Biden Fires First Salvos in War Against Fossil Fuels

New president Joe Biden didn’t waste any time attacking the fossil fuel industry. We at least deserve a proper accounting of how these attacks are supposed to help us.

As soon as Joe Biden first sat down at his new office in the White House, he already had several executive orders sitting on the desk, which he eagerly signed. Among the new orders were the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline and getting the United States back in the Paris climate agreement.

Trump’s predecessor, Barrack Obama, had both put the country into the Paris agreement and banned construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. Trump reversed both decisions, and in a couple of pen strokes, the pipeline is off again and the Paris agreement is on again.

These are merely the first shots across the bow in Biden’s plan, which he claims to be declaring battle on “climate change” but instead is a war on fossil fuel energy. This might sound like one in the same if we are to assume the views of Biden and a great many others who think that humanity has the power to affect the climate in any meaningful way one way or the other, but to understand this matter at all, we need to look at these claims to actually see how valid they may be instead of just assuming they are, as we love to do.

We’re not exactly sure what to call the popular view on climate change. It is purported to be science, but real science is based upon facts and not just merely beliefs. That which is based merely upon beliefs we call dogma, and when pursued with the amount of passion that these beliefs are, we might want to consider it religion. The religion of climate change may be the most popular and passionate religion the world has ever seen.

Just like with other religions, the religion of climate change requires followers to not only unquestionably accept its dogma, but also exclude all other competing beliefs. Religions don’t accept alternative beliefs, as belief becomes deemed as truth and anyone who would seek to question it becomes truth deniers.

This is no way to do anything that is supposed to be science, but it sure is convenient to be able to just claim the truth without question and then anyone who disagrees is simply considered to be wrong. This approach does fit in perfectly with the philosophy of Biden’s Democratic Party in particular, where if you think that there was any tampering at all with last November’s election for instance, you are just lying, because they get to decide truth, and their beliefs are the standard that must be used, regardless of merit.

It turns out that Biden’s view on climate change is of the same sort as his view on the fairness of the election that vaulted him to power, requiring us to look completely away from the facts and just believe they are right. The real difference between them is that it is at least possible to have fair elections, in contrast to relying on a completely preposterous idea such as human activity having any meaningful effect on the climate.

It should not be too much to expect that the leader of the United States be held to at least a minimal standard of reasoning, regardless of how popular the ideas may be. The popular view of climate change is popular indeed, for what that’s worth.

In democracies, governments are entrusted to govern us in a responsible way, although the nature of democracy in practice has this appealing to what the majority believes to be reasonable. The issue of climate change shows the gap between reason and popular reasoning better than anything, given how wide the gap ends up being.

Given the stakes involved, the profound effect that Biden’s policies will have upon our economy, this is not a topic that we want to simply nod along with, without asking the questions that we are not supposed to be allowed to ask. If Biden is going to be bashing our economy and the enjoyment of our life, we at least should wish to see the practice justified at least somewhat.

During the presidential debates, the two candidates disagreed on everything, including their approaches to climate change. Biden’s view is apocalyptic, while Trump considers climate change a hoax. Trump does acknowledge that pollution is a problem, and no one in their right mind would doubt that, and suggested that we seek the right balance between economic growth and the qualitative good of clean air and water.

The climate change fanatics easily deal with views such as Trump’s, or anyone who shares this view regardless of whatever expertise and evidence they bring to the table, because this game is all about denial, you deny whatever reasons may be behind opposing views that oppose your beliefs. They even dare to call their beliefs science. Are they?

Where did we ever get the idea that our industrial activity causes any sort of meaningful global warming? Why are we so afraid of global warming in the first place? The story began some years ago when then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was seeking to promote the expansion of the U.K.’s nuclear energy program, which faced significant opposition from environmentalists.

The goal was to tarnish traditional fossil fuel energy production enough to make nuclear energy look good, aside from the fact that it caused so much pollution. Pollution just didn’t scare people very much, so the task was to come up with something that more successfully scared them.

Thatcher commissioned the Royal Society to cook up something to do this, and the climate change movement was born. People think that scientific study is driven by the quest for knowledge or some other laudable ideal, but this usually is very far from the case in practice. What actually happens is that research is funded by organizations with specific agendas. The truth is not among them, as the goal isn’t to discover truth, it is to manipulate it.

This is not to say that there isn’t honest science being done, but the majority of it is commissioned, either by governments or private industry, and they definitely fund it with specific objectives. Thatcher directed them to disparage fossil fuels, and that’s exactly what they did.

When Considering Science, The Facts Actually Do Matter

The “science” that emerges from these efforts isn’t anything that fools actual experts, although in some cases you do have to look into the science and have a good idea of what science is supposed to look like to be able to tell the fraud from the real thing. The claims of this popular view of climate change are so ridiculous that no prior knowledge or aptitude is needed, and this speaks to just how influential banding together a bunch of scientists with credentials can be.

Prior to this, climate science was very well developed, and understood pretty well the actual processes behind variations in the Earth’s temperature, being driven by that yellow ball in the sky we call the sun. Coming up with beliefs that the sun does not matter anymore, with its influence negated by mere air pollution, and having almost everyone in the world believe it, is surely the biggest “scientific” feat of all time.

As hard as people pretend that this matter is settled and the facts unquestionably support their views, especially with this much on the line as President Biden takes off his belt and gets ready to strap us and our economy based upon these beliefs. We are at least entitled to a better explanation than he is right and is entitled not to be questioned.

We can start with the idea that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere cause climate change. If we can’t show this, it won’t matter what influence human activities have on carbon levels, although that’s a whole different story in itself.

What these “scientists” have done is just assumed this, that carbon dioxide levels cause climate change, and even more remarkably, that human CO2 emissions is behind the rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere. They haven’t shown either, because both are completely absurd, but if you can just assume it and people believe the tale, you are off to the races.

They then take this data and tweak it with modeling, and they simply come up with whatever formulas you need to in order to achieve the desired outcome. When the growth in CO2 emissions that are measured aren’t high enough, you just pretend it’s twice as high as observed, whatever it takes, as no one is looking, not believers at least.

The Earth’s temperature has constantly fluctuated in cycles over its history, and for most of it has been considerably warmer than today, completely ice-free. It was considerably warmer than today as recently as 1200, back when Greenland was named, as it was nice and green then and Leif Eriksson had a farm there for a number of years.

We then entered a cooling period called the Little Ice Age, which we are working our way back from presently, sitting midway between the high from what is termed the Medieval Warming Period and the lows of this more recent cooling. Somehow though, we avoided ecological catastrophe during this time or during other periods where the Earth was in a warming phase, so this in itself should put an end to the idea that this current warming phase has us headed straight toward one, in spite of all the tales of doom that are so popular now.

These warming periods throughout recorded history tend to be at points considered to be apexes of civilization, such as the peak of the Roman Empire, and separately during a particularly lengthy warming period, the birth of civilization itself. Both these periods saw the Earth much warmer than today. It is when the cooling starts that things go downhill in fact, not that this is anything worth bothering about too much.

The truth plays no role in any part of this climate change fairy tale, and this includes the idea that global warming increases the severity of weather patterns. The complete opposite is true in fact, as the severity of weather depends on the degree of temperature change between the tropics and the poles. Warming reduces this, while cooling increases it. This is in all textbooks on meteorology and is a fact not even in dispute. None of this has to do with carbon dioxide though.

The claim is that our putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by way of emissions increases the greenhouse effect in the upper atmosphere. If this were actually the case, we would see more warming in the troposphere than on the surface, right under this blanket that is insulating us.

It turns out that this is not the case at all, and the upper atmosphere has hardly warmed at all during the period under question, with the surface warming much more. This just doesn’t cast doubt upon the greenhouse effect being behind our warming, it completely invalidates it.

They also tell us that since CO2 levels and global temperature move in lock step, over as far back as we wish to look, this means that higher CO2 levels cause global warming. What they neglect to tell you is that while the two move very closely together, rises and falls in temperature always precede higher or lower CO2 levels, with a significant lag, and without exception.

Temperature rises precipitate a rise in atmospheric CO2, not the other way around, and it’s easy to understand how. The great majority of the CO2 in the atmosphere comes from the oceans, and as the evaporate more, this releases more carbon dioxide into the air.

Even if this were the greenhouse effect at work, it turns out that carbon dioxide, at the best of times, only represents a very tiny portion of the atmosphere overall, and a tiny portion of even greenhouse gases as it turns out. By the numbers, we’re only talking about 3% of greenhouse gases, and of this 3%, only 5% of that is from us, with the rest being shown to be from nature. This cashes out to only 0.15 of the alleged effect of elevated carbon levels being due to human activity, if such a thing did drive global warming in the first place, which it does not. These ideas are completely fraudulent based upon the facts, deserving the term “hoax.”

What does cause global warming then? It’s actually changes in the activity of our sun, and this model does track with reality, even on the level of showing the cooling period between 1940 and 1980, as carbon emissions rose but the temperature declined. Joe Biden is indeed assuming that our relatively meaningless amount of pollution is so powerful that it has negated the sun, and he’s now using this platform to punish us for our alleged evil deeds.

You don’t see this evidence in the media, but they fall four square on the side of the propagandists and do great work in fueling and perpetuating it. A lot of scientists have joined this scientific fraud, but in the battle between money and the truth, the truth doesn’t stand much of a chance. There are many honest experts who refuse to stand down, in spite of efforts by the establishments to destroy their careers. Many refuse to be silenced though.

Somehow, the sheer number of their signees in this pact to suppress us economically matters, just like it did when the majority of people on Earth still believed the world was flat many centuries after Aristotle proved it was round. When Galileo proved that the Earth was not the center of the Universe, he was not only deemed to be wrong, they even threw him in prison. Science can only be rightly decided by evidence, not how popular a view may be.

No Justification is Required to Strangle Ourselves Over This Fraud

As we prepare to re-enter the Paris climate agreement, it is also worth having a look at what this is supposed to achieve, even if their assumptions were true. Dr. Bjorn Lomberg of the Copenhagen Consensus is far from a climate “denier,” is widely respected in the community as in influencer, and even mocks Trump for correctly calling it a “hoax.” Dr. Lomberg doesn’t ignore the economics involved though as others within the movement do, and reveals some startling findings.

Dr. Lomberg openly welcomes all of the fraudulent assumptions that the climate change bogeymen use, and has worked out what it would actually take to reach their targets that will allegedly have us avoiding catastrophe. If everyone complies completely with the Paris agreement, he has calculated out that this will cause a reduction in global temperatures by 0.05 degrees C. This is what is supposed to save us? Apparently, the people behind this haven’t bothered to calculate any of these things.

What would it take, according to their assumptions, for us to actually achieve the desired targets? We currently emit 36 gigatons of CO2 a year. Dr. Lomberg calculates that the Paris agreement will reduce CO2 by 33 gigatons in total by 2100, a little less than a year’s worth at the current rate, over 80 years. In order to hit the temperature targets, he says we need to reduce emissions by 100 times more than this, by 3,066 gigatons.

In other words, even if they are right, none of this is even going to matter, as even the most tweaked up models finds such a minute change in temperature meaningful. The very idea that the Earth will warm anywhere near as much as they have modelled is ridiculous anyway, even if such things mattered. The Earth’s temperature does move in cycles, but it simply does not move this much this fast, not this century, not ever.

Dr. Lomberg also points out that impacts upon climate change, as predicted by the people who wish to paint such a gruesome picture, will have us lose between 0.2% and 2% of GDP as a result. Even the upper end of this is not really notable, but the fact that their plans to reduce emissions to zero will cost us 16 percent of GDP, $5 trillion a year in the U.S. to prevent this up to 2% loss in GDP, reveals how truly mad this plan is. How we will pay for this or how it would even be possible to survive under current technology with zero emissions are questions left unanswered, as if these things did not even matter.

We do not want this to let us become distracted with the real issue behind carbon emissions, the unhealthy air that it causes. We do not want to go all out for economic growth and neglect the environment, and all we need to do is look at the air quality of cities in China to see what happens when we don’t seek even a decent balance.

This is best achieved from an economic standpoint as well as from the standpoint of sensibility by looking to clean up the emissions enough with technology, which is the part that China has left out due to a lack of regulation. Carbon dioxide itself isn’t a pollutant at all though, and is the element that life itself is based on.

Dr. Lomberg has the presence of mind to recognize that we should be spending our money on not choking the economy but to put a lot more money into research and development instead. We are not even close to coming up with a substitute for fossil fuels, something both affordable and usable, which means energy on demand, not ones that are only available intermittingly like wind and solar and cannot effectively replace fossil fuels no matter how much of this we have.

There is a pending crisis here, and it will be coming up far sooner than most people think. We do not have the luxury of waiting until we run out of fossil fuels to have this impact us, as once we get to the point where the supply can no longer satisfy demand, we’ll still have lots left but we’ll reach the tipping point where the price of fossil fuels will escalate as supply continues to diminish, creating more and more economic havoc until it all completely crashes.

This is what we need to be working on, the real potential crisis and not just a fake one, using a lot more of this money earmarked for climate change to actually address the problem, to actually seek a good alternative to the burning of fossil fuels for energy, and unless we succeed at this, our entire economy will be brought down.

One of the offshoots of cheap energy from fossil fuels as this has allowed the population of the world to explode, and more people mean greater energy needs and more emissions. The population has doubled in the last 50 years, and that happens to be how much emissions have gone up as well. Overpopulation is another crisis that has been stuffed under the bed during this infatuation with climate, something we will be unable to continue to ignore for much longer, and this adding more pollution is just one of the issues involved.

While we should certainly wish to reduce air pollution to at least a level not unreasonably harmful to human health, we should welcome higher carbon dioxide levels, and this actually allows us to grow food more efficiently. This is not just an economic good, as the survival of a great many people depend on this, to help us better manage death by starvation.

While the U.S. will pay whatever price Biden and his gang decide we need to pay as far as restricting our economy for the cause, we also need to be aware of the effect that his ideas have upon global policy. For instance, two-thirds of Africa lives without electricity, leading to a hideous existence among the majority of their people. Their countries are very eager to develop enough to raise themselves out of this mire, but that takes energy.

They have the resources, coal and oil, but the international community who believes in this climate nonsense are preventing them from using their fossil fuels very much and instead insist on them using renewable energy sources. The people can barely manage to eat, and some cannot even manage this, and they and their governments do not have the means to pay 3 times as much as fossil fuels for energy, so they are left gasping for breath in the muck as the world cheers.

This includes our new president who would cheer along with them, presuming this is even within his level of awareness, which is disturbingly shallow. His revoking permission for the Keystone XL pipeline planned to bring more oil in from Canada is good evidence of this in fact.

This idea obviously got stuck at the pre-cognitive level in Biden’s mind, at least if there is a goal behind this other than to just use it as an opportunity to shake your fist at fossil fuels just because. The issue at hand is seeking a more efficient and safer way to transport this oil to market. Canada already pumps a lot of oil through the Keystone pipeline, and this planned extension of it was to add 29% more capacity, to take the load off all of the oil that needs to be sent down from Canada by rail. We’re stuck with the trains now, and a lot of lost jobs.

This rail traffic has almost doubled over the last couple of years and, ironically, the pipeline is a clean way to transport this oil versus with trains which emit greenhouse gases. If the goal is to increase greenhouse gas emissions, this succeeds. They get this and everything else backward.

The relatively few jobs lost by this decision is just a very small ante in a poker game that will have a lot of chips on the table, black chips that is, and a black chip is worth a whole lot of jobs. It does not seem that anything can cause people to break their climate fever, but so many being put out of work by this may serve to at least move the bar.

Biden waffled on the issue of banning fracking, although he last told us just prior to the election that he was not going to ban it, and instead planned to phase it out, as if this didn’t qualify. Biden has already begun work on this, placing a “moratorium” on new fracking permits or any permits developing oil and gas on federal lands. The game is on.

Joe’s declared war on fossil fuels, but we knew he would. Elections have consequences, as he and his party are so fond of saying now. They do indeed.

Editor, MarketReview.com

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