior of fruits and vegetables such as avocados, asparagus, and citrus to extend their shelf life and prevent food waste, is announcing a $250 million funding round in which Katy Perry and Oprah Winfrey are participating.
Apeel CEO James Rogers says that the opportunity to have Perry and Winfrey invest came via their inbound interest. “I never tracked back exactly know how they first heard about what we’re doing,” he admits, via a Zoom call from his living room, where a “35 and quarantined” banner celebrating his recent birthday hung in the background. “We’ve been very focused on the technology itself, but these are folks who want to join in our mission to help build a more participatory food system that’s based on nature. Although we were going about it in different ways, the end goal was the same.”
Perry, who has been a longtime champion of addressing and mitigating the effects of climate change and is also an investor in Impossible Foods (maker of the Impossible Burger), says she got involved after getting a tip from Chris Lyons, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz (the firm helped lead Apeel’s $33 million fundraising back in December 2016). “I met James, and I went to Apeel and toured the offices and the labs and saw the science in real time and was just so blown away I thought it was witchcraft—in the best of ways,” Perry says in a phone call. “This is one of the definitions of sustainability. [Apeel] has so many prongs to it. It makes economies. It gives farmers a chance. It gives us more options as a consumer. It takes produce shipping off of planes and back onto shipping containers, so it lowers our CO2 emissions.”
Winfrey’s environmental advocacy dates back to at least the 1990s, and her most prominent sustainable food investment to date has been True Food Kitchen, the healthy, seasonal restaurant chain. Her interest in Apeel, which is available at such grocers as Costco and Kroger, connects to her interest in both a healthier food system and planet. “I hate to see food wasted, when there are so many people in the world who are going without,” said Winfrey in a statement. “Apeel can extend the life of fresh produce, which is critical to our food supply and our planet, too.”
Approximately 11% of the greenhouse gas emissions created by the food system could be eliminated by the eradication of food waste, according to the World Wildlife Federation. A March 2020 study by Project Drawdown, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping society achieve the goal of reducing rather than growing greenhouse gas emissions, states that solving food waste, along with embracing more plant-based diets, can have the single-greatest impact on reducing emissions. “Roughly a third of the world’s food is never eaten,” says the study, “which means land and resources used and greenhouse gases emitted in producing it were unnecessary.”’https://www.fastcompany.com/90507946/katy-perry-and-oprah-winfrey-just-invested-in-this-startup-to-eliminate-food-waste-one-avocado-at-a-time
Katy and Oprah are pantheists. They believe so it seems ‘This beautiful Planet Earth is our mother and our home. This sacred Earth is our ark and all the plants and animals that live in it are our fellow passengers. That ark is threatened now, as never before in history, by human actions and inactions.’https://www.pantheism.net/earth/
The following article is an example of what God’s Word tells us in Romans 1:22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.
‘If you care about the working poor, about racial justice, and about climate change, you have to stop eating animals.
Is any panic more primitive than the one prompted by the thought of empty grocery store shelves? Is any relief more primitive than the one provided by comfort food?
Most everyone has been doing more cooking these days, more documenting of the cooking, and more thinking about food in general. The combination of meat shortages and President Trump’s decision to order slaughterhouses open despite the protestations of endangered workers has inspired many Americans to consider just how essential meat is.
Is it more essential than the lives of the working poor who labor to produce it? It seems so. An astonishing six out of 10 counties that the White House itself identified as coronavirus hot spots are home to the very slaughterhouses the president ordered open.
In Sioux Falls, S.D., the Smithfield pork plant, which produces some 5 percent of the country’s pork, is one of the largest hot spots in the nation. A Tyson plant in Perry, Iowa, had 730 cases of the coronavirus — nearly 60 percent of its employees. At another Tyson plant, in Waterloo, Iowa, there were 1,031 reported cases among about 2,800 workers.
Sick workers mean plant shutdowns, which has led to a backlog of animals. Some farmers are injecting pregnant sows to cause abortions. Others are forced to euthanize their animals, often by gassing or shooting them. It’s gotten bad enough that Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has asked the Trump administration to provide mental health resources to hog farmers.
Despite this grisly reality — and the widely reported effects of the factory-farm industry on America’s lands, communities, animals and human health long before this pandemic hit — only around half of Americans say they are trying to reduce their meat consumption. Meat is embedded in our culture and personal histories in ways that matter too much, from the Thanksgiving turkey to the ballpark hot dog. Meat comes with uniquely wonderful smells and tastes, with satisfactions that can almost feel like home itself. And what, if not the feeling of home, is essential?
And yet, an increasing number of people sense the inevitability of impending change.
Animal agriculture is now recognized as a leading cause of global warming. According to The Economist, a quarter of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 say they are vegetarians or vegans, which is perhaps one reason sales of plant-based “meats” have skyrocketed, with Impossible and Beyond Burgers available everywhere from Whole Foods to White Castle.
Our hand has been reaching for the doorknob for the last few years. Covid-19 has kicked open the door.
At the very least it has forced us to look. When it comes to a subject as inconvenient as meat, it is tempting to pretend unambiguous science is advocacy, to find solace in exceptions that could never be scaled and to speak about our world as if it were theoretical.
Some of the most thoughtful people I know find ways not to give the problems of animal agriculture any thought, just as I find ways to avoid thinking about climate change and income inequality, not to mention the paradoxes in my own eating life. One of the unexpected side effects of these months of sheltering in place is that it’s hard not to think about the things that are essential to who we are.
We cannot protect our environment while continuing to eat meat regularly. This is not a refutable perspective, but a banal truism. Whether they become Whoppers or boutique grass-fed steaks, cows produce an enormous amount of greenhouse gas. If cows were a country, they would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world.
According to the research director of Project Drawdown — a nonprofit organization dedicated to modeling solutions to address climate change — eating a plant-based diet is “the most important contribution every individual can make to reversing global warming.”
Americans overwhelmingly accept the science of climate change. A majority of both Republicans and Democrats say that the United States should have remained in the Paris climate accord. We don’t need new information, and we don’t need new values. We only need to walk through the open door.’ The rest of this climate scam story can be read at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/opinion/coronavirus-meat-vegetarianism.html
These people do NOT know the Creator as this story and other writings clearly indicate. These are those of whom Paul said in Romans 1:25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator
‘According to the Washington Post, which he owns, Jeff Bezos of Amazon has just given $791 million to climate activists, with $9 billion to follow. Which isn’t chump change even to him. It certainly isn’t to us, though unfortunately we’re not the climate activists he has in mind. So let’s finally put to rest the meme that climate deniers are lavishly paid hacks picking on the poor underfunded alarmists, which is not just a conspiracy theory but one that flies with particular chutzpah in the face of the evidence.
It’s curious to hear over and over again that in addition to being venal scoundrels we have disappeared entirely. As Bill McKibben just asserted, saying of “classic climate denial” that “Outside of the Trump Administration and the right wing of the Republican Party, that’s now a dead letter”. Well, to coin a phrase, “We’re not dead yet”.
Of course not having Jeff Bezos’ deep pockets to raid, while still needing to pay the rent, we must keep gently reminding you to chip in what you can. Bezos clearly doesn’t expect the alarmists to work for free, and neither should those who want to encourage the few left who are fool enough to push back against the tide.
That preliminary point dealt with, the key thing is that if we were in it for the money, we wouldn’t be climate skeptics. We’d be alarmists. Look at their fancy professorships with tenure and six-figure salaries and defined-benefit pensions and their attitude of superiority. Look at their billion dollar foundations and lavish granting programs. Look at their multimillion dollar government grants and recall Eisenhower’s warning “that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite”. Look at the kudos they enjoy from the jet set. And then just when you’re thinking life couldn’t get any better, Jeff Bezos drops by with billions in subsidies.
Or maybe they weren’t thinking it couldn’t get any better. According to the Post, “’Climate change is the biggest crisis facing humanity but, despite lots of great work, has been an underfunded area of philanthropy,’ said Jules Kortenhorst, head of the Rocky Mountain Institute, which received $10 million.” To which we at CDN can only say that if you were feeling all underfunded and impoverished there at RMI with your 260 staff members and your funding from four U.S. government agencies, the California Energy Commission, the City of Boulder, the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, the UN and the World Bank before Jeff dropped by with the latest $10 mill to add to your annual $55 million budget, we’ll swap your clothes for our barrel just as soon as we carve the word “irony” into it.
Now Bezos is a private individual and, as we believe in liberty, we think he is entitled to make money selling people things they want, and then to spend that money as he chooses. Not just legally, though certainly we support private property rights. Morally. We didn’t found Amazon or make it work, he did. And while there are certainly pitfalls in having money, ways to spend it that are not good for the soul, it is impossible to spend money in virtuous ways unless one gets to choose how to spend it. (We might add that, life being what it is, rich people like everyone else very often have to make mistakes before they can learn lessons.)
So it’s his money and he can spend it on whatever he likes. Including climate alarmism times ten. But what he cannot do, and neither can anyone else, is tell lies. For instance that the alarmists are David and the deniers are Goliath, or that they are Bob Cratchit and we are Scrooge and Marley.
The politicians are alarmists. The professors are alarmists. The bankers are alarmists. Even the oil companies are alarmists (and much good may it do them). The movie stars are alarmists, with few exceptions. The rock stars are alarmists. They have the money and the prestige and the money and also the money. So at least stop with the character assassination and instead try to explain why with all that money, you’re having so much trouble persuading people and your computer models don’t work.’https://climatediscussionnexus.com/2020/11/25/well-take-a-cheque/
God said While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease Genesis 8:22.
‘Among the supposed horrors of climate change you can list, well, everything from giant jellyfish to itchier poison ivy to soggy pork chops, bad chocolate and the disappearance of beaches on which to savour a Foster’s. But don’t forget bad computer models, including the one that said beaches were going fast and would go faster; it turns out they were based on bad assumptions and used to justify worse policy. It really is getting silly.
According to The Times, the European Commission study predicting the end of sand as we know it was badly flawed and caused, of all things, “unnecessary alarm”. And in such a basic way that it almost looks deliberate although as we have repeatedly stressed, one should never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity. What new research has discovered about beaches is, in plain language, that they are sandy strips at the edge of the sea and so if the sea rises, the beach that is washed away at the low edge will be replaced by new beach at the high edge.
It cannot have been easy to miss this point. But the EC study apparently managed it through a combination of elaborate techniques, beginning with assuming rising seas washed sediment away rather than depositing it. (Were this true, we must observe, the steady sea rise since the end of the last glaciation would have finished off the beaches long before Henry Ford got to work on them; once again the inability to think through basic historical points is among the most glaring weaknesses of climate alarmists.)
The earlier study then seems to have assumed that people would do the dumbest stuff possible in response to eroding beaches, like walling them in so they had nowhere to grow. (Among other things it said Australia was the worst-affected country because it has over 7,000 miles of beaches. But of course most of them are not in built-up areas so those beaches have endless outback into which to retreat.) And then it suggested some even dumber stuff like trying to pump sand back out of the water as if Mr. Ocean weren’t big enough to wash it all away again with a sneer.
Now of course it is true that in Britain, for instance, if the beaches keep retreating they will eventually meet at the top of the last sandy hill and vanish like a sand castle before an incoming tide. But if all of Britain goes under because of rising seas, from man-made causes, natural ones or both, the big problem won’t be not being able to relax on the beach as it happens. If on the other hand the world continues to see the same slow rise in sea levels that it appears to have seen for many centuries, long before man-made GHGs were a thing, then the new study reveals that the old study repeats another familiar and unhelpful alarmist habit: Having misidentified the problem, it then recommends actions that would make the situation worse. As the new study says, “As sea level rises, shoreline retreat must, and will, happen. Beaches, however, will survive. The biggest threat to the continued existence of beaches is coastal defence structures that limit their ability to migrate.”
So as always, let’s combine a sober assessment of the problem with a sensible solution. Among the major drawbacks of climate alarmism is that, in part by relying on computer models that simply assume what they set out to prove, it diverts far too much time, energy and money to “stopping climate change” which is neither possible nor desirable, and away from mitigating any really undesirable impacts of it at acceptable cost while also giving sustained attention to other environmental problems from smog to plastic in the oceans that are both real and manageable.’https://climatediscussionnexus.com/2020/11/25/on-the-beach/
These Left walking talking politicians are a disgrace to their countries. Among the top ten of these is Macron who ‘…on Thursday expressed his excitement over Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s promise to re-enter the U.S. into the Paris climate accord, describing the prospect as an opportunity to “make our planet great again.”
Reuters reported that Macron specifically hailed Biden’s vow to re-enter the Paris climate accord, noting that the Democrat “has pledged to rejoin the pact and to invest $2 trillion to wean the country off planet-warming fossil fuels.”
“It is proof that we had to stand firm against all headwinds,” Macron said. “‘Make our planet great again’ is a possibility, not just in words but also in deed.”‘https://www.theblaze.com/news/ready-emmanuel-macron-says-biden-presidency-is-chance-to-make-our-planet-great-again
Can mankind change the climate? If you believe this I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale.
‘Thanks to US president-elect Joe Biden’s declaration that his administration will set a target of net-zero emissions for the US by 2050, meaningless statements about emission targets are now the political vogue.
President-elect Biden had barely made this declaration before independent Federal MP Zali Steggall brought forward her previously announced plans to launch a private member’s bill containing the same target for Australia. Britain and France have already made such declarations, as has China.
The private bill is extremely unlikely to reach the governor-general’s desk for royal assent but means just as much as all the other pious declarations made by the other countries, as it does not spell out how Australia is going to reach such a target.
Instead the bill sets out various processes which may help in achieving the target, such as forming a Climate Change Commission (as opposed to the late and unlamented Climate Commission) to advise on the matter, as well as mandating a national climate risk and national adaptation programs in addition to adopting the government’s existing technology road map.
All the extra public servants that have to be hired for those initiatives will then work out the irksome details on just how to eliminate or offset the emissions from Australia’s aluminium smelters and steel-making operations, not to mention changing all of the power industry over to renewables and the cars to electric.
Just how any of those targets will be achieved in thirty years is anyone’s guess but the major advantage for Steggall and the other proponents of this bill is that they can pose as green saviours knowing that the bill will never become law. If the bill, or some variation on it, does eventually get through parliament they will never be held accountable for any failure to meet a target so far into the future — at least five parliamentary cycles. In the meantime, taxpayers will be left to pay the bill for an expanded green bureaucracy plus consultancies.
Much the same calculation may underpin the decision by organisations such as Oxfam, the Business Council of Australia, the ACTU and the Australian Medical Association to publicly support the bill. They get green street cred knowing that the bill is unlikely to see the light of day.
President-elect Biden is in a different position as he will be expected to do something about the target, but at 77 he is highly unlikely to be held accountable for a target 30 years from now and he has a host of ready made excuses. For Biden only has the power to set targets, not to enforce them.
In the disparate US system, individual states have more freedom to mess things up than in Australia, assuming they have any interest in climate targets in the first place. It is difficult to imagine hard- core Republican states such as Texas, for example, being impressed by Biden’s climate aspirations and the Republican senate is unlikely to pass legislation that would force them to do so.
Then there is the reality of decarbonisation. Even Democrat California, which has its own climate targets, will struggle to meet the President-elect’s intermediate goal of decarbonising the power industry by 2035. As has previously been noted, California’s emphasis on renewable energy and failure to invest in reliable power plants resulted in rolling blackouts during a Northern summer heatwave (‘Battery Battles’, The Spectator Australia, 29 August, 2020). Activists living in the state have excused this failure on the grounds that the blackouts did not last for long, while Democrat state governor Gavin Newsom has blamed neighbouring states (which faced similar high demand) for refusing to sell power to California.
The checks and balances of the American system will also make it difficult for President-elect Biden to take the US back into the Paris treaty framework for reducing emissions, as he has declared he will do. America was only ever able to sign it in the first place in 2015 as a presidential agreement rather than a treaty. The wording of Paris was even altered so that it could be considered an agreement rather than a treaty as far as the Americans were concerned. Treaties have to be ratified by the US Senate which would never have happened at the time and still won’t happen.
However, Biden can still sign the Paris deal as a presidential agreement, binding him to do what he can to meet climate targets, knowing that green activists will insist on calling it a treaty, without any of the legal obligations of a treaty.
He can also still waste a lot of taxpayers’ dollars once he reaches the White House in pursuit of his declared goal and already the sum of $US2 trillion to be spent on clean energy over four years has been mentioned. That is a lot of money to spend on batteries and wind farms.
Particularly hard to take for anyone with knowledge of the climate scene is activists hailing, as a breakthrough, the declaration by Chinese President Xi Jinping that his country will aim for net-zero emissions by 2060 to a virtual audience of world leaders at a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly last month.
Chinese mines dig up half the world’s coal (both power and smelting) and the country still has to import billions of dollars worth from Australia to feed its industry. Earlier this year US climate organisation CarbonBrief estimated that in 2019 the Chinese built coal plants capable of generating 37 gigawatts, net of closures, or about the same as the existing total coal-fired capacity of the Australian system.
Although coal’s share of the power generating market is declining despite that growth, thanks to increases in hydro power and nuclear, it is still very difficult to reconcile that building program with China’s net-zero emissions declaration.
This week Prime Minister Scott Morrison declared that Australia should meet the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 ‘as quickly as possible, as quickly as it’s able’, but he declined to mandate a target until it was clear how it would be achieved and what the cost would be.
Former Prime Minister John Howard would not sign Australia up to the Kyoto Protocol in 2005 for the good reason that it was useless and was pilloried by the green movement for his honesty. Morrison may also be pilloried for his honesty but there is little doubt that until there is some indication about how net-zero emission targets can be achieved, such declarations are meaningless.’https://www.spectator.com.au/2020/11/zero-net-sense/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=OZWH%20%2020201114%20%20AL&utm_content=OZWH%20%2020201114%20%20AL+CID_ab1dd8456b37c5b72f40115308217c8a&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Australia&utm_term=Zero%20net%20sense
whatyareckon 