During his run for the GOP presidential nomination, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie attacked President Obama’s dictatorial “Clean Power” regulations, which is basically an attempt—so far successful—to bankrupt the U.S. coal industry.
Christie’s stance drew a rebuke from the NJ Star-Ledger, which lectured that Christie needs to get on board with climate initiatives. The Star-Ledger wrote:
Pricewaterhouse Coopers, the multinational auditor, recently released its annual survey of 1,322 CEOs from 77 countries. At the top of the list of fears for these flinty men of commerce, at 78 percent, was "over-regulation." Climate change did not even crack the top 20.
These are doubtlessly smart people. But this endemic ignorance – or is it institutional stupidity? – is a threat to the species, and the resistance to change by even the most accomplished men is why President Obama had to roll out his Clean Power Plan Monday.
After praising Obama’s regulatory attack on coal as “the most significant climate initiative this country has ever undertaken,” the Star-Ledger goes on:
So right on cue, Gov. Christie said all the wrong things about the Clean Power initiative.
It has become a tedious litany: Reducing carbon will kill jobs, they say. It will hurt business. It will drive up energy prices. Enforcing regulations like this is unconstitutional.
Right on cue, the Star-Ledger echoes the climate change catastrophists’ disregard of the benefits of fossil fuels, the threat to human well-being of the assault on fossils, and its classic “progressive” disdain for the rule of rights-protecting law.
Though the immediate ire of the Star-Ledger was directed at coal, the same arguments used to attack coal energy can be directed at natural gas and oil.
Reasonable people need constant rejoinders to the catastrophists’ false narrative, so I left these comments, edited for clarity:
. . . “a threat to the species.” “burning fossil fuels threatens our infrastructure, economy, health, and national security.”
This kind of hyper-hyperbole is indicative of the climate-mongers’ panic. Is it any wonder reasonable people have a hard time taking it seriously? It’s not just big business CEOs who place climate change low on their list of concerns. Average voters also do, as Gallup and many other polls regularly show. As Anthony Watts reports for the climate change website WUWT,
The inescapable conclusion [from the Gallup poll], in my opinion, is that there has been no climate “breakthrough”, and there is unlikely to be a significant rise in support for climate alarmist policies in the foreseeable future. Climate scare stories are only reaching people who are already worried about climate change.
Both average voters and CEOs have good reason not to panic on climate change: Far from the catastrophe that environmentalists have been predicting for decades, life around the globe keeps getting better as fossil fuel energy production increases.
On 8/2/15, the Star-Ledger ran a Bloomberg article on global prosperity. Since 2001, the percentage of the world’s population living in poverty dropped by half, from 29% to 15%. Every category of economic well being—low, middle, upper middle, and high income—gained. During this period, fossil fuel-driven energy production soared as carbon emissions from emerging “Third World” economies surpassed America’s. At the same time, one climate catastrophe prediction after another bit the dust.
Going back further, climate-related deaths have dropped 98% over the past hundred years—the very era of global warming. Global warming notwithstanding, we are safer than ever from extreme weather and other climate-related dangers.
Going back still further—to the dawn of the industrial revolution, especially since the rise of fossil fuels—our environment has gotten cleaner as people shifted from open wood and dung-burning fires for heat and cooking and animal transportation to centralized, mostly fossil fuel-driven power supplies. Lives have gotten longer, more comfortable, healthier, better fed, and more flourishing generally. Whereas humans for millennia had been at the mercy of climate dangers, climate dangers in the modern era are ever-less of a threat.
Everywhere around the world, fossil fuels-driven economic progress has been making people’s lives better, right up to the current day. These “ignorant” and “stupid” global CEOs, who run giant companies that cater to the needs and wants of the increasingly prosperous world population, are a much better measure of the truth than the climate catastrophists. Regulations that hamper productiveness—including War on Fossil Fuels regulations—are the real threat to human well-being. Obama’s initiative is cruel, as is the root dogma that CO2—which is vital to life on Earth and harmless to humans—is a pollutant.
Climate catastrophe exists only in the computer models that churn out perpetually failed predictions of catastrophe. Despite the fact that, today, 87% of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels, there is no existential proof of climate catastrophe. The final proof of the failure of the climate catastrophists’ to prove their case—and why climate change is increasingly less of a primary concern of most people, regardless of out-of-context polls—is that the peddlers of climate catastrophe dogma refuse to openly debate the “skeptics” and their counter-arguments. Instead, all you get are smears and intimidation and claims of “settled science.” The climate catastrophists are intellectual cowards, and ad hominem, the siren song of the intellectual coward—along with increasingly shrill (and spectacularly wrong) catastrophe predictions—are their only weapons.
These last two, among others, are the reasons I don’t buy climate catastrophe. One of my top concerns is the climate catastrophists’ war on today’s most reliable, economical, and best energy technology—fossil fuels. My test of who to vote for will include a candidate’s willingness to openly reject the climate catastrophists and their potentially catastrophic (for humans) War on Fossil Fuels agenda.
Related Reading:
The Secret History of Fossil Fuels—Chapter One, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein
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