https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/decarbonization-and-climate-change
By ALEX BERENSON
Excerpt:
Last month, President Trump ended the left’s efforts to decarbonize the United States.
Notice the massive protests in the streets? Or any protests?
Me neither.
In December 2009, the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency issued its so-called “endangerment finding,” a ruling that carbon dioxide threatened “current and future generations.” The fact that every human being releases carbon dioxide with every breath didn’t come up.
The finding was the definition of an administrative state power grab. The EPA’s job is regulating dangerous chemicals that have definable and known risks, not remaking the American economy by fiat because it says so.
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Leftist leaders passed happy-sounding decarbonization laws whose consequences they hoped were safely years or even decades in the future:
All planes will run on pressed apple juice and Tabasco by 2050!
Instead of trucks, freight will be delivered by zipline!
Nitrogen fertilizer is out! Farmers shall think good thoughts to grow corn. Corn loves good thoughts.
I’m barely exaggerating.
European countries promised to reach “net-zero” emissions by 2050. Since even the most pie-eyed environmentalist admits airplanes will require oil-based fuel for the foreseeable future, that goal requires negative emissions in the rest of the economy.
China gladly cheered on this economic suicide even as it built thousands of new coal-fired power plants to fuel its growth. Its increased emissions vastly overwhelmed European efforts to slow carbon release.
In 2000, Europe released more carbon dioxide than China. Today China emits more than five times as much as Europe — and one-third of all emissions worldwide.
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For a while, none of this mattered.
Feelings, not facts, were in charge, never more so than in 2019, when a 16-year-old Greta Thunberg told the United Nations:
You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!
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The beginning of the end of the hysteria came in 2022, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine woke Europe to the fact that it had become deeply dependent on imported natural gas.
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Now even Europe is quietly backing away from its climate change goals. In December, the continent dropped its plans to ban gasoline- or diesel-powered cars in 2035, though it still has a 90 percent target for now.
The United States, which has a far stronger domestic energy industry than Europe, never went as far — though the Biden administration tried, using the endangerment finding to undergird a 2021 effort to force half of all new vehicles to be electric by 2030.
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Millions of Americans will protest almost any action this White House takes. But climate change hysteria is so spent that Trump’s decision to undo the cornerstone of decarbonization has barely even been noticed.
Well, maybe noted climate activist Leonardo DiCaprio will hit the barricades now that he’s done vacationing on Jeff Bezos’s 400-foot, half-billion-dollar yacht.
How dare you!
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A (highly visual) follow-up to yesterday’s piece on the death of climate change hysteria
Excerpt: The real problem with the environmental hysteria of the last 25 years is that it ignored the reality of global economic growth outside the West.
Wealth takes energy, and oil, natural gas, and even coal are still the world’s main energy sources. And so, after decades of hysteria about carbon dioxide and climate, the world is emitting more carbon dioxide than ever. Meanwhile China, which is by far the largest global emitter, continues to add coal-fired power plants at a stunning rate. Unreported Truths readers probably intuitively sense this reality, but the numbers are more shocking than you know.
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China’s coal-powered electric plant spree is actually accelerating:
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The New York Times offered a typical whopper last month:
China remains the world’s largest user of coal, but is working to decrease its usage. Overall, Chinese carbon dioxide emissions have been flat or falling for 21 months now.
Yes, that figure is correct.
Except somehow the reporter forgot to mention that China’s carbon output rose almost fourfold from 2000 to 2024.
As a wise UT reader commented in response to yesterday’s piece:
Trump didn’t kill the climate cult. Covid did. We learned that “science” “experts” world wide had two characteristics: they marched in lockstep, killing dissent (which didn’t seem scientific) and they lied without conscience (which didn’t seem human).
There will no further science-based scams for a generation at least. There will be plenty of other scams but none will be successful if they appeal to “science”.
