Greta Thunberg is right.
Yes, I actually wrote that with a straight face.
Of course, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and Thunberg’s clock is not just busted, it’s being wildly wound back and forth by its handlers. Even when she’s right, she’s right for the wrong reasons.
Joe Biden called an international summit last week to parade his administration’s virtue on climate change. He pledged to cut 2005-level greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, a goal twice as ambitious as that set by the Obama administration. It was left to Greta Thunberg to expose the emptiness of the promise. The ramped-up targets were “reliant on future, fantasy-scaled, currently barely existing negative emissions technologies”, she said.
On this point at least, Thunberg and Scott Morrison are on the same page. The Prime Minister is reluctant to commit his country to net-zero emissions by 2050 without the technology to get us there. As Thunberg said, “we can fool others and even ourselves, we cannot fool nature and physics”.
What Thunberg actually knows about nature and physics is plainly sod-all. Her grasp of climate science is even more feeble, given her propensity to spout media talking-points that, as former Obama science adviser Steven Koonin says, “has drifted so far out of touch with the actual science as to be absurdly, demonstrably false”.
But, cracked clock that she is, Thunberg’s cuckoo is dangling on its haywire spring and, almost by happenstance, pointing at a truth that even many of her ardent worshippers are strenuously denying: emissions targets are self-serving bullshit.
Honesty is a lowly ranked virtue for the climate cognoscenti[…]
In 1997, Biden’s finance secretary, Janet Yellen, then chair of Bill Clinton’s council of economic advisers, said steps to avoid global warming would not be allowed to jeopardise the president’s progress toward revitalising the economy[…]
Today, Yellen, as Biden’s economist-in-chief, has joined the climate emergency panic. Last month she described climate change as the biggest emerging risk to the US financial system. That’s quite a call when US government debt is at $US28 trillion, inflation is building, COVID-19 has yet to be tamed and Chinese belligerence grows by the day. Yellen proposes a carbon tax beginning at $US40 a tonne and rising every year until 2030.
If Biden were looking for a way to kill the economic revival that began under his predecessor, Yellen has provided one.
Climate politics is the stomping ground of liars and shonks. China, already the world’s largest emitter, fully intends to keep skyrocketing its emissions for the next 30 years. Then they would have us believe that they will wave a magical Communist wand and turn around to net zero in just a decade.
China is merely the boldest of the barefaced liars of climate politics.
Canada exceeds China’s deceit only by the sheer insanity of its policies.
Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax will rise to $CA170 per tonne by 2030. The government has not released any quantitative economic analysis of the impact of the tax, but modelling by the Fraser Institute forecasts a loss of 184,000 jobs and a 1.8 per cent fall in GDP, which will lead to a decline in average wages of $CA1540 a year. In the unlikely event Canada can persist with these measures without a civil war[…]It will overshoot its 2020 target and its 2025 target, since its greenhouse gas emissions of 730 Mt CO2 equivalent in 2019 were barely 1 per cent less than in 2005.
Australia, the alleged climate change villain, has cut emissions by about 18 per cent over that period. In 2005, the average Australian’s carbon footprint was 30 per larger than the average Canadian’s, but today they are roughly the same.
Then there’s the Middle-Earth of ‘Saint Jacinda’.
The same comparison can be made with New Zealand, land of the sainted Jacinda Ardern, which has failed to reduce its emissions since 2005. NZ’s plan, such as it is, to be carbon neutral by 2050, ignores agriculture, the sector that produces the largest greenhouse gases.
The Australian
It should be borne in mind that for almost all of that period of emissions reduction, Australia has been governed by the Coalition. This has been achieved despite scrapping the disastrous Gillard carbon tax, and strong economic growth – but also with soaring househould electricity prices in most states.
If there’s one thing that stands out about climate politics, it’s that the louder the climate virtue-signalling, the bigger the emissions. This is as true of national governments as it is of “climate-conscious” celebrities zooming about in private jets.
It’s so obvious that even Greta Thunberg can see it.
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