An email from Bloomberg Green growls “Air travel is soaring, and so are emissions”. The piece it teases to has the good grace to admit that “Airlines Trying to Reduce Emissions With Green Jet Fuel Face Reality Check”. Yeah. That green jet fuel is another one of those energy transition mirages. But they miss the much bigger point: normal people may have been intimidated into saying they believe there’s a man-made climate crisis and will happily see others sacrifice to stop it. They may even have been lulled into thinking they really were willing to make lifestyle changes, provided they weren’t required to give anything up. But their behaviour, from the cars they buy to the planes they fly in, suggests that they no more believe in it than the green-virtue-signaling celebrities jetting to Jeff Bezos’s lavish wedding. Which we think rather serves the alarmists right for the bullying tone of their, well, arguments is often not the right word since a key part of it was steamrolling opponents, not engaging them respectfully.

It might seem counterintuitive that the alarmists blundered big time by capturing the commanding heights of our society. But they did. If you’re looking for somewhere that vocal expressions of deep concern over anthropogenic global warming, and indeed some kind of genuine conviction, is so widespread as to be almost unanimous, try academia. Or popular entertainment. Or journalism, if something can be a commanding height and a swamp simultaneously. Or politics ditto.

There are exceptions, of course. And when it comes to politicians the most obvious example and the most important is U.S. president Donald Trump. But try getting a Canadian “conservative” politician to question the supposed settled science, whether a federal MP, a provincial premier or even a city councillor. You’ll find a few outliers, but remarkably few. As is also the case in Britain, France and so on. Yet precisely by bypassing a real debate, somehow getting hold of the great and the good while ignoring most of the actual people, they’ve created a situation in which few are arguing with them because few are listening.

Ordinary people are not behaving as if they thought there was a climate crisis, let alone that they thought they could fix it by being less piggy. And as Jordan Peterson once said, when you’re getting confused by someone’s messaging it’s helpful to turn off the sound and just watch the pictures.

It’s pretty clear, if you do, that outfits like Inside Climate News can continue with the high-flying rhetoric, including things like:

“Scientists Forecast a Big Increase of Clear-Air Turbulence That Could Lead to Bumpier Flights/ Global warming is making high-altitude winds more volatile. Scientists say there are ways to help prevent serious incidents.”

But ordinary people are not hesitating to get on planes lest their carry-on baggage come hurtling out of the overhead compartment just because scientists say. Nor, as we recently noted, does MSN peddling tales of extreme heat making tourism impossible from Pakistan to Greece (and we note that the link to that story no longer works) stop the latter from attracting a record number of visitors the vast majority of whom, we imagine, arrived not in a traditional Homeric galley across the wine-dark sea, but in a jet aeroplane through the pale blue sky.

Indeed, as we’ve also noted, if you look at advertisements, which for better or worse are usually based on a keen, even cunning read of the public mood, they praise sun and warmth and invite you, in the middle of Northern Hemisphere summer, to “Save on our new sun destinations” rather than cowering in the scorching heat as temperatures soar. Which came from, yes, an airline.

On the way they may read a pundit in the New York Times raving about “A rash of heat waves” and insisting that:

“Across the Northern Hemisphere, searing temperatures are breaking records, disrupting everyday life and costing lives.”

And they may say isn’t it awful. And then step out blissfully into the summer heat and bask on a beach. Their lives are not disrupted and neither is his.

That piece also said “In Asia, unrelentingly high temperatures in Pakistan are making everyday life unbearable.” What else is new? At some point if you keep talking in ways that do not match people’s actual experience, you lose credibility. And we are there, without even having to fly.

Another New York Times piece asked “What Are the Health Benefits of Sunshine?” and said “We’ve been taught to avoid the sun at all costs. Is that right?” Who’s we? Your pale trembling newsroom staff, or the public flocking to tropical beaches?

Speaking of flocking to tropical beaches, and the airlines that get you there, when it comes to corporations, the alarmists seem to have succeeded in the same defective way, capturing their PR departments while missing accounting and marketing. With respect to airlines in particular, the Bloomberg piece sums it up with depressed frankness:

“British Airways’ parent company IAG SA surged ahead of other passenger airlines last year to consume the most sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, according to a Bloomberg Green review of corporate filings from dozens of air carriers. The company acquired 55 million gallons of cleaner jet fuel, which is derived from lower-emitting sources such as used cooking oil and animal tallow. That number exceeded the amount used by all US passenger airlines combined.”

What’s grim, frank or depressed about that opening paragraph? The next one:

“But the promising performance is overshadowed by a troubling reality for the industry: The shift to SAF is still minuscule, while growth in passenger air travel is drowning out any climate gains so far. For example, despite IAG’s world-leading status, cleaner fuel accounted for only about 1.9% of its overall fuel consumption last year, and its emissions from fuel combustion still rose by 5%.”

As we already noted, the problem with this whole “lower-emitting sources” thing is the physics. You must get energy out, from petroleum distillates or peanut oil, and the way you do it is to burn hydrocarbons, breaking complex high-energy chemical bonds and leaving just low-energy ones like… aaaaaaah!... CO2. You may be able to produce impressive numbers like more than all US passenger airlines combined by putting some canola in your crude. But you can’t send heavy metal tubes full of people hurtling through the sky to sunnier climes at hundreds of miles per hour unless you burn a lot of potent fuel. You just can’t. And people are going to fly. They are flying.