Hey Democratic Candidates: Are You Going To Ban All Fossil Fuels?

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The CNN climate “town hall” was just the beginning. With each passing day it seems that there is a louder and louder chorus of voices on the left demanding that all candidates get in line with a total war against use of all fossil fuels. After all, total eradication of these evil fuels is the only way to save humanity from climate apocalypse.

Probably, you don’t read these things, so I’ll just give you a couple of examples to demonstrate how completely unhinged they have become. . . .

try this one from Jonathan Franzen in the New Yorker on Sunday (September 8), titled “What If We Stopped Pretending? The climate apocalypse is coming.”  

[E]very one of the world’s major polluting countries [must] institute draconian conservation measures, shut down much of its energy and transportation infrastructure, and completely retool its economy. . . . [T]he carbon emissions from existing global infrastructure, if operated through its normal lifetime, will exceed our entire emissions “allowance”—the further gigatons of carbon that can be released without crossing the threshold of catastrophe. . . . To stay within that allowance, a top-down intervention needs to happen not only in every country but throughout every country. . . . [O]verwhelming numbers of human beings . . . need to accept high taxes and severe curtailment of their familiar life styles without revolting. . . . They have to make sacrifices for distant threatened nations and distant future generations. They have to be permanently terrified by hotter summers and more frequent natural disasters, rather than just getting used to them. Every day, instead of thinking about breakfast, they have to think about death.

So where do the candidates stand? Go through the leading contenders, and you find that sure enough they are quickly lining up to eradicate fossil fuels. . . .

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Add Rent Control To The List Of Progressive Policies That Are Sure To Increase Income Inequality

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The list of progressive policy proposals supposedly designed to increase fairness and justice in the world just keeps getting longer and longer. Medicare for all. Free college. Higher minimum wages. Every kind of “climate justice” prescription. Reparations for slavery. And here’s one that seemed to have faded away in disgrace decades ago, but now is making a revival: rent control. Rent control is currently getting expanded and strengthened in numerous progressive jurisdictions, from New York to California, with new proposals now on the table in places like Minnesota and Illinois.

A recurring topic in this blog has been the extent to which progressive policies reduce — or instead, actually increase — income inequality. You will not be surprised to hear that there is a very close relationship between jurisdictions with more progressive and redistributive policies and higher income inequality. In an article I wrote in the City Journal in 2015 I pointed out the close relationship:

[In 2014] Bloomberg Rankings published a national study on income inequality, using U.S. Census Bureau income data to rank each of the 435 congressional districts by economists’ standard measure of inequality, the Gini coefficient. The study found high levels of income inequality in areas of the country known for their political progressivism. Topping the inequality list was New York’s tenth congressional district, which covers the West Side of Manhattan and Wall Street—including City Hall. Of the top 25 spots, 23 went to Democratic districts—and not just any Democratic districts. The five congressional districts covering some part of Manhattan earned the first, sixth, ninth, 13th, and 20th positions. Congressional districts in solidly liberal Chicago, Cambridge, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and Berkeley placed in the Top 25. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district ranked 14th on the list . . . . And how about rent control? . . .

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The Competition Over How To Impoverish The American People Continues Among Democratic Candidates

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It was back on June 4 that I posed the eternal question, “Will The Democratic Candidates Ever Notice That The Climate Change Thing Is Over?” That post noted that the Democratic candidates for President had begun a kind of bidding war over who could put forth the most extreme proposal to shackle the American economy in the name of climate salvation, while at the same time “out in the rest of the world” they were “laugh[ing] at this spectacle.” Among the data points cited in that post were that China was seeking reductions in the price of coal in order to spur consumption of electricity, and that in Australia a national election had just been lost by the party that made a principal issue out of its opposition to a huge new coal mine in Queensland.

In the three months since early June, things have only gotten sillier.

  • The Statistical Review of World Energy 2019 from the BP oil company came out. A summary of it in Forbes on June 28 noted: “Coal consumption in most of the developing world continues to grow. Asia Pacific increased consumption [in 2018] by the most overall, but its 2.5% growth rate lagged Africa's (+3.9%) and Central and South America (+3.7%).”

  • The annual Google billionaires’ climate summit was held in Sicily at the beginning of August. From euronews: “114 private jets flew into the Italian Verdura Resort, according to the Italian press, and many of the elite guest list arrived in multi-million pound yachts. With stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Barack Obama and Prince Harry in attendance, reports Jim Dobson at Forbes, they were hardly going to be hitch-hiking. . . .” . . .

So then, by now, at least some of the Democratic candidates must have noticed that the climate change thing is over, right? Don’t be ridiculous. In fact, back in June the bidding war of insane “climate” proposals was only getting started. Now, the run-up to last night’s CNN climate “town hall” provided the impetus for a round of new and ever-more-extreme bids, each one promising some new impoverishment of the American people in the name of appeasing the climate gods: . . .

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The Anti-Climate-Change Energy Crunch Is Starting To Hit New York

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The Anti-Climate-Change Energy Crunch Is Starting To Hit New York

As you all know, the game plan of climate activists is to restrict and ultimately ban the use of carbon-based fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas. Don’t worry, those will all be replaced in due course with perfectly clean and free “renewables.” You won’t even notice that it is happening! At least until your price of electricity triples or you can’t heat your house any more.

I’ve long said that the politics of energy will change significantly when people start to get hit with reality in the form of soaring prices or shortages. An early example of the latter is starting to take shape here in New York.

In recent years, jurisdictions have competed with one another with promises to get higher and higher percentages of energy from “renewables,” and lower and lower percentages from fossil fuels, by earlier and earlier dates. For example, California claims to be “leading the nation toward a 100 percent clean energy future and addressing climate change.” California’s SB 350, enacted into law in 2015, directs the state to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 and to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. But New York was not about to cede “climate leadership” to those rubes on the West coast. As reported here on July 6, New York’s legislature had just passed the “Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.” It’s goals: to get 70% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030, followed by reduction of all carbon emissions — not just from the electricity sector — by 85% below 1990 levels by 2050. Take that, California! . . .

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David Gelernter Takes On Darwinism

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David Gelernter is one of a small number of people in the world whom I would characterize as a genuine independent thinker. But then, I would say that, given that he’s one of the few conservatives on the faculty of Yale, where he is a professor of computer science. He has written widely, often outside his primary field, including on things like culture and art criticism. He was famously severely injured in 1993 by a bomb sent by the Unabomber. As an example of the extent to which he truly doesn’t care what his academic peers think of him, he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in October 2016 supporting Trump for President (or, perhaps more accurately, stating that the only way to protect the country from the disaster of Hillary was to vote for Trump).

In the Spring 2019 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, Gelernter steps on another super-high-voltage third rail — Darwinism. Moreover, he does it in the context of writing what is essentially a favorable review of a 2013 book titled “Darwin’s Doubt” by a guy named Stephen Meyer. Meyer is one of the leading promoters of the counter-theory to Darwinism called “intelligent design,” as can be seen in the subtitle of Meyer’s book: “The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design.” I doubt that there is any more reviled guy in the field of origin of species than Meyer. (First line of Meyer’s Wikipedia bio: “Stephen C. Meyer (born 1958) is an American advocate of the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design.”) Nasty! So what has inspired Gelernter to take this one on? . . .

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Michael Mann "Hockey Stick" Update: Now Definitively Established To Be Fraud

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Michael Mann "Hockey Stick" Update: Now Definitively Established To Be Fraud

The Michael Mann “Hockey Stick” is suddenly back in the news. It’s been so long since we have heard from it, do you even remember what it is?

The “Hockey Stick” is the graph that took the world of climate science by storm back in 1998. That’s when Mann and co-authors Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes published in Nature their seminal paper “Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries.” A subsequent 1999 update by the same authors, also in Nature (“Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations”) extended their reconstructions of “temperature patterns and climate forcing” back another 400 years to about the year 1000. The authors claimed (in the first paragraph of the 1998 article) to “take a new statistical approach to reconstructing global patterns of annual temperature . . . , based on the calibration of multiproxy data networks by the dominant patterns of temperature variability in the instrumental record.” The claimed “new statistical approach,” when applied to a group of temperature “proxies” that included tree ring samples and lake bed sediments, yielded a graph — quickly labeled the “Hockey Stick” — that was the perfect icon to sell global warming fear to the public. The graph showed world temperatures essentially flat or slightly declining for 900+ years (the shaft of the hockey stick), and then shooting up dramatically during the 20th century era of human carbon dioxide emissions (the blade of the stick).

In 2001 the UN’s IPCC came out with its Third Assessment Report on the state of the climate. . . .

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