Sunday, August 18, 2019

NJ's Energy Master Plan’ not Inhumane Enough for Climate Catastrophists


New Jersey has a new 2019 Energy Master Plan. It promises to “foster economic growth” while it “mandates 80 percent reductions in carbon pollution below 2006 levels by 2050,” according to NJ SPOTLIGHT. That’s not enough for hardcore environmentalists. In a New Jersey Star-Ledger guest column, The draft of N.J.'s energy plan isn’t meeting the challenge of combating our climate emergency, John Reichman condemns the plan because it does not “include a moratorium on all new fossil fuel projects until a plan is in place to regulate GHGs.” I have to admit that the “until a plan is in place to regulate GHGs” seems like a small opening for allowing some future use of fossil fuels. But that shred of a hopeful sign goes up in smoke (or GHGs) in light of the following. Regurgitating the hysterical claim that “we have 10 years to avoid climate catastrophe,” Reichman asserts

The first common sense step the state must take to address the climate crisis is to stop making the problem worse. The state’s existing goals for reducing GHGs cannot possibly be met if New Jersey permits any of the dozen, proposed fossil fuel projects to go forward.

My emphasis. These are current projects in various degrees of development which will not be there 10 years from now, when demand growth makes them vital. Will GHGs be regulated in time to satisfy the likes of John Reichman? And if there really is a climate crisis pending within 10 years, and if human flourishing were Reichman’s basic consideration, you’d think nuclear power would be prominent in Reichman’s withering critique of NJ’s plan. You’d be wrong.

Reichman represents “BlueWaveNJ’s Environmental Committee the Steering Committee of EmpowerNJ, a coalition of more than 80 environmental and community organizations.” I posted these comments, edited for clarity. The emphasis is mine:

The attack on natural gas, coupled with the failure to embrace nuclear power—the only replacement capable of producing the volume of reliable, large-scale electricity needed to power our lives—is brutally inhumane. Environmentalism places pristine—i.e., unimproved by man—nature over human well-being, so they don’t care about the human catastrophe of energy deprivation that would result from getting rid of fossils and nuclear. 

But when you see “we have 10 years to avoid climate catastrophe,” you’ve encountered a political tactic geared to panic people into granting government the totalitarian utopian powers needed to transition the entire economy to “Green”—precisely the kinds of wide, transcendent powers statists need to impose socialism. The statists’ plan is, We need to save the planet, and while we’re at, we can transition from capitalist freedom to socialism. That’s why the U.N. report contains phrases like “go hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society . . . and efforts to eradicate poverty.” That’s why AOC’s Green New Deal means to “use the transition to 100 percent renewable energy as the vehicle to establish economic, racial and social justice in America." “Climate Emergency” is wrapped up in a socialist agenda. 

When a child wakes up screaming, the adult assures the child that there are no monsters in the closet--it’s only a nightmare. As to the “climate emergency”, let me be the adult: There is no climate crisis—no “10-years to avoid”—in the closet. The real monster is the socialist agenda behind the climate crisis tactic. Given the vital necessity of energy and freedom in our lives, we should fear those who would impose “a moratorium on all new fossil fuel projects.” We owe our children and grandchildren more prosperity and freedom, not poverty and slavery.

To further make the case for climate catastrophism, I conclude with an excerpt from a previous post of mine:

In order to understand what this is really all about, we must take a brief look back. As thinkers such as Ayn Rand (P. 270) and Stephen Hicks (Chpt. 5) have observed, socialists faced a crisis around the middle of the 20th Century. Marxist predictions that capitalism would lead to the few getting rich at the expense of impoverishing the many turned out to be 180º wrong: The growth of industrial fortunes was accompanied by a rising general standard of living, including the emergence of a vast prosperous middle class. Meanwhile, socialist nations collapsed into widespread poverty, one after another, accompanied by brutal repressions and often genocide. Rather than acknowledge the obvious, the socialists switched gears. Under a “New Left,” they aligned with the “ecology” movement, the precursor to modern Environmentalism, opposing capitalism for creating too much prosperity for the masses, thus ruining the Earth with pollution. When capitalist nations began cleaning up the pollution--genuine pollution--while continuing the upward trajectory of general prosperity, the socialists turned to a quasi-religion--the Environmentalists’ “climate crisis”. Capitalism-hating Naomi Klein captures the modern socialist strategy. Climate change “Changes Everything,” she writes. As Reason’s Ronald Bailey summarizes:

"Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war," she asserts. Climate science, Klein claims, has given progressives "the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism" ever. If the stresses of globalization and a massive financial crisis cannot mobilize the masses, then the prospect of catastrophic climate change must.

Canonical Marxism predicted that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its class "contradictions," in which the bourgeoisie profit from the proletariat's labor until we reach a social breaking point. In Klein's progressive update, capitalism will collapse because the pollution produced by its heedless overconsumption will build to an ecological breaking point.

[P]rogressive values and policies are "currently being vindicated, rather than refuted, by the laws of nature." [emphasis added]

Socialism is totalitarian, by design and in practice. So where does the Green New Deal come in?

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