“Heading down to DC to catch an #EarthDay flight on Air Force One tomorrow with the President,” popular scientist Bill Nye tweeted out ahead of yesterday’s Earth Day celebration. “We’re going to #ActOnClimate.”
Indeed, Nye and President Obama “acted on” the climate on their 1,836-mile round-trip flight to the Everglades. They emitted five times as much carbon in one day as the average American emits over the course of a year.
No, Nye’s and Obama’s climate hypocrisy does not falsify any scientific theory about global climate change. But it does highlight a lack of faith among those who would demand sacrifices from their fellow man to avert the supposed disaster they predict. That same lack of faith is evident in anyone connected to the electrical grid and using a computer to read these very words.
Most Americans agree that human activity has contributed to an increase in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and that this has caused some increase in global temperatures. This is the reality to which the oft-cited scientific consensus applies. There is far less consensus as to what and how bad the effects of this warming will be.
Hence the failure of every climate model to track the rise in temperatures and their current pause. Hence the almost-daily crackpot amateur theories about every weather event being caused by global warming — including snow, cold, and the recent record-high levels of Antarctic sea ice.
In the meantime, Americans are told to fear for the world’s future, even as every manner of airhead celebrity gallivants across the country in a carbon-guzzling private jet to decry the dangers of global warming. Even so, no one is proposing or indeed can propose a carbon-reduction policy that avoids environmental catastrophe without causing a far greater greater economic catastrophe.
To take the extreme example, the United States could simply eliminate all carbon-generating sources of energy overnight — in the process leaving hundreds of millions of souls without any means to feed themselves. Yet even if this drastic policy were adopted today, carbon emission increases in the developing world would still fully replace this nation’s annual carbon output by roughly 2020. And the United States possesses neither the moral authority nor willingness to make demands of the world’s poor — Obama, supposedly a “green” politician, just made a non-binding climate agreement allowing China to increase its carbon emissions without limit until 2030.
There is thus no policy of reduced energy use that holds forth any hope for humanity, if the doom-sayers are to be believed. The only remaining future, therefore, aside from an uninhabitable planet, is technological innovation. And only society with access to immense amounts of energy will ever possess the economic vitality needed to bring it about.
Radical environmentalists have laid out before Americans a game so hopeless that it cannot be won with any play they advocate. The Hail Mary pass is all that is left. It could come in the form of safer nuclear power, or perhaps a profitable agricultural or manufactured product that traps large quantities of atmospheric carbon, or all of the above — or something no one has yet conceived of.
Or who knows, maybe the warming won’t actually be so bad after all.
Obama and Nye must tacitly understand this. Otherwise, they would have made other travel arrangements.
