For our climate envoy, ‘saving the planet’ requires a massive hero complex, a few egotists, and a lot of tax dollars.
For our climate envoy, ‘saving the planet’ requires a massive hero complex, a few egotists, and a lot of tax dollars.
H aving the government spend yet more “money, money, money,” like a drunken sailor is the only solution to global warming, said failed former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in a speech at the World Economic Forum (WEF).
“The lesson I’ve learned in the last years — and I learned it as secretary [of state] and I’ve learned it since, reinforced in spades — is: money, money, money, money, money, money, money,” Kerry said, sounding more like he was mumbling an old pop song than making a serious policy statement. Promoting endless spending rather than more fiscal responsibility seems especially reckless as the national debt exceeds $31 trillion, or over $94,000 for every person in the country, and continues to mount.
The Biden administration’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act already plans to set $369 billion on fire in the name of “climate solutions and environmental justice.” This isn’t chump change, even by federal-government standards. To put it in perspective, that’s enough cash to purchase just over 36 and a half Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, which is over three and a half times the size of the current U.S. Navy carrier fleet.
You might think that such an exorbitant amount of spending would at least accomplish a significant decrease in global warming. It won’t.
According to the United Nations’ (likely optimistic) models, spending that much would turn down the global thermostat by a grand total of only 0.0009 degrees. That’s not a typo, but it is an amount so small that it would be nearly undetectable. The Inflation Reduction Act will have just as little impact on the temperature as it will on inflation: essentially zero.
“It’s pretty extraordinary that we, a select group of human beings, because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives, are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet,” Kerry said at Davos. “It’s so, almost extraterrestrial, to think about saving the planet.”
It’d certainly take some alien thinking to believe that ever-higher government spending is the way forward on climate policy, as the costs of the intrusive environmental policies favored by many in the Davos clique vastly outweigh even the nominal benefits that their proponents promise.
Kerry mentioned that his goal is limiting the increase in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius by having humans emit net-zero carbon dioxide by 2050 relative to pre-industrial levels. This would be not just expensive, it’d be likely impossible without effectively removing a huge percentage of the global population. (Some at the WEF seem to think the population is doomed anyway.)
Kerry wasn’t the only one spouting radical environmental talking points at Davos.
“This is a safety crisis, but, above all, it is also a justice crisis.” Joyeeta Gupta said at the WEF. “If we continue with our greenhouse [emissions], then by 2070, as many as 3 billion people will live in uninhabitable zones, and mostly in poorer countries.” Gupta is a professor specializing in “environment and development in the Global South” at the University of Amsterdam. She holds multiple law degrees; none in climate science or any related scientific field.
By 2070, her claim will join the long list of failed environmentalist predictions, such as the 1970 claim that environmental disasters would force food rationing in the U.S. by 1980, or the 1989 claim by U.N ecologists that rising sea levels would obliterate island nations by 2000.
Mankind’s sins include “creating the droughts, melting the ice, raising the sea level, and causing these waves of climate refugees predicted to reach one billion in this century,” Al Gore, another failed Democratic presidential candidate, said at the WEF. “Look at the xenophobia and political authoritarian trends that have come from just a few million refugees. What about a billion? We would lose our capacity for self-governance on this world!”
Gore is no stranger to making alarmist environmental predictions. His previous prognostications turned out to be laughably wrong. In 2008, for example, Gore predicted on German television that “the entire North Polar ice cap” would be completely melted in five to seven years. The ice cap is, of course, still with us 15 years after that statement. There’s in fact more ice today than when Gore made that prediction.
Rather than making dubious prophecies and throwing ever more taxpayer money at the issue of global warming for undetectably minuscule results, policy-makers should consider low-cost and outright desirable and beneficial alternatives such as deregulating emission-less nuclear energy and freeing private industry to develop solutions to environmental problems.
Kerry may believe that “saving the planet” requires gathering at Davos with a few egotists who share a massive hero complex and who are intent on spending others’ tax dollars with abandon, but everyday entrepreneurs and engineers with their own money on the line have a far better track record of tackling environmental challenges. If Kerry were to return to Earth and take a break from comparing himself to a benevolent world-saving extraterrestrial, he might finally realize this.