Your humble author has pretensions to theory and here is one for your consideration dear reader. Bear with me, but here it is in a nutshell. Governments and policymakers keep drumming it into our ears that fossil fuels are bad and will lead to the “end of days”. The ultimate cause of climate change, it is argued, appears in the form of oil, gas and coal. Ordinary Joe Blow will listen to the self-proclaimed climate change experts and their official sponsors. He will bear higher gasoline and electricity prices, higher airfares for his modest holidays, and even pay more for his beef since cows belch methane. After all, Joe Blow – a decent and humble fellow — wants to be a responsible inhabitant of the planet.
But there comes a point in time when the burden on Joe hits a nerve, that node of effective pain, when he explodes. It seems that is where the Germans are with the ban on oil and gas heating systems from 2024 by the Scholz coalition government. And ditto for the Americans with the loss of their natural gas cooking stoves threatened by the Biden Administration. Peak green seems to have come about as the shards of effective pain hit citizens in the West.
Let me elaborate.
The Green Movement
The Green movement has been long in the making. Maurice Strong, a Canadian environmentalist and principal architect of the 1972 Stockholm conference – the first global summit to make the environment the central issue – proclaimed in 1997 that “If we don’t change, our species will not survive… Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.”
Strong’s prophetic words on industrial civilization are already seeing fruition. Germany, the epicenter of the Greens, is actively de-industrializing at the altar of “renewable” energy and “fighting” climate change as we speak. Former Economics Minister of Saxony-Anhalt Dr. Horst Rehberger of the FDP party, sharply critical of the country’s “energy transition” ambitions, said in 2021 that “Inexpensive and secure energy is essential for competitive industry. Expensive and unstable energy supply forces companies to migrate to other countries that allow competitive production with coal and nuclear energy.”
In an interview in 2020, Professor Fritz Vahrenholt – a towering if critical voice on German environmental policies — had this to say of the main party in the coalition government: “Unfortunately, the SPD no longer has its clientele in mind. There is already a party for the hip, green urban crowd. But the employees in the steel, chemical or car industry have been lost from sight. The little people will now be punished with a CO2 tax starting in January.”
Perhaps the best meme of the green movement is the picture of an EV charging point running on a diesel generator.
Only Carbon Dioxide Matters!
Over the past few decades, it has been argued by NASA for instance that it does not matter from a climate change point of view that the earth orbits the Sun elliptically and at varying axial tilts, as described by Milankovitch cycles. The term was coined and named after Serbian geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milanković in the 1920s. He hypothesized that the earth’s cyclical variations strongly influenced the Earth’s climatic patterns.
According to Scientific American, solar activity (frequency and strength of sun flares) which affect the cosmic-ray flux and cloud formation processes on earth described by the European Organization For Nuclear Research matter very much to global warming. A study by Oregon State University argues that it also matters little that an estimated million volcanoes spew materials and gases into the oceans, even if we wonder what might be heating the oceans. For advocates of human-induced global warming, heat distribution between the oceanic and atmospheric systems with highly complex and variable ocean-atmosphere coupled global circulation also has little causal role in climate change.
The focus is on the carbon dioxide emitted by humans combusting fuels for industry, cooking, heating and transport. For the green movement, CO2 is indeed the control knob of climate and, by extension, our cataclysmic future, unless we listen to the wisdom of a Swedish school drop-out who deleted her 5-year old June 21st predictive tweet about the end of the world. Along with Greta Thunberg are the assorted “climate scientists” who construct global warming “hockey stick charts out of their climate models duly adopted by the UN’s IPCC.
Nor does it matter that the Vikings grew barley (for their malted beer) in their heyday in 1000 AD. And if the Romans grew…
Read More: The Theory Of “Effective Pain”