Dakota Beacon

Repeated from Parts I and II

Practical solutions to one of the most contentious issues of our time have been ignored by those who believe they alone know what’s best for the rest of us. These partisans have posited the choice as either a free market driven fossil fuel economy or a central planned replacement of fossil fuels by other energy sources. Generations of school children have been taught that fossil fuels are destroying the planet and mankind is to blame.

Apocalypse Never (© 2020)

In part II, a sneak preview of “Apocalypse Never” (© 2020) by pragmatic (as opposed to apocalyptic) environmentalist Michael Shellenberger was presented to illustrate a few of the ways in which immense progress has been made in reducing carbon emissions, reducing deaths from extreme weather events, and reducing the growth of the earth’s human population. Simultaneously, improved efficiency of fossil fuel extraction, treatment, and delivery to the consumer have insured ample supplies of clean energy for the foreseeable future. Horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing, clean coal technology and vastly improved pipeline technology have, in spite of efforts by radical environmental alarmists, kept our homes and offices warm and bright. U.S. carbon emissions declined 13% between 2005 and 2018. Despite a nearly 40% increase in natural gas production since 1990, the EPA reported a 20% decrease in methane emissions in 2013 largely because of improved gaskets, monitoring, maintenance and state mandates for steadily more stringent regulations decreasing flaring.

Cost of Natural Disasters

Regarding extreme weather events, more people and property are in harm’s way, explaining the rising reconstruction costs due to natural disasters, not a worsening of the disaster events themselves. For example, while Florida experienced 18 major hurricanes from 1900 to 1959, it experienced only 11 major hurricanes from 1960 to 2018. The IPCC concluded that there is little evidence of a spike in the frequency or intensity of floods, hurricanes and tornadoes. The death toll from natural disasters has radically declined and should decline even further with mankind’s continued adaptation.

Natural Disasters Disproportionately Affect the Poor

Climate scientist Kerry Emanuel said richer countries are more resilient to natural disasters so let’s focus on making people richer and more resilient.

Forestation

Globally, new tree growth exceeded tree loss for the last thirty-five years, by an area the size of Texas and Alaska combined. The amount of forests in Sweden has doubled during the last century. An area of forest the size of Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Denmark combined grew back in Europe between1995 and 2015.

Forest “fuel buildup” and “home construction in or near forests” matter most in determining the severity and impact of forest fires. Fuel buildup has historically been handled naturally by fires… but man’s insistence on preventing ALL fires, while building within or in close proximity to forests or dense fuel (thick brush), has resulted in fires that have the potential to damage property and take lives.

Bioplastics, paper bags and glass bottles

Alternatives to fossil-based plastics such as the below listed examples pollute our air more.

California’s bans on plastic bags increased carbon emissions due to the greater amount of energy needed to produce paper bags and other thicker bags being used. Plastic bags constitute just 0.8% of plastic waste in the oceans.

Glass bottles consume 170 to 250 percent more energy and 200 to 400 percent more carbon to manufacture and recycle than plastic bottles.

When sugar-based bioplastics decompose, they emit more methane than fossil-based plastics.

World Population Growth

World population growth rate peaked at 2.1% in 1968, falling to around 1% by the end of 2021; total current world population of just under 8 million will peak at about 11 billion by year 2100 when the growth rate goes to zero.

The number of malnourished human inhabitants of earth declined from 20% in 1990 to 11% in 2020, currently about 820 million people.

Wood Used as Fuel

Humans use more wood as fuel today than at any other time in history, even as it constitutes a lower share of total energy use. Globally, wood went from providing nearly all (100%) primary energy in 1850 to 50% in 1920 and only 7% today. 2.5 billion people still burn wood and other biomass (i.e., corn husks & cobs, dried grass)

“Gasland”, the Documentary

People all over the world have documented water catching fire naturally for centuries. It is called biogenic gas and is created by nature.

World Land Use for Meat Production Peaked in year 2000

Since 2000, an area equal to 80% of the land area of Alaska has been converted from pasture throughout the world. In developed nations like ours, India, and Brazil, the amount of land for meat production peaked in 1960. Meat production roughly doubled in the United States since the early 1960s, while greenhouse gas emissions from livestock declined by 11%.

Metabolic syndrome, a cluster of abnormalities including weight gain and high blood pressure affecting half of middle age Americans, is linked to the carb content of the diet, not the fat content, as was claimed by researchers for decades. Metabolic syndrome is linked to diabetes and obesity.

Solar Farms

Solar panels require 16 times more materials per power density (in watts per square meter) than nuclear plants and create 300 times more waste; and solar waste is toxic. 25% to 50% of U.S. land area would be required instead of the 0.5% required for our current energy mix.

California’s solar farm, Ivanpah, requires 450 times more land than its nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon (scheduled for decommission and closure in August 2025). Ivanhoe caused the death of countless critically endangered desert tortoises.

Wind Farms

Maximum efficiency of wind turbines is 59.3%, which we’ve known for over 100 years. Discarded carbon fiber windmill blades must be buried in landfills. The reason wind energy had to be subsidized by government is that the benefit cost ratio is under 1.0. Wind farms are a “population sink” for bald and golden eagles, bats, red-tailed hawks, and burrowing owls.

Wind rich migration trails used by insects for millions of years are increasingly seamed by wind farms. And insects cluster at the same altitudes occupied by wind turbines, 150 to 250 meters (wind turbine blades stretch from 60 meters to220 meters). Wind turbines kill insects during a critical, vulnerable period during migration just prior to breeding, effectively killing hundreds of potential successors with each mature insect.

Ethanol Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Ethanol produces twice the GHG emissions of gasoline. American taxpayers spent $24 billion on failed biofuel experiments from 2009-2015. Cellulosic ethanol could have cut emissions to 1.5 those of gasoline but handling of switchgrass and other problems doomed the idea. It is essential, therefore, that the ethanol industry capture and sequester carbon dioxide in order for ethanol to continue to replace Methyl tert-Butyl ether (MTBE) as an octane/oxygen increasing additive in gasoline. MTBE is a suspected carcinogen and is limited or banned in several states due to concerns with groundwater contamination and air and water quality.

The Alliance Against Nuclear

How long have oil and gas interests been funding environmental groups toward the shutdown of nuclear plants? Since the 1970s, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), Center for American Progress (CAP) and 350.org are all funded by fossil fuel billionaires. They are trying, with great success, to kill America’s largest source of carbon-free electricity… nuclear power. Natural gas companies have perhaps benefitted most from these “nuclear cancel” organizations, since the supply has not kept up with demand for the cleanest fossil fuel, natural gas.

Cap and Trade

From 2009 through 2011, lawyers and lobbyists with EDF and NRDC advocated for and helped write complex “Cap and Trade” legislation that would have created a carbon-trading market worth up to a trillion dollars. This “scam” would have allowed many of their donors to score big dollars on “carbon credits” they speculatively invested in for pennies prior to the failure of the U.S. Congress to enact “Cap & Trade. Unfortunately, we were not so lucky with the passage of the Unaffordable Care Act that confuses health insurance with health care, dramatically raising costs for both.

Crop Yields

Fertilizers, tractors, and irrigation (in areas of low rainfall) matter most in determining crop yields.

In 2010, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) “Summary for Policymakers” falsely claimed that climate change would result in the melting of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035… and unwarranted alarmist shock to the 800 million people that depended on the glaciers for drinking water and irrigation. The scientists that pointed out the error said it could have been avoided had the norms of scientific publication, including peer review, been respected.

Despite the 2010 error, the IPCC, in 2014, approved a “Summary for Policymakers” that was far more apocalyptic than the science warranted. It left out key information:

That better cultivars and improved irrigation increase crop yields; It emphasized the impacts of heat stress, but downplayed reduced cold stress, on crops.

Why have so many “Drank the Kool-Aid”?

Mr. Shellenberger answers this question as quoted below:

“Now we must address the question of how so many people, myself included, came to believe that climate change threatened not only the end of polar bears but the end of humanity.

The answer is, in part, that while the IPCC’s science is broadly sound, it’s Summary for Policymakers, press releases, and authors’ statements betray ideological motivations, a tendency toward exaggeration, and an absence of important context.

As we saw, IPCC authors and press statements have claimed sea level rise will be “unimaginable”, world food supplies are in jeopardy, vegetarianism would significantly reduce emissions, poor nations can grow rich with renewables, and nuclear energy is relatively dangerous.

The news media also deserves blame for having misrepresented climate change and other environmental problems as apocalyptic, and for having failed to put them in their global, historical, and economic context. Leading media companies have been exaggerating climate change at least since the 1980s. And, as we have seen, elite publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker have frequently and uncritically repeated debunked Malthusian dogma for well over a half century.”

Documentation of Facts

103 pages (290 through 393) of this book list the 1,240 background references (numbered by chapter).

Final Thoughts

Environmental alarmists transitioned from “global cooling” in the 1970s to “global warming” in the later part of the 20^th century, and finally to “climate change”, which began to appear following the publication of Dark Winter, the first book referenced in this 3-part series called “Affordable and Agreeable Climate Solutions”. As I had surmised immediately upon first hearing the term “climate change” uttered in place of the term “global warming”, who could possibly disagree that climate changes, however slowly that it happens? So, the term finally selected by the doomsayers is here to stay…

The author of Apocalypse Never, as quoted above, somewhat lightly blames the news media. My opinion, based on the continual bombardment of “climate alarmism” from every media source on earth, is that journalism schools of so-called “higher education” across the world are pumping out graduates that are steeply indoctrinated in socialism, Marxism, biological atheism, and a naive idealism that results in unpragmatic (even Utopian) and incommunicative teleprompter-reading clones of a rapidly declining liberal arts propaganda mill. Investors… the future is not in AI… it is in AU, artificial unintelligence.

For the unconvinced among readers of this Part III, Mr. Shellenberger’s book, “Apocalypse Never” (© 2020) is highly recommended. The reader can then personally decide if spending up to $10 Trillion to combat so-called “Climate Change” is preferrable to the solutions of Part I. The alternative is to continue fighting each other like pre-school children that government has not brainwashed… yet.

Love = Work + Courage