from Climate Change Dispatch where this is addressed to Boris Johnson, but is equally applicable to James Shaw and his Cabinet cronies.
What would convince you that your ‘net zero carbon’ strategy is a fairy tale?
Let’s go back to basics. Carbon dioxide (CO2) (not ‘carbon’) is not a pollutant. It’s a trace gas and essential for life. Only 5 percent of CO2 is man-made and largely through burning fossil fuels; the other 95 percent is natural from sources such as oceans or volcanoes. [bold, links added]
More than 450 million years ago (long before mankind arrived) it was 5,000 parts per million (PPM). It’s currently about 420 ppm with the anthropogenic share at 20 PPM, in other words minuscule!
There is no known harm from CO2. Consequently, there is no enemy to fight to attain ‘net zero’; no need for expensive offset schemes to mitigate its purportedly harmful effects; no need to cover the land in environmentally damaging and unsightly solar farms or wind turbines (your ‘white Satanic mills’).
Neither of these alternative energy sources has recyclable parts. Birds mistake solar farms for lakes and fry as they land. Offshore wind farms kill birds and the incessant hum is believed to disorient cetaceans.
Onshore, where the hum drives sane people to distraction, they kill birds, bats, and insects. Discounted energy bills will not compensate for this destruction.
Restricting CO2 increase to pursue <2°C temperature rise by 2050 has no evidential basis. Even its inventor (Germany’s Chief Scientific Adviser Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, climatologist and member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admits that the aspirational constraint is a ‘political goal’.
The IPCC is the body ‘polishing’ the UN’s climate reports, ensuring they continue the drama of ‘climate emergency’ (or some such doomsday title).
Actually, temperature increases precede CO2 rises by 800 years and the residence time for CO2 is unknown – any time from four to 1,000 years.
The outcome of any economic pain you inflict now will not be visible for almost a millennium (when it will be too late to say ‘I told you so’).
Your baffling hyperbole that ‘we were the first to knit the deadly tea cozy of CO2 that is now driving climate change’ is unevidenced.
Anthropogenic atmospheric gases are not analogous to a ‘tea cozy’. Similarly, the belief that increased CO2 will be detrimental to Planet Earth is baseless when gardeners pump extra CO2 into greenhouses to encourage growth.
In fact, slight warming accompanying increased CO2 should deliver a positive impact on improving agricultural output. (This will be desirable given the inevitable failure of Ukraine’s 2022 crops.) Increased warming should also reduce winter heating costs (something you favor).
Governments want populations to reduce energy consumption to match the restricted supply. However, demand is increasing because of the expansion of innovative, energy-hungry technologies (including the electric vehicles of which you are so supportive).
This foretells a worsening supply squeeze that will increase energy prices (yes, be prepared).
In contrast, the much-derided fossil fuels currently blamed for increased CO2 have many environmental benefits.
These include saving whales from extinction (blubber no longer needed as candle fuel), improved hygiene (hot water!), and streets freed from dung-borne diseases resulting from equine transport.
We don’t want to return to the 18th century. Fossil fuels have delivered us to the life we have today and until we have sufficient substitutes, should continue to do so.
However, fossil-fuel energy companies are now apologists for their products. They are hobbled by governments in thrall to increasingly vocal lobbies that cannot distinguish between human-made and natural CO2.
Irrespective, finance houses pushing the concept of a purportedly ‘warming planet’ are using ‘green’ anti-CO2 criteria in their corporate lending risk and planning.
Their endgame is to avoid investment in fossil-fueled industries as their contribution to reducing CO2 emissions. Choking energy investment is detrimental to economic growth.
As commercial enterprises, they are usurping the role of democratically-elected governments and deciding suicidal energy policies at a distance (follow the money).
CO2 is not our enemy. With no enemy, we have no need to fight. The pursuit of distant ‘net zero’ resembles fraud on a massive, taxpayer-subsidized scale. So, given that it has no evidential basis, how can you justify your strategy?
Next time you meet Greta Thunberg, ask her two questions: ‘What percentage of CO2 is anthropogenic?’ and ‘How do we tame Mother Nature’s 95 percent?’ This should finish the fairy tale.
Sincerely,
Deborah Ancell
It is great to see thinking people looking at facts and rejecting the “climate change” hysteria.
Carbon is a chemical element that is neither created or destroyed.
It can exist in a solid, liquid or gaseous form.
Carbon is a basic “building block” of all living things.
The fossil fuels we have been using came from the degeneration and compression of massive forests that grew by metabolizing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and utilizing the carbon to grow.
The growth of these forests occurred in the past when global temperatures and atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were very high.
Our use of fossil fuels is just returning stored carbon to the atmosphere so that it can be recycled by plants to encourage their growth.
The gradual warming of the climate that has been ongoing since the last “mini-ice age” is beneficial for the growth of plants that require Carbon and emit the Oxygen that other species require.
The use of fossil fuels can therefore be regarded as RECYCLING the carbon that was previously taken from the atmosphere and stored in the plants that eventually died (in periods of colder temperatures) and were converted to coal and oil.
Rather than being a “crisis”, warmer temperatures and more luxuriant growth of plants is probably beneficial to animal species such as ours.
The adverse effects of our species on the environment and other species are due to the EXCESSIVE exploitation, and waste of finite natural resources to support our culture and economies of CONSUMERISM.
We have all been addicted to consuming and wasting more and more resources to have things we do not really need.
The proposed solution for climate change, which is probably just a naturally occurring cycle we cannot control is to begin exploiting, consuming and wasting more but different natural resources to perpetuate an economic system based on excessive consumption and waste.
It is trying to solve a problem by doing more and more of what causes the problem.
Utilizing other sources of energy as well as fossil fuels is a reasonable way to conserve and reduce the excessive waste of them but is not necessary to save the planet and our species from destruction.
In my humble opinion, the elite people in our economic and political system are much more interested in SUSTAINING the failing economic system based on consumerism, debt and waste than the natural resources of the planet.
It would make much more environmental and practical sense for us all to stop buying and wasting so much stuff.
Maintain, repair, reuse, repurpose and recycle would probably be a much better strategy than fearmongering everyone so that they dispose of their current possessions and are forced to become more financially indebted to purchase new and different ones.
These sensible changes in our habits will not be promoted because they would not make the politically and economic elites of the world more rich and powerful.