The Global Warming Gravy Train is Coming to a Screeching Halt at Long Last

The global warming craze is dying out, says Matt Ridley in the Spectator, as banks, billionaires and politicians bail out of the Net Zero agenda. Well thank goodness for that. Here’s an excerpt:

The other factor that kept the climate scare alive was that emissions reduction proved impossibly difficult. This was a feature, not a bug: if it had been easy, the green gravy train would have ground to a halt. Reducing sulphur emissions to stop acid rain proved fairly easy, as did banning chlorofluorocarbons to protect the ozone layer. But decade after decade, carbon dioxide emissions just kept on rising no matter how much money and research was thrown at the problem. Cheers!

Switching to renewable energy made no difference – literally. Here’s the data: the world added 9,000 terawatt-hours of energy consumption from wind and solar in the past decade, but 13,000 from fossil fuels. Not that wind and solar save much carbon dioxide anyway, their machinery being made with coal and their intermittency being backed up by fossil fuels.

Despite trillions of dollars in subsidies, these two ‘unreliables’ still provide just 6 per cent of the world’s energy. Their low-density, high-cost, intermittent power output is of no use to data centres or electric grids, let alone transport and heating, and effectively poisons the economics of building and running new nuclear and gas generation by preventing continuous operation. Quite why it became mandatory among those concerned about climate change to support these unreliables so obsessively is hard to fathom. Subsidy addiction has a lot to do with it, combined with a general ignorance of thermodynamics.

Now the climate scare is fading, a scramble for the exits is beginning among the big environmental groups. Donations are drying up. Some will switch seamlessly to trying to panic us about artificial intelligence; others will follow Gates and insist that they never said it was the end of the world, just a problem to be solved; a few will even try declaring victory, claiming unconvincingly that promises made at the Paris conference a decade ago have slowed down emissions enough to save the climate.

Of course, Al Gore, the former US vice-president who did more than anybody else to alarm the world about climate change and made a $300 million fortune from it, has been at the recent conference in the Brazilian jungle – the one where they felled a forest to build the access road. As he railed against Gates last month for abandoning the cause and accused him of being bullied by Donald Trump, he sounded like one of those Japanese soldiers emerging from the jungle who did not know the second world war was over.

Perhaps Gore might now regret his exaggerated preachings of hellfire and damnation. In his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, for which he shared a Nobel prize, he predicted a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet “in the near future” – out by around 19 feet and nine inches. In 2009 he said there was a 75 per cent chance all the ice in the Arctic Ocean would disappear by 2014. In that year there were five million square kilometres of the stuff at its lowest point – about the same as in 2009. This year there were 4.7 million square kilometres. At the film’s showing at the Sundance Festival, Gore said that unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases were taken within ten years, the world would reach a point of no return. Yet here we are 19 years later.

Gore is correct that fear of retribution from the Trump administration drives some of the corporate retreats. President Trump has already cancelled $300 billion of green infrastructure funding and purged government websites of climate rhetoric. But even if the Republicans lose the White House in 2028, it will be hard to reflate the climate balloon. The proportion of Americans greatly worried about climate change is dropping. If Trump takes America out of the 1992 treaty that set up the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change it would require an unlikely two-thirds vote of the Senate to rejoin.

Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish economist who is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and has fought a lonely battle against climate exaggeration for decades, recently explained the shift in public opinion: “The shrillness of climate doom also wears down voters. While climate change is a real and man-made problem, constant end-of-the-world proclamations from media and campaigners massively overstate the situation.”

A key figure in the collapse of the climatocracy is Chris Wright, the pioneer of extracting shale gas by hydraulic fracturing who was appointed by Trump as energy secretary this year. Wright commissioned a review of climate science by five distinguished academics that set out just how non-frightening the facts of climate change are: slowly rising temperatures, mainly at night in winter and in the north, correspondingly less in daytime in summer and in the tropics where most people live, accompanied by a very slow rise in sea level showing no definite acceleration, minimal if any measurable change in the average frequency and ferocity of storms, droughts and floods – and record low levels of deaths from such causes. Plus a general increase in green vegetation, caused by the extra carbon dioxide.

Worth reading in full.