People tend to act on what they believe.
That shouldn’t be a controversial statement. This one might: people tend to act in accordance with what they believe to be true.
That isn’t to say that people always act in perfect rational accord with their beliefs. First off, no one is perfectly rational. Second what seems a reasonable response to a belief to one person may be silly to another.
However, on the whole, people will tend to act in accord with what they believe to be true.
It’s on this basis that I think ‘climate whatever we’re calling it now’ is bunk.
Yes, yes, scientists say. They also say eggs are good for you. No, wait, bad for you. No, no, good…
Even well intentioned scientists can be wrong. They can also lie like dogs to get published and keep their jobs. Scientists only come in Size Human, just like everyone else.
So, what do policy makers believe? After all, scientists have to show their work to the guys that make policy in order for laws and regulations to get changed. Policy makers should be reasonably well informed and have been educated by climate scientists well enough to design good policy, right?
Stop laughing. As obviously flawed as this principle is, it’s the one we’re working from. I don’t mean me for this commentary – I mean public policy worldwide. The scientists tell us the sky is falling and scientists know best! That’s a bit hyperbolic but it is exactly what policy makers and political leaders worldwide have been saying – in prettier prose – for two decades.
Follow the science! Oh, wait, wrong global crisis.
You’re not a climate scientist!
That’s better. Never mind that most of the oft quoted and completely erroneous 95% of scientists accept Global Warming/Climate Change/Movie of the Week! aren’t climate scientists either.
Back to the question, what do the folks making all these policy, legal and regulatory changes believe about climate change?
I can tell you what they don’t believe. They don’t believe that carbon dioxide is either causative or controllable. It’s dubious that they even believe that the climate is in crisis of any kind. I suppose a few have begun to believe their own rhetoric but the majority aren’t buying this.
How could I possibly know? Simple, look at the policies they advocate and enact.
The United States is REALLY, REALLY protective of all things related to nuclear weapons. Why? Because the things are insanely dangerous. The US actively fights nuclear proliferation. It takes other nations building nuclear weapons very, very poorly – ask North Korea and Iran.
The US wants to keep nuclear weapons and anything related to them as close to the vest as is humanly possible. The US and a few close allies, plus those nation-states that have already acquired them, that’s as far as the US wants this stuff to spread.
Insanely dangerous stuff should be kept as close as possible where you can protect and regulate it.
Same reason your mom wouldn’t let you play in her knife drawer.
So, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, what do OUR world leaders do? Well, the ones in developed countries actively deindustrialize themselves and industrialize the heck out of China. So, all that already regulated and built industry along with all the multitude of infrastructure projects are shuttered so that they can be rebuilt entirely in an authoritarian, developing country with little to no environmental regulation and a LOT of reasons to not enforce what little they did have.
Every carbon reduction in the developed world is dwarfed by the carbon output of China alone.
Yes, really. Before both Olympics China shut down both industries and power plants so their air wouldn’t look like London fog on steroids. China is in the process of building MORE coal fired power plants right now.
The US, with all its incredible and annoying regulations, shuttered all its coal plants. Which do you think is doing more environmental damage now?
Oh, I obviously don’t believe in the climate crisis nonsense but I’m all for keeping our environment as clean and well managed as possible. Smog made Los Angeles a 1970’s meme and thanks to some good and some overbearing regulations, you can’t see normally Los Angeles air any longer and haven’t much in decades.
If you want visible air, you’ll have to go to Beijing.
I’m dubious mass plant suffocation is a good way to save the planet but polluting the heck out of a massive country like China certainly isn’t doing the planet any favors.
So the Netherlands wants to ban cows. Every developed nation is clambering to pay China to strip mine half of Africa so they can build more subsidized solar panels for the discerning climate virtue signalers to stick on their roofs. The United Kingdom is killing tons of ocean going birds so they can harness the power of the wind and create nearly indestructible fiberglass waste.
Does any of this even sound like conservation, let alone combating climate change?
The build out of industry and infrastructure alone is thought to have used more concrete in China than in the whole of the US. Power plants, roads, buildings as well as schools and homes all had to be built for China to become the world’s assembly plant.
All of that translates to political leaders worldwide playing a shell game. Reducing carbon emissions at home, no matter how many blue collar workers it puts out of jobs, looks good to the eco-minded soccer moms. That the emissions are just transferred and increased to China makes no never mind – as long as Politician Bob can say he’s fighting climate change during his next campaign.
Multiply by about 50. The number of developed nations being a bit hard to pin down but we’re counting all of Europe and the traditional ‘West’, plus Japan and South Korea with a smidge to spare. It’s a decent estimate of the number of countries busily pretending to fight the good fight while letting the least developed nations and China pollute the heck out of their countries.
Mind you, the atmosphere doesn’t care about the GDP per capita of the source country. If carbon dioxide is a pollutant, then there’s far more in the atmosphere now than twenty years ago. Paying someone to plant a few trees in the US or Canada won’t fix that. The trees only help with the local CO2. The stuff from the other side of the planet is presumably making its way into the upper atmosphere where it can heat the planet.
Lots of fun, feel good projects and policies but they don’t actually work as advertised. CO2 can’t be lower – China alone is producing way too much for that.
So, either all the world leaders and policy makers are complete imbeciles – as much as this sounds likely, remember they can hold down jobs so they can only be idiots – or they don’t believe word one of this climate change crisis nonsense.
If they don’t, why do you?
