Green Elites, Trumped: The planet will benefit if the climate movement is purged of its rottenness, by Holman Jenkins.
Hysterical, in both senses of the word, is the reaction of greens like Paul Krugman and the Sierra Club to last week’s election. “The planet is in danger,” fretted Tom Steyer, the California hedge funder who spends his billions trying to be popular with green voters. Uh huh. …
What a Trump election will do is mostly dismantle a green gravy train powered by moral vanity that contributes nothing to the public welfare.
That gravy train, which I used to ride on more than a decade ago, is worth about $1.5 trillion per year.
A phenomenon like Trump, whatever its antecedents, is an opportunity — in this case to purge a rottenness that begins at the commanding heights. The New York Times last year published a feature entitled “short answers to the hard questions about climate change” that was notable solely for ignoring the hardest question of all: How much are human activities actually affecting the climate?
The IPCC’s estimates are five to ten times too large.
It’s why “climate sensitivity” remains the central problem of climate science, as lively and unresolved as it was 35 years ago.
That’s right. From its public inception in 1979 in the Charney Report, to the latest Assessment Report from the IPCC in 2013, the sensitivity range has not narrowed — it is still 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius, despite all the research and computing. It cannot be determined because it is not CO2 driving global warming, and the models are laughably wrong. Back to politics:
Democrats must know by now they are in a failing marriage. Wealthy investors like George Soros,Nat Simons and Mr. Steyer, who finance the party’s green agenda, have ridden the Dems into the ground, with nothing to show for their millions, and vice versa.
On the contrary, the WikiLeaks release of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails only dramatizes what a liability they’ve become, demanding attacks on scientists and even loyal Democrats who don’t endorse their climate-disaster scenarios. Their anti-coal, anti-pipeline, anti-fracking stance especially hurts Dems with union households, which turned out in record numbers for Mr. Trump.
It was always crazy to believe in an unprecedented act of global central planning to wean nations away from fossil fuels, but equally idiotic not to notice that our energy economy is ripe slowly to be transformed by technology anyway.
One greenie who is beyond the need for handouts is Bill Gates, who has made himself non grata by saying the current vogue for subsidizing power sources that will always need subsidies is a joke — an admission of defeat.
Honest warriors like Mr. Gates and retired NASA alarmist James Hansen insist real progress [in reducing CO2 emissions] can’t be made without nuclear. Why haven’t others? Because the Tom Steyers and Bill McKibbens would sacrifice the planet 10 times over rather than no longer be fawned over at green confabs. That’s rottenness at work.
There’s a reason today’s climate movement increasingly devotes its time and energy to persecuting heretics — because it’s the most efficient way to suppress reasoned examination of policies that cost taxpayers billions without producing any public benefit whatsoever.
