It’s easy to be liberal when you have money!

Those who read my blog know the topic of climate change is a real bone of contention for me, and in the following, taken from past blog posts, I’ve summarized many of the most salient points – so, just for the fun of it, you might want to consider sending to your climate activist friends and then wait for a reply.  This much I promise – whatever the response, it will be emotional and lacking in peer-reviewed hard evidence.

• Planet earth has been alternately warming and cooling for 4 ½ billion years; and according to NOAA, the average temperature of planet earth is just under 60* F – for comparison, during the Neoproterozoic period, one of the warmest periods on planet earth, the average temperature was just over 90* F with no ice at the poles. Meanwhile the UN, the IPCC and the climate activists are concerned about managing a 1.5* change.
• No individual, organization or government has yet to identify what the ideal temperature for planet earth is, nor during which geological period that ‘ideal temperature’ was supposed to have occurred.
• Science and common-sense dictates that when measuring historical climate data for comparison purposes, such as hottest recorded temperatures, sea or carbon dioxide levels, snowpack, glacier recession, volcanic activity, hurricane, tornado, and wildfire frequency, etc., we must begin with a common baseline.  But climate activists are not interested in fact-based comparisons and only cite climate examples that fit their agenda, e.g., they’ll use carbon dioxide levels from the Mesozoic period, ocean temperatures beginning 1000 years ago, and then measure hurricane frequency from 1930.
• No one doubts humans exert a growing influence on the planet’s climate, however deficiencies in peer reviewed climate data challenge mankind’s ability to untangle the response to human influences on climate from the many poorly understood natural influences on climate.
• There is no accepted standard for creating climate models; every agency (NOAA, NASA, IPCC, etc.) designs its own.  As a result, there is significant disagreement among them with many even contradicting each other, which means the current state of climate science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change in the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it.
• To say an EV (electric vehicle) is a zero-emission vehicle is a gross distortion of reality because only 10% of the electricity produced in this country comes from wind and solar, which means that 90% of the energy powering all those shiny, new, expensive, ‘zero emission’ Teslas comes from fossil fuels
• The premise that wind and solar are renewable is a fallacy.  Energy requiring the removal, refining, and transportation of billions upon billions of tons of minerals from the earth is hardly “renewable.”
• The average EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, is about the size of a standard suitcase and contains 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic.  Every one of these toxic components come from mining, and to manufacture just one such battery the manufacturer must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust must be dug up for just one battery; yet the foregoing’s impact to the environment is almost never mentioned by climate activists.
• Solar photovoltaic (PV) plants, wind farms and electric vehicles (EVs) require far more minerals than fossil fuel- based sources.  Consequently, the shift to green energy is set to drive a huge increase in the requirements for lithium nickel, cobalt, copper, aluminum, and dozens of other rare earth elements in a world where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) controls 85% of the planet’s rare earth minerals and where the United States is 100% dependent on the CCP for most of them.
• 70% of the world’s cobalt, comes from the Congo, where the world’s largest cobalt mine is locate and btw, owned by China.  Congolese mines have few if any pollution controls and regularly employ children in the mining process.
• Meanwhile, windmills are the ultimate in hidden costs and environmental destruction. Each windmill weighs 1,688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1,300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the very difficult to extract rare- earth minerals, neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium.  Each blade weighs roughly 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced.
• Unfortunately, as of today there is no agreed upon safe, economical, and pollution-free method to dispose of the obsolete solar panels and wind turbines.
• The Keystone pipeline can move 34,860,000 gallons of oil from the tar sands in Hardisty Canada to the refineries in Freeport Texas a day using a minimal amount of energy. Meanwhile, it would take 12 trains using 1,428,000 gallons of diesel fuel to deliver that same amount of oil in a day.  Doing the math, by stopping the pipeline trains (and trucks) will consume more than 500,000,000 gallons of diesel fuel in a year.
• The United Nations estimates that the world will need 75% more food by the year 2050 – so where do you think the nations of the world are going to put their resources, building solar panels and windmills, or feeding their citizens

~ In their own words ~

“We (the UN-IPCC) redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy…One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.  This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”– Dr. Ottmar Endenhofer, co-chair of the IPCC working group on Mitigation of Climate Change

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model (i.e., capitalism) that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,”– Christiana Figueres, Executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change and a 2016 nominee for Secretary General of the United Nations.