Heatmap chirps “Are Pollsters Getting Climate Change Wrong? Why climate might be a more powerful election issue than it seems.” Pollsters get lots of things wrong but in this case we’re pretty sure they’ve gotten the right message and it is the global warming zealots who, once again, have closed their minds to evidence. Worldwide.
For example a month ago The Australian ran a story headlined “Energy companies’ brutal verdict on green power switch” which doesn’t sound encouraging. And it wasn’t: “significant project delays are inevitable amid community opposition. The warnings from leaders of some of the largest renewable projects in the country sparked an urgent call to boost gas supplies and keep coal plants open longer.” Because however much people want to virtue signal on climate, they want the lights to stay on even more.
Heatmap has a point that how you ask the question can affect what people say. But the key cash-on-the-barrelhead way of putting it is to see what happens when they are asked to pay a significant sum.
Consider the causally unrelated CTV story that:
“Equifax Canada is warning that Canadian consumers are increasingly ‘under stress’ from the surging cost of living. ‘Our data says about 50 per cent of Canadians are living paycheque-to-paycheque,’ Sue Hutchinson, the president of Equifax Canada, told CTV News Channel on Tuesday.”
Equifax is a private credit bureau so they have some expertise in the perilous state of Canadian household finances. And whatever the cause, if you really have no cushion between your financial obligations and your income, then raising the price of, say, gasoline on purpose is bound to cause irritation.
Which the Liberals do not understand. When the Canadian Conservatives chant “Axe the tax” our Prime Minister literally claims they want to take away your money, by not taxing you and then giving some of it back. And when the tax turned out to be deeply unpopular they renamed it from “climate action incentive payments” to “Canada Carbon Rebate” and actually threatened legal action to force banks to put that shiny label on autodeposits, without it polling any better.
Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation was in Calgary early in April to address “Europe’s NetZero Rebellion and the implications for Canada” and to suggest that ordinary European voters’ frustration with the high cost and dismal results of the “green energy transition” was bound to come to Canada as well.
Here it’s important to realize how little there is to show for a quarter-century of almost unopposed militant climate policy. As Roger Pielke Jr. wrote in early March, under the heading “Is Global Climate Policy Working?”, it’s not:
“Climate policies do many things, but accelerating decarbonization of the global economy is not yet among them”.
Even where there is some decarbonization, it had nothing to do with climate policy. It was just improved efficiency including in energy use.
The true believers can conjure up different visions with the use of magical scenarios in which, among other things, government policies do what their architects predict at little or no cost, despite all experience to the contrary. Many politicians believe in the magic and blather things like:
“Imagine what our Green Prosperity Plan could do for Britain – not just achieving clean energy by 2030 but cutting bills, boosting jobs and making working people better off.”
Which was all fine and good 20 years ago before we saw deindustrialization, soaring heating bills and very real misery. People often refer to this kind of claim as a “zombie lie”, something that has been killed but won’t die. And the zombie part is fair enough. The trouble is, they’re not lying. They really believe, and evidence doesn’t get through.
During the 1980s I worked for a precious metals fabrication firm (strip and wire), since these products were used in industrial processes, removal of oil residues was critical. Originally, we used perchlorethane in vapor phase degreasing but that was very harmful to humans, so we switched to trichloroethylene 111, which was far safer, Sadly, "scientists" found a "hole" or this spot in the ozone layer above Antarctica, this incited fears that the ozone layer was coming to an end and they discovered parts per billion traces of the compounds that formed when CFCs reacted to ozone....although nobody could explain why a highly reactive, very heavy molecule like a CFC would ignore all of the ozone at the surface but somehow be lofted up to the edge of space.....over Antarctica to wreak havoc on the ozone layer. Somehow I am beginning to lose faith in scientists!
There is no "accelerating decarbonization" because the world's biggest carbon emitters are NOT decarbonizing!In fact their carbon emissions are
going to keep increasing before they ever start decreasing.Carbon reduction schemes in the West are just the worst stupidest virtue signaling
thing imaginable.And people are suffering for it.Justinflation,cost-of-living unaffordability,job losses,undemocratic gov't mandates.Another Liberal
election win means the end of Canada.Hope it doesn't happen.
"... a quarter-century of almost unopposed militant climate policy"
But why, one must ask. Why this almost religious campaign to convince us that the world will come to an end if we don't get rid of fossil fuel use?
Here are some reasons:
1. Money. About five trillion dollars has been spent since 2000 on wind and solar energy, with lots more to come, all funded ultimately by the long-suffering end users. A lot of people have become very rich along the way.
2. Political power. 'Vote for us or the world is doomed' makes a very effective election slogan.
3. Empire buliding. Many academics and civil servants have built little empires on the backs of the climate scare. And once your empire is up and running, confessing that you have the slightest doubt about it will result in being cast into outer darkness.
4. ENGOs. Many environmental NGOs have evolved (perhaps a better term would be metastasized) from small groups who care about the environment into massive fund-rasing behemoths based on climate scares.
I'm sure you can think of other reasons why climate change has become the juggernaut we know today, and why anything that tends to oppose it will be ruthlessly attacked. Too much is at stake for too many people to allow anything to get in its way.
I recently posted on Quora that the holes in the ozone layer above the poles was due to cosmic rays being guided to the poles by the Earth's magnetic field, where they catalysed the decay of ozone to oxygen and a free radical, while ozone is continually formed by the action of ultra-violet radiation on atmospheric oxygen. The bozo in charge of the question justified deleting my comment by saying it was 'unscientific'! He didn't say what was incorrect - that Earth has a magnetic field, that aurorae show guide cosmic rays to both poles, that ultraviolet light forms ozone, or that cosmic rays can decompose ozone - but in a spirit of scientific enquiry, simply deleted my hypothesis, without offering any alternative, save that CFCs are to blame (settled science!).
It isn't a stretch to suggest that CAGW hysteria has evolved into the most extensive elitist death cult for the underclasses in history. Virtually all the salvation on offer from the elites involves loss of prosperity and a return to, or being held to the primitive, shortened and more brutal lives of the non elites. Most of the world rejects such "salvation" leaving the bankrupt western / welfare / warfare "democracies" focused on their own de-industrialization as they destroy what works while subsidizing their sophomoric delusions. Such societal depredation couldn't happen without widespread captured institutions all aligned with the captured leviathan state. As everything is becoming more expensive, more people are realizing the costs and questioning the now unattainable and arbitrary "benefits" of "net zero" whatever that means. The narrative will change or the west will slide into dark times.
Roger, your comment won't be welcome by CDN, who continues to insist against all evidence that, "The trouble is, they’re not lying. They really believe, and evidence doesn’t get through." CDN is committed to the peculiar single-cause ideology that *all* climate error is attributable to numbskullery; none of it is attributable to knavery, cowardice, the desire to belong to a "consensus" religion, etc. In this one field alone, the vast swath of human motivation gives way to stupidity only. No, much of climate commentary is indeed "zombie lies."
Thylacine, I think most human beings have an inbuilt capability to convince themselves that what is good for them, in the sense of bringing wealth and/or power, is ipso facto virtuous and righteous. There are probably relatively few people in the climate change business that see it as a scam but continue on regardless. Instead, they convince themselves that they are indeed saving the planet. The acid test would be whether such people would continue on if so doing would make them poorer or weaker.
@Roger Graves.The proof is in the pudding,isn't it?Michael Mann,Al Gore,NO-bama,Mark Carney,et al are ALL wealthier since they jumped on the
climate alarmist bandwagon.Wealthier than their political or professorial careers already made them.They're laughing all the way to the bank!
So no,they would not be doing this if it was making them poorer or weaker.