Many of my friends have long referred to environmentalists as “watermelons”—green on the outside, red on the inside. The idea is that because communism and socialism (interchangeable political/economic systems in practice) have visibly failed everywhere they’ve been imposed, doctrinaire socialist zealots, being unable to accept reality, have embraced environmental causes as a backdoor way to get socialism adopted in Western liberal democracies. After all, who doesn’t care about the environment?
A recent admission by Saikat Chakrabarti, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, concerning the much-hyped Green New Deal (GND) reinforces the view socialists are using the environment to replace private property and free exchange in the market with state control of the economy.
In a meeting with Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington reported by the Washington Post, Chakrabarti said addressing climate change was not Ocasio-Cortez’s reason for proposing the GND.
“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” the Post reports Chakrabarti told Inslee’s climate director, Sam Ricketts. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
This admission did not surprise me much. As far too many youth have increasingly embraced socialism—showing no understanding of how capitalism has made possible the i-phones, laptops, instant messenger and social media services, and latte shops found on nearly every street corner, these products they so cherish as sources of instant gratification—socialists are becoming more honest about the true aims of the policies they are pushing.
For instance, in the run-up to negotiations culminating in the Paris climate agreement, at a press conference in Brussels in early February 2015, Christiana Figueres, then executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, stated the global warming scaremongering going on for more than 25 years at the UN was about controlling peoples’ lives by controlling the economy, not fighting climate change.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” Figueres said, continuing, “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history.”
Others who have highlighted the anti-capitalist agenda motivating climate alarmism include professors Joshua Goldstein and Steven Pinker, who, in an article in the Boston Globe, said progressives were using the climate change fight to push big government action on a laundry list of “longstanding social ills such as inequality, corporate greed, racism, and political corruption…. Naomi Klein’s campaign to ‘change everything’ casts global warming as an opportunity for the left to step up its various crusades.”
To be clear, GND would constitute a complete socialist makeover of the U.S. economy—the culmination of years of effort by watermelons. GND’s package of government handouts combined with a government-directed industrial policy is straight out of the old Soviet playbook, promising, among other things, well-paying jobs and health care for all while calling for a complete makeover of America’s housing stock, its transportation system, and its entire energy system, all by 2030.
Perhaps the more than 100 Democrat members of the U.S. House and Senate who rushed to sponsor or publicly embrace GND—including Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ), Kamala Harris (D-CA), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), accounting for most of the senators vying for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president—are finally being honest about their fealty to socialism. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has always honestly proclaimed himself a socialist, so his support for GND should surprise no one.
Socialism kills. From the former Soviet Union to Cuba, from North Korea to Venezuela, everywhere socialism has been tried it has robbed people of freedom and their property, produced economic stagnation and misallocation of resources, and directly or indirectly resulted in millions of deaths. The socialist policies promoted in the GND under the guise of saving the Earth are no less deadly than previous utopian socialist schemes.
Both the human race and the environment will benefit when we permanently consign all such delusional national or international socialist plans to the dustbin of history.
- H. Sterling Burnett
SOURCES: National Review; Climate Change Weekly; Investor’s Business Daily; The American Spectator; Boston Globe
IN THIS ISSUE …
Sun’s orbit leads to warming, cooling … Corn and soy boom along with carbon dioxide … Physics dictates continued fossil fuel use
SUN’S ORBIT LEADS TO WARMING, COOLING
Researchers from Northumbria University, Bradford University, Hull University, and Moscow Research University have published a new study in Nature: Scientific Reports showing the motion (orbit) of the Sun has a substantial effect on Earth’s temperatures over the long term.
Science has, until the recent climate change scare, long recognized solar cycles, such as periodic changes in solar irradiance or the absence or presence of sunspots, drive temperature changes on Earth. This research indicates a new factor previously little discussed or understood behind century-long changes in terrestrial temperature: small shifts in the orbit of the Sun in response to the gravity of supergiant planets, resulting in changes in the Earth’s orbit moving it closer to and farther away from the sun.
A new mathematical formula has allowed the researchers to accurately reproduce solar activity going back 120,000 years. They say it also “allows scientists to predict future patterns, giving a clearer picture of how conditions might change here on Earth as a result.”
In a process known as solar inertial motion (SIM), the Sun does not simply rotate at a spot around its own axis but instead slowly moves around a small, almost-circular area at the barycenter of the solar system, in response to the orbits of the larger planets, such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
“In its current cycle of movement, the Sun is slowly moving towards the aphelion of the Earth’s orbit—the point of the orbit furthest away from the Sun,” says the study. “This will result in the Earth’s orbit becoming more circular, increasing the amount of solar energy to hit the surface of the Earth … [which] over the next 600 years … will slowly lead to an increase in the average terrestrial temperature by around 2.5 degrees Celsius.”
According to this research, the temperature increase caused by the Sun’s and Earth’s orbital interaction should peak by 2600, by which time the Earth’s temperature will likely have increased by between 2.5 and three degrees Celsius. Subsequently, the SIM cycle will “enter the ‘cooling’ phase, during which the Sun will move slightly further away from the Earth. This is expected to last until the year 3700.”
Within this extended cycle, terrestrial temperatures will stabilize, rise, or decline periodically as a result of other solar activities. For instance, earlier research by Professor Valentina Zharkova, the lead author of the present study, predicts over the next 33 years the Sun will enter a period of decreased sunspot activity, or grand solar minimum (GSM), leading to a decrease in temperature of between 0.5 degrees Celsuis and one degree Celsius, with a second GSM expected between the years 2370 and 2415. These periods of decreased sunspot activity will temporarily partially or wholly offset the rise of the terrestrial temperatures due to SIM.
This study is important not only for a better understanding of the Sun’s influence on global average temperatures but also for what it says about climate change projections based on computer models. Computer models don’t account for the effects of short-term solar changes such as fluctuations in sunspot activity or long-term SIM activity on global temperatures. If Zharkova’s team’s research is correct, any measured temperature rise Earth has experienced over the past 150 years, and any decline or rise going forward, have been and will be substantially affected by solar activity unaccounted for in climate models. That means the role of greenhouse gas emissions in driving recent climate change is less than the models assume.
SOURCE: Nature Scientific Reports; Northumbria University
CORN AND SOY BOOM ALONG WITH CARBON DIOXIDE
A May 2019 report in the journal Science of the Total Environment by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing University, and La Trobe University’s Melbourne Campus found corn (maize) and soybean production significantly increased under conditions of higher carbon dioxide, and contrary to some scholars’ assertions, the nutritional value of the crops improved as well, even with higher temperatures.
The team of researchers grew soybeans and corn under controlled conditions in open-top containers for five years in which carbon dioxide levels were maintained at 700 parts per million (ppm)—approximately 300 ppm higher than the current level—with temperatures held 2.1 degrees Celsius higher than ambient temperatures. Under these conditions, soybean yield was 31 percent higher, and the yield of corn was 25 percent higher than the crops grown under ambient temperatures and carbon dioxide levels.
The nutritional value of the crops also improved under higher carbon dioxide conditions. Oil content and phosphorus, potassium, iron, and zinc levels increased in both crops. The researchers measured a statistically insignificant decline in calcium levels in corn and a slight decline in manganese in soybeans.
SOURCES: Jo Nova; Science of the Total Environment (behind paywall)
PHYSICS DICTATES CONTINUED FOSSIL FUEL USE
A recent paper by Mark P. Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a faculty fellow at Northwestern University, dismantles the myth society can quickly shift from fossil fuels to exclusively renewable, non-carbon-emitting technologies.
Mills writes, “Hydrocarbons collectively supply 84 percent of the world’s energy, and the belief that we can replace them with non-carbon dioxide emitting technologies in a short time period is pure wish fulfillment, a form of ‘magical thinking.’ The success of the Green New Deal and other similar proposals both here and in Europe is limited by the physics of energy, not political or economic recalcitrance.”
Here are a few critical points from Mills’ paper showing how delusional climate change hucksters’ demands to shift to a non-hydrocarbon-based economy in the short term are:
- When the world’s four billion poor people increase [their] energy use to just one-third of Europe’s per capita level, global demand rises by an amount equal to twice America’s total consumption.
- A 100 times growth in the number of electric vehicles to 400 million on the roads by 2040 would displace [only] 5 percent of global oil demand.
- Renewable energy would have to expand 90-fold to replace global hydrocarbons in two decades. It took a half-century for global petroleum production to expand “only” 10-fold.
- Efficiency increases energy demand by making products and services cheaper: since 1990, global energy efficiency improved 33 percent, the economy grew 80 percent and global energy use is up 40 percent.
- For security and reliability, an average of two months of national demand for hydrocarbons are in storage at any time. Today, barely two hours of national electricity demand can be stored in all utility-scale batteries plus all batteries in one million electric cars in America.
- To make enough batteries to store two-day’s worth of U.S. electricity demand would require 1,000 years of production by [Tesla’s] Gigafactory (world’s biggest battery factory).
- Over a 30-year period, $1 million worth of utility-scale solar or wind produces 40 million and 55 million kWh respectively: $1 million worth of shale well produces enough natural gas to generate 300 million kWh over 30 years.
- The shale revolution collapsed the prices of natural gas and coal, the two fuels that produce 70 percent of U.S. electricity. But electric rates haven’t gone down, rising instead 20 percent since 2008. Direct and indirect subsidies for solar and wind consumed those savings.
- China dominates global battery production with its grid 70 percent coal-fueled: EVs using Chinese batteries will create more carbon-dioxide than saved by replacing oil-burning engines.
SOURCES: Economics21; Manhattan Institute
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
