Shellenberger began by highlighting his background, telling the Committee: “I am an energy analyst and environmentalist dedicated to the goals of universal prosperity, peace, and environmental protection. Between 2003 and 2009 I advocated for a large federal investment in renewables, many of which were made as part of the 2009 stimulus. And since 2013 I have advocated for the continued operation of nuclear plants around the world and thus helped prevent emissions from increasing the equivalent of adding 24 million cars to the road.”

“I also care about getting the facts and science right. I believe that scientists, journalists, and advocates have an obligation to represent climate science accurately, even if doing so reduces the saliency of our concerns,” Shellenberger continued. “No credible scientific body has claimed climate change threatens the collapse of civilization much less the extinction of the human species. And yet some activists, scientists, and journalists make such apocalyptic assertions, which I believe contribute to rising levels of anxiety, including among adolescents, and worsening political polarization.”

During the last 30 years the mortality risk from climate-related disasters plunged more than six-fold and the economic loss rates went down five-fold...

A paper published in the scientific literature in July 2019 had the refreshingly plain-language title “Empirical evidence of declining global vulnerability to climate-related hazards”. Care to guess what it’s about? In slightly less plain-language, the authors say:

We quantified the dynamics of socio-economic vulnerability to climate-related hazards. A decreasing trend in both human and economic vulnerability is evident. Global average mortality and loss rates have dropped by 6.5 and nearly 5 times, respectively, from 1980 to 1989 to 2007–2016. Results also show a clear negative relation between vulnerability and wealth.”

Last week, Nature published a damning refutation of a significant body of climate change research. The title of that article is self-explanatory: Ocean acidification does not impair the behavior of coral reef fishes. The authors studied more than 900 fish from six different species over a period of three years, attempting to verify earlier findings by a team of researchers at Australia’s James Cook University. Their attempts failed.

...

The author in common is research leader Philip Munday. When eight of this man’s papers were double-checked, other scientists were unable to confirm his findings. They performed the same experiments but got different results. Every. Single. Time. The James Cook University website tells us Munday is “in the top 1% of cited researchers in the ISI fields of Plant and Animal Science” (bold added). He sits on the editorial board of three scientific journals. He also – ding, ding, ding – “has contributed to IPCC reports” on ocean acidification. In fact, Munday’s name appears 46 times in this 174-page document about a 2011 IPCC workshop on that topic. You heard it here first, folks. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s pronouncements about tropical fish relies on a man whose work falls to pieces whenever anyone tries to verify it.

In a 2-1 decision, the appeals court made several key findings regarding the youthful plaintiffs' standing. It found the kids showed they have indeed been injured by the federal government's policies. And they also held that the plaintiffs' argument that the government's policies are a "substantial factor" in causing the injuries could have been decided at trial. But the majority drew the line at whether a court could give the kids the relief they are seeking.

Sen. Elizabeth's Warren's energy deprivation plan for America: No new houses or buildings, 'zero carbon' cars & electricity production & no drilling on federal lands and no nuclear energy. 

“What scares me is every time you go back to the scientists, they tell you two things,” the senator said. “It’s worse than we thought, and we have less time.“ That means we’ve got to be willing to do things, for example, like regulation. By 2028, no new buildings, no new houses, without a zero carbon footprint.” And she’s coming for your car and electricity bill, too.“By 2030, trucks — light-duty trucks and cars, zero carbon footprint. By 2035, all production of electricity, zero carbon footprint,” Warren said.

“We do three regulations, we can cut our carbon footprint by 70 percent,” she said...“We’re not going to build any nuclear power plants and we’re going to start weaning ourselves off nuclear energy and replacing it with renewable fuels,” she said during CNN’s mammoth climate town hall back in September.

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The Green assault on home ownership: ‘We need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership’ - UCLA Prof.: "Cheap energy is untenable in the face of a climate emergency. And individual homeownership should be seriously questioned."

Assemblymember Luz Rivas (D-Arleta) says under AB 1922, “climate change education will be a coursework requirement for students in grades 1 through 6, and a graduation requirement for students in grades 7 through 12, starting 2025.”

Here’s a quote from the abstract in Nature:

we comprehensively and transparently show that…ocean acidification levels have negligible effects on important behaviours of coral reef fishes…we additionally show that …[results] that have been reported in several previous studies are highly improbable. [bold added]

Extending back to 2010, many of these studies were highly publicized at the time they appeared. Physicist Peter Ridd points out they were all produced by Australia’s James Cook University. Ridd, remember, was fired by James Cook after raising concerns about research quality.

"Cheap energy is untenable in the face of a climate emergency. And individual homeownership should be seriously questioned."

UCLA urban planning professor Kian Goh, in an op-ed in the far-left magazine The Nation, wrote that "if we want to keep cities safe in the face of climate change, we need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership." ...

Some politicians have also jumped at the opportunity to propose a future without single-family homeowners. Maryland state legislator Vaughn Stewart wants to eliminate zoning regulations that protect single-family neighborhoods and instead mandate construction of tenements that will destroy property values in those “high-opportunity” neighborhoods. ...

Academics like Professor Goh are blaming climate change in part on home ownership itself. Goh opines: “Cheap energy—both the monetary price of subsidized gasoline and the hidden costs of fossil fuels—and the idealization of individual homeownership have created the scorching landscapes we face today. Cheap energy is untenable in the face of a climate emergency. And individual homeownership should be seriously questioned.”

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Sen. Warren Seeks To Ban Construction of New Homes in America Unless They Are ‘Zero Carbon Footprint’

In an op-ed published by the Guardian on January 10, teenage climate kid Greta Thunberg, allegedly speaking along with 20 others, demanded the world abandon all investments in fossil fuel exploration and extraction, “right now.”

“We demand that at this year’s forum, participants from all companies, banks, institutions, and governments immediately halt all investments in fossil fuel exploration and extraction, immediately end all fossil fuel subsidies and immediately and completely divest from fossil fuels,” she wrote, referring to an economic forum to be held in Davos.“We don’t want these things done by 2050, 2030 or even 2021, we want this done now – as in right now,” she added.