Sunday, December 16, 2018

At Climate Summit, America takes Lead on Energy Realism and Prosperity


For those of us who hold individual rights as sacred, Donald Trump is a heavily mixed bag. There’s a lot to hate about his policy agenda.

But there’s also things to support--his energy policy, for example.

At the recent global climate summit in Poland, dubbed COP24, the Trump Administration stood before a sneering, mocking, elitist cabal of global climate alarmists, . . . and promoted coal and other fossil fuels!

As the Washington Post’s Griff Witte and Brady Dennis "reported":

President Donald Trump's top White House adviser on energy and climate stood before the crowd of some 200 people on Monday and tried to burnish the image of coal, the fossil fuel that powered the industrial revolution - and is now a major culprit behind the climate crisis world leaders are meeting here to address.

"We strongly believe that no country should have to sacrifice economic prosperity or energy security in pursuit of environmental sustainability," said Wells Griffith, Trump's adviser.

Mocking laughter echoed through the conference room. A woman yelled, "These false solutions are a joke!" And dozens of people erupted into chants of protest.

The protest was a piece of theater, and so too was the United States' public embrace of coal and other dirty fuels at an event otherwise dedicated to saving the world from the catastrophic impacts of climate change. The standoff punctuated the awkward position the American delegation finds itself in as career bureaucrats seek to advance the Trump administration's agenda in an international arena aimed at cutting back on fossil fuels.

Talk about guts. Note the bias in this “news” report--terms like “climate crisis” and “dirty fuels” and coal labeled “a major culprit”--as if the issue is settled, and there are no other views or facts to consider. That’s why I put the word “reported” in scare quotes. Right in the epicenter of the biggest gathering of the climate catastrophists’ witch doctors, we get a defense of fossil fuels!

That aside, when you look beyond the hubris of the elites, an entirely different picture emerges. As the elites laugh at Trump, people around the world are embracing coal as they struggle to pull themselves up from poverty. Hundreds upon hundreds of coal-fired electric power plants are being planned or built, while United States coal exports hit records as coal producers strain to meet this worldwide demand. As Trump gets mocked, he takes the side of the world’s poor, who want a piece of the prosperity and climate safety enjoyed by the elites, and of the “rich,” who want to maintain their elevated lifestyles. It looks like Trump is not the only one who doesn’t want “to sacrifice economic prosperity or energy security in pursuit of environmental sustainability.”

Trump was also criticized for refusing to back the recent United Nations report that alarmingly asserted that mankind has only until 2030 to prevent climate doom:

Monday's presentation came after a weekend in which the U.S. delegation undercut the talks by joining with major oil producers Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in blocking full endorsement of a critical U.N. climate report. The report, by some of the world's leading scientists, found that the world has barely a decade to cut carbon emissions by nearly half to avoid catastrophic warming.

But the United States balked at a proposal to formally "welcome" the finding, setting off a dispute that, while semantic in nature, carried ominous portents that the United States could become an obstacle to progress in Katowice.

Trump was right here, too. That U.N. report was a scary document with totalitarian implications.

To be sure, the Trump Administration is not blind to the possibility of serious climate side effects from greenhouse gases. It’s policy views are much more broad based than implied here. You have to read down toward the end of the article to find this:

After dozens of activists had shouted, "Keep it in the ground!" and "Shame on you!" for roughly 10 minutes, they marched together from the room. In the calm that followed, administration officials continued with their pitch for carbon-capture technologies to clean up coal, hydraulic fracturing to unearth gas and a new generation of nuclear energy plants.

Scientists say that a rapid migration away from fossil fuels toward cleaner energy is essential in the quest to prevent the most catastrophic effects of climate change. But Griffith, the White House adviser, argued that an exclusive focus on wind and solar is misguided at a time when the global energy supply is still dominated by carbon.

He and his colleagues touted the economic benefits of shale gas and insisted that coal can be made much less polluting given the right technology.

"Alarmism," Griffith said, "should not silence realism."

Alarmism should not silence realism. Amen. Carbon-capture technologies, hydraulic fracturing to unearth gas, and nuclear energy are all greenhouse gas-reducing energy solutions that don’t require sacrificing economic prosperity to environmental “sustainability” and pay due respect to the vital reliable energy our lives depend upon. Trump is not alone in his realism. Bill Gates, who is investing $billions of his own fortune for the cause of reducing climate-altering carbon emissions, called the obsession with unreliable solar and wind “dangerous.” As the Daily Caller reports:

Bill Gates offered some surprisingly critical comments about environmental activists who believe the proliferation of renewable energy is the only answer to climate change.

“That general impression that ‘Oh, it’s just about solar and wind,’ that I think is as dangerous to us as the fact that in one country, the U.S., there’s a faction that associates with ‘Hey, let’s not make any trade-offs to go in and solve this problem,'” he said.

Gates is putting his money where his mouth is:

Gates is no stranger to environmental activism. The founder of Microsoft — and a man worth almost $100 billion — has used his wealth to propel a number of climate change initiatives. He currently leads a coalition of billionaires who are investing in clean energy technologies. The philanthropy organization he founded, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is focusing on the adaptation to climate change.

Gates has also invested in the development of advanced nuclear reactors, and a company, Carbon Engineering, that uses technology to capture carbon right out of the sky.

Carbon capture, adaptation, nuclear power; sounds a lot like Trump’s balanced agenda. These are not “false solutions,” as one protester screamed. They are realistic, progressive proposals coming from people who value human well-being over Stone Age-like “sustainability”.

True to their biases, Witte and Dennis asserted that “the idea of the United States as a leader at the international climate talks has evaporated.” They accused Trump of “thumbing his nose at international norms." But what Trump actually did was give us a lesson in true leadership. Thumbing one’s nose at norms that one believes is wrong, and offering a different approach, is what leaders do. On climate, energy, and human prosperity, the Trump Administration has made America a leader true to its legacy as a beacon of technological and economic advancement.

It remains to be seen if Trump’s courageous stand signals the beginning of the end of the climate catastrophist bubble, and the beginning of a more balanced, pro-human approach to energy and climate. To be sure, as the article points out, unelected “deep state” American bureaucrats are working behind the scenes at the conference to undercut the elected Trump Administration from carrying out its agenda. Nonetheless, kudos to the Trump Administration for standing up for a rational, realist approach that integrates energy, climate, and economic concerns. It’s a view that desperately needs a voice.

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1 comment:

Steve D said...

'Alarmism'

Is that even a real concept?