In some parts of the United States, people are witnessing a so-called green energy revolution, and many are comparing this so-called “revolution” to the “Great Leap Forward” in mainland China sixty years ago. Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” resulted in tens of millions of people starving to death, and the U.S. “Great Leap Forward” is anyone’s guess, maybe not as serious, but no one knows.
President Biden launched a $2.3 trillion stimulus package, a large part of which is to finance the so-called clean energy, the whole plan aims to reduce carbon emissions, reduce pollution and prevent climate warming.
When you look at the U.S. clean energy programs, many of them are connected to leftist issues, such as the Green New Deal. It is no coincidence that the Green New Deal was launched by a group of leftists in New York. New York State unveiled the most aggressive climate goal in the nation in 2019, the Climate Leadership and Community Conservation Act (CLCPA), which sets a statewide goal of using carbon-free electricity and “decarbonizing” all buildings with energy efficiency retrofits by 2050. The state legislature is now being pushed to pass a piece of legislation called the Climate and Community Investment Act (CCIA) before the summer recess that would create a super-stimulus “leap forward” by imposing a carbon tax and raising gas prices.
These climate bills are full of abstract terms, decarbonization, carbon neutrality, just transition …… but will this stop catastrophic weather like hurricanes? Clean energy or net zero emissions, there is no effectiveness, but also depends on the real consequences.
Roger Caiazza, a meteorologist who has worked in the air quality industry for more than 40 years, points out that spending a lot of money on subsidies for wind and solar energy, and introducing more restrictions on economic development bans, at best, will only achieve a 0.0097 degree Celsius reduction in climate warming by 2100, hardly helping. Most importantly, climate science can’t confirm whether global warming is man-made or not, and the risks these policies take, like overpaying for harm, hurt the poor rather than help them.
A self-described “pragmatic environmentalist,” Kayaza posted on his blog on April 23rd, “Legislative Findings on the Climate and Community Investment Act,” which provides a professional, line-by-line analysis of the provisions of the CCIA and explains the consequences of the CCIA. Interested readers can see for themselves.
He explains that the basic premise of the New York legislation is that there is a climate crisis. But politicians and regulators who make the assumption that they want to “solve climate change” often confuse weather and climate, as is often the case.
Dr. William Briggs also said that the idea of blaming extreme weather on man-made global warming is “overconfident and probably wrong. The first problem, he explained, is how to define nature, because “some people mistakenly believe that the Earth’s climate never changed until humans began to ‘interfere’ with it.
Briggs explained how trying to attribute weather and climate problems to “anthropogenic impacts” is impossible to verify independently, no matter how you estimate them. The main tools used today to estimate impacts are climate models. But those models “must first prove their predictive power, and if they can’t or aren’t accurate, then they can’t be trusted. He concluded that because the research is based “on these conjectures, it is either wrong or overconfident.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., concluded, “In summary, it is not yet possible to conclude convincingly that increased atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations from human activities have had a detectable effect on Atlantic Basin hurricane activity.”
New York State green energy legislation, for example, usually takes the impact of hurricanes on New York and talks about it. New York has been affected by several hurricanes in recent years and is used as “evidence” of climate change. However, an actual look at the data shows the opposite. Roger Pielke, a climate expert and professor at the University of Colorado, summarized the landfalls of hurricanes and found a downward trend in landfalls since the early 1960s.
Roger Caiazza therefore argues that the supposed risks associated with climate change do not exist, so reducing greenhouse gas emissions will have no effect. Instead, reducing greenhouse gases will inevitably increase energy costs, and vulnerable communities will be more affected by higher electricity prices, higher gas prices, and much higher basic living expenses. The money the government spends on “reducing emissions” will not pay off and, frankly, will not benefit the disadvantaged.
He made an estimate of New York’s plan and found that by 2100, the CLCPA emissions inventory would reduce climate warming by between 0.0097°C and 0.0081°C, or less than one hundredth of a degree Celsius.
Kayaza’s point is very interesting.
In fact, we live on an Earth where the temperature is not constant. Looking at the history of the Earth, over its billions of years, there have been three major ice ages with much lower temperatures than other periods. The most recent one was the so-called Quaternary Ice Age, which is the time we are living in. In other words, the temperature of this Earth we live on now is lower than the temperature of the Earth during most periods.
During the Great Ice Age, there were also Little Ice Ages, and between the Little Ice Age and the Little Ice Age there were small interglacial periods. It seems complicated to say, in plain English, that sometimes it is cold and sometimes it is hot. Now the Earth is a small interglacial period in the middle of a major ice age, which is the usual term in the earth science community. Let’s put it this way, it’s like having sunny weather in winter, and although the general climate is cold, it’s pretty warm for a couple of days.
Russian drilling studies of the Arctic ice have concluded that the average temperature difference between the Earth’s Little Ice Age and Little Interglacial has been about 10 degrees Celsius over the past 400,000 years, with a total of five cycles, and that the Earth’s temperature is now at the highest point of the fifth cycle. The study also compared carbon dioxide levels, and there is indeed a positive relationship between carbon dioxide and Earth’s temperature.
What makes this study interesting is the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature. Because humans have been industrialized for about 300 years, I think, where did the CO2 come from before that? So, the only explanation is that CO2 could be a result rather than a cause of the rise in the Earth’s temperature. It is possible that the rise in temperature is the result of a large increase in animal populations.
The reduction of carbon emissions by humans with new energy technologies, if there were 100 big plans for New York State on the planet, would have less than a 1 degree Celsius effect on the temperature of the earth in 80 years. And we can’t figure out the cause-and-effect relationship between temperature rise and CO2 right now.
Even if temperatures are rising, is that necessarily a bad thing?
In the 1970s and 1980s, the dean of the Swiss ETH Zurich’s School of Earth Sciences, Jing-Hua Hsu, a native of Taiwan, proved that human society thrived during the global interglacial optimum, which led to reduced agricultural production, famine and great migration of peoples, based on the history of human social development in the global climate change cycle. That is to say, a warmer climate will be much better for human beings; if the climate is colder, there will be more disasters and difficulties.
He argues that for more than two hundred years, from the 15th to the 17th centuries, there were frequent strong earthquakes around the world and a high concentration of other natural disasters, such as plague epidemics and severe low-temperature freezes, known as the Little Ice Age period.
Now the promoters of the Green New Deal say that rising temperatures will lead to climate change and many problems will arise. Yes, that’s right, any climate change creates human social problems. A drop in temperature creates just as many problems.
But why is the Earth’s temperature changing? According to Jing-Hua Hsu, the 15th to 17th centuries, a period of minimal sunspot Mond, when solar activity was at a low value, is most likely the cause of the Little Ice Age climate.
Whether or not the Earth’s temperature has affected human society, there is no doubt in the general Earth scientist’s mind that the Earth’s temperature changes are caused primarily by sunspot activity. This is certainly true; the Sun is the largest source of energy in the solar system, and any changes in it have a huge impact. The controversy now is how much human activity actually affects temperature and climate? One degree Celsius, or two degrees? So humans determine the future temperature and climate of the Earth?
You’d have to ask a geologist or an earth scientist, and most would be more negative, because in terms of the history of the earth, the impact caused by human activity may be there, but it’s not likely to be decisive. So for humans to radically change the way we use energy, to change the energy regime, to change the form and way of life, and then a hundred years later lower the temperature of the earth by 2 degrees Celsius, at least to me, seems rather absurd.
The progress of human civilization, put another way, can also be seen as progress in the use of energy. The earliest humans began to use fire, then there was the development of tools after the so-called Neolithic period, to the use of coal before there were machines, until the use of oil, but also into a new era. The pursuit and development of new energy sources will not stop, the next generation of energy, most likely nuclear energy, rather than solar and wind power.
For example, solar energy, solar energy is not we go to the sun on the end, it needs solar panels, the need for more efficient battery. The production of solar panels need monocrystalline silicon and polysilicon, all of which are minerals, smelting and chemical engineering. Batteries, not to mention the rare earth elements or acid or alkaline liquid, are very polluting industry.
Now the United States and Europe with panels and batteries, most of the purchase from mainland China, Europe and the United States feel clean, feel no pollution, new energy well, but the pollution is in mainland China, mainly in the western part of Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, these pollutants are actually left on the earth, carbon emissions also remain on the earth. This change, does it help to change the climate in any way?
In addition to production, there is waste disposal. Solar panels or batteries have a lifespan of about ten years, when they have to be replaced with new ones, so how are these old panels and batteries to be disposed of? In mainland China, for example, experts believe that the number of waste batteries will increase 80 to 100 times in the next decade. How will these highly polluting wastes be handled?
Will the value created by new energy sources be enough to solve these problems and bring more benefits to humanity? Many experts have debated this. In reality, though, the issue is sometimes more political than economic and scientific. For at the heart of the changes in the way energy is used and the energy regime is a big change in wealth interests and dominant power.
In the United States, the left has been hostile to the oil industry for a long time, starting with Rockefeller. In other countries, too, oil companies are a symbol of capitalism. Reducing the importance of the oil industry in GDP, preferably by finding new technologies to replace it, is quite attractive to the left, and that destroys capitalism. Think about it: the oil industry is not only about gasoline, but also about chemicals and various manufacturing materials. Once the oil industry, which is the mainstay of energy, is hit, the whole mechanism on which modern human civilization is based may be greatly affected.
The consequences of such a leftist “Great Leap Forward” could be dire, as Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” in 1958 called for the People’s Commune (a rural socialist organization he strongly promoted) to increase grain production. As a result, local governments misrepresented agricultural production, producing tens of thousands of pounds of grain per acre. Many people doubted the reasonableness of this yield. A top scientist who returned from studying in the United States wrote an argumentative article in the People’s Daily, saying that if 30% of the energy from the sun (667 square meters) could be applied, along with enough water and fertilizer, there would be no problem with 40,000 pounds per acre.
This scientist’s premise, if 30% of the sunlight and other conditions are used, no one will pay attention to it because people do not understand it, they will only pay attention to an acre of land can produce 40,000 jins of grain, so Mao’s request is not unreasonable. So the Communist Party’s “Great Leap Forward” accelerated and eventually 30 million people died of starvation.
The scientist was not wrong because his conclusion had many prerequisites, what was wrong was the politics behind it, and the overriding “political correctness”. This is a big lesson, a lesson that the Chinese have learned with the lives of 30 million people. U.S. green energy policy makers are also assuming a series of “preconditions” that the scientists arguing may not be wrong, but the political maneuvering behind them does not necessarily take into account scientific issues, but more social power and political issues.
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