The Environmentalists don’t care about the environment. All they want to do is preserve a talking point and hammer conservatives with it.
The plausible truth of the matter is that there is no provable man-made global warming. There is so much contrary evidence, missed catastrophic predictions, and examples of warmer periods from the past—long before so-called “industrial activity” would have produced greenhouse gases—that from a strict scientific method standpoint, the unequivocal link between mankind’s recent actions and warmer global temperatures can’t be established beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s not to say that the earth is not warming. It may very well be. The earth historically goes through cyclical periods of warming and cooling, but these stages are caused by naturally occurring events in nature, not by human activity.
But what about the famous “97% of climate scientists” saying that reckless human activity is causing global warming? That statement is so intentionally misleading it’s utterly risible. It’s the classic example of a popular cliché being repeated often enough by its proponents that it’s accepted as “true,” regardless of the actual facts. When one looks closely at the study that produced the notorious 97% figure, it turns out that it’s not 97% of 12,000 climate scientists as regularly reported by the environmental lobby, but rather, only a paltry 77 of 79 self-identified climate scientists who had already taken a position in favor of human-caused warming. That’s where the 97% comes from—77 out of 79, not 97% of 12,000!
Still, let’s posit for the sake of this discussion that global warming is real and that it’s caused by mankind’s recent industrial activity producing an excess of CO2. Let’s take the whole issue of global warming fault off the table. Let’s even assign blame: It’s the fault of conservative white Western businesspeople in pursuit of immoral capitalistic profits.
It doesn’t matter. There are solutions at hand, but the environmentalists don’t want to pursue them. There are better ways for Western economies to spend their wealth for the betterment of all people rather than to chase a “cure” for so-called climate change.
First, there is no cure for global warming, even if it’s man-caused. The Paris Accords won’t do it. John Kerry, America’s representative at those meetings, even said so:
“If all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions –- remember what I just said, all the industrial emissions went down to zero emissions -– it wouldn’t be enough, not when more than 65% of the world’s carbon pollution comes from the developing world.”
It may be popular for know-nothing liberals to bleat nonsense like, “We’ve only got 12 years to save the world! This is our World War Two!” but such utterances are completely irrelevant, unprovable and unintellectual.
Let’s look instead at what Bjørn Lomborg says about what should be an alternative response to global warming. Lomborg is a well-respected Danish academic (PhD in Political Science) and pro-environmental activist. He’s one of “them,” a clear-cut Green Warrior. He contends that the West’s considerable wealth, resources, research capabilities and influence should be focused not on amorphous fool’s errands like imposing vindictive regulations on businesses to punish their success or implementing arbitrary restrictions on personal consumer behavior but instead on attacking the solvable problems in the world that truly impact people’s health and quality of life.
Lomborg says the West can and should address issues such as making clean drinking water available to the millions of people who lack it, eradicating diseases that still afflict far too many, like malaria, and increasing access to quality education and healthcare.
These are actions that Western concerns could actually do to make an immediate positive impact. The notion of the ocean rising an inch a century from now from theoretical “warming” has little meaning to a starving Third World family that doesn’t have access to adequate drinking water and education today.
Anyway, chances are quite good that a century from now, the whole CO2-based global warming issue will be moot. Many alternative energy sources are being developed that could end the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. One such source is the SMR—Small Modular Reactor—by NuScale of Portland, OR, which has just received design approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The SMR is a small nuclear reactor, just 65 feet tall, with a core just 1/20th the size of a conventional reactor. Importantly, its safety features are passive, meaning that if the reactor loses electrical power for any reason, the gravity-based safety system automatically drops the fuel rods back into the core’s water, assuring complete safety and protection. The SMR is small enough to be factory-produced in quantity rather than site-made like conventional large reactors. This will dramatically lower costs and largely solve the “too expensive” complaint about existing nuclear plants.
The environmental lobby largely ignores nuclear, dismissing it with unspecific, superfluous complaints about safety and cost. The safety issues are overblown. Even Three Mile Island—the only serious near incident in U.S. nuclear power history was just that—a “near” incident. That was in 1979—41 years ago!—and technology safeguards have progressed significantly since then. SMR-based nuclear power generation is not even structurally subject to the same failures as was the case at TMI.
And isn’t it interesting that no environmental group ever protests or even mentions the widespread use of nuclear propulsion in dozens of naval warships and submarines around the world? The operative word here is warships. These vessels are subject to coming under hostile fire at any time, to be blown up and sunk, their nuclear innards being flung through the air and settling into the oceans of the world. Yet no Green fanboy ever calls for the dismantling of the world’s navies. This is a concrete example of both their naïve, emotionally-based opposition to nuclear power generation and their ignorance of the current state of nuclear power usage in general.
The anti-nuclear environmentalists are not interested in a clean power source that eliminates CO2 emissions, nor are they interested in Western countries truly raising the quality of life in impoverished Third World nations. The environmentalists are only concerned with preserving their talking points in order to bash conservatives so they can gain more political power for themselves.