The demise of RCP8.5 is leading to the important follow-up question: What decisions were made under its lurid spell, and shouldn’t we now reassess them? A recent Epoch Times article noted about Canada that “questions are growing over whether potentially overly pessimistic climate projections have caused the country to miss out on years of billion-dollar investments and rapid economic growth.” For those of us who watched it happen, it’s painfully obvious that all major economic policy decisions in Canada over the past decade plus were subordinated to Paris and Net Zero. But these huge economic costs have not been accompanied by any of the promised gains, from emissions reductions to dazzling new industries that bring prosperity, saintly greenitude and bliss. When do we get a re-do?
Consider for instance the Guardian, which is not suffering any attack of sober second thought, crowing that “UK’s growing green economy worth more than £100bn a year, research finds/ Net zero industry accounts for more than a million jobs and benefits whole country, according to CBI Economics”. And even if you put aside the assumptions behind “net zero industry” or possible tendentiousness in the findings of CBI Economics, commissioned by the “Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit”, the mathematical fact is that £100bn isn’t much to show after decades of massive government subsidies in an economy that, for all its woes many of them a direct result of this alleged “race to Net Zero”, is somewhere around £2.5 trillion.
Nor is it necessarily a triumph that, as the Guardian also says, “Net zero workers also enjoy higher wages, topping £43,000 a year on average, about 11% higher than the national average of £39,000.” Of course they do. The government is sucking wealth out of the rest of the economy in a way it only wishes it could suck carbon out of the air, and blasting it at every ludicrous green venture including battery-powered aircraft. That it benefits the recipients emphatically does not mean it benefits everyone. It’s the “broken window fallacy“ again.
The truth is that Britain, like Germany, has trashed its economy in pursuit of fevered green dreams and, in the case of Germany, managed to become “One of Europe’s Biggest CO2 Emitters” because they demolished their nuclear industry in an omnicause fit of irrationality that somehow linked nuclear energy with nuclear weapons with destroying the planet with climate change yaaaaaaah we are all going to die. But just because the politicians and their favoured handout-recipients aren’t feeling the pain doesn’t mean it’s working in their waking hours. As indeed California too has made itself a gruesome demonstration project for pretending you don’t need the old stuff because you have the new stuff when you don’t. Which brings us to the big point.
All the hype and razzle-dazzle about technological breakthroughs, from politicians, activists and journalists, was driven not by evidence or even sober reasoning but by a will to believe. It was never there and still isn’t.
OK, that’s not the really big point. The really big point is that there’s nothing sacred about global temperatures in 1978. If Heatmap really wants to get open-minded, they should ask themselves whether anything about the Little Ice Age, from which we are still rebounding and far more naturally than they believe, was better than the Medieval Warm Period, from conditions for agriculture to, yes, the weather.
P.S. If they want to get so open-minded they might start seeing things clearly, and bearing in mind Chesterton’s dictum that the point of an open mind, like an open mouth, is to close it again on something solid, they should ask themselves what evidence exists even over the past three centuries that CO2 actually drives temperature. Because you’d sure look silly somehow getting rid of much of humanity’s carbon emissions, at enormous economic cost because sucking it into a tube and blasting it into rocks or whatever Plan A was has failed, only to discover that the planet didn’t cool, hurricanes didn’t go away, wildfires kept burning and so forth.
