Tag Archives: mass hysteria

Princeton Physicist Dr. Will Happer: Alarms about climate change ‘are delusions’ – ‘This can be compared to the time of the witch hunts’

From the ClimateDepot

By Marc Morano

Albrecht Glatzle William Happer visited Paraguay last week on invitation of the Federation of Production Cooperatives FECOPROD. He gave several presentations and talked to political and technical decision makers (including the head of state Santiago Peña).

Here are two short, but very clear press statements following his visit, which went viral in the social media.

https://www.abc.com.py/politica/2023/11/26/las-alarmas-por-el-cambio-climatico-son-delirios-afirma-cientifico-de-eeuu/

This visit was well timed, just before COP 28 in Dubai. Hopefully, William Happer’s message will strengthen the resistance of Paraguayan politicians against the pressure exerted by the global climate alarmist community of the UN to sign the global methane pledge which would tremendously harm the paraguayan cattle industry and which has, totally incomprehensibly, already   been signed by mayor livestock producing countries, such as Brasil, Australia, Argentina and Uruguay (mass hypnosis?).

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https://www.abc.com.py/politica/2023/11/26/las-alarmas-por-el-cambio-climatico-son-delirios-afirma-cientifico-de-eeuu/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Alarms about climate change “are delusions,” says US scientist – Politics – ABC Color

Alarms about climate change “are delusions,” says US scientist – Politics – ABC Color

– I came for a week, invited by friends like Alfred (Fast) from Fecoprod (president of the Federation of Production Cooperatives)…– Physicist from Princeton, the University of (Albert) Einstein and (Robert) Opennheimer…– Yes. I am a physicist, a nuclear physicist. I am also an expert in atmospheric physics. I am an emeritus professor. I still work. I have an office in the Department of Physics, the same place where Einstein was. Oppenheimer was also there. I knew Oppenheimer. My invention is something very well known, sodium guide stars, which were used in the Star Wars. This invention was very important because it allowed one of the layers of the atmosphere to create a guide, a reference through sodium atoms. It is used today in all observatories.

Read more: Video: CAF proposes in Paraguay to stop agricultural expansion

– Travels a lot?

– Quite. I was in Australia a few days ago, also invited by friends like Alfred who invited me to come to Paraguay. I loved it. I was there five days. I gave a series of conferences where I explained why there is no emergency in climate change, as they say.

– What is its foundation?

– The rising levels of carbon dioxide (carbon dioxide) have in some way even helped plants grow better today. The higher the carbon dioxide is, this actually has a beneficial effect. Now, even the world is greener, including Paraguay.

– Yours is a 180 degree different position…

– Climate change is real. It has always existed since the world existed. This particular change, this warming, already began in the 1800s long before the rise of greenhouse gases. The scientific evidence is very clear.

– What is your theory then? Climate change is attributed to human activity.

– Only now it is attributed to humans. This however began more than 150 years ago.

– How can you refute a (scientific) consensus of countries on climate change?

– The first thing we have to understand is that scientific truth can never be a matter of consensus. It is the empirical evidence. In the 1930s, for example, there was great opposition to the ideas of Einstein’s theory of relativity. There was even a book supported by a hundred scientists that proved, in quotes, that he was wrong. With great humor, Einstein responded to that book by asking “why did 100 get together if one that refuted with evidence what I said was already enough…”

Nuclear physicist, William Happer, professor at Princeton University, home of Einstein and Oppenheimer. On ABC TV.

– Isn’t it true then that global warming in the last 50 years is attributed to humans?

– Of course, because it is actually a natural process that already exists prior to industrialization, long before human activity. Therefore, this is not a cause of human activity.

– What is it then, mass hysteria?

– It’s true. This can be compared to the time of the witch hunts. At that time, when there was a very bad harvest, a bad year, people looked for someone to blame and that’s why they invented witches, women who were even led to die at the stake. There is a very famous book called “Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of the masses” by Charles Mackay (1814-1889), a book of great impact.

– What era is the book from?

– From 1842.

– What is it about?

– The book mentions how the masses are susceptible to lies and delusions that come from political power. When reading the history of nations we discover that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness in which they do not care what their leaders do. They impress with deception. The masses believe and follow until the madness ends or a new one captivates them. It is a fragility of human beings when they act collectively…

– What is global warming attributed to then…

– Since the beginning of time the earth’s temperature always rises and falls. There are other factors to consider. A thousand years ago, for example, the earth was so hot, much hotter than now when Greenland was green. It was not a mass of ice as it is today. In South America, the glaciers that one sees in the Andes were much further removed than now. The cooling was so great that the Thames River (in London) froze, the canals of Amsterdam too… In reality, there are many factors involved in warming and cooling.

– What is attributable to man then?

– One of the main reasons is ignorance. A common thing in politics is the use of fear as something useful. Manipulation is a resource of political power. One gains economic advantages through fear. It is a political technique.

– Why do they say that carbon dioxide is a danger?

– Carbon dioxide (or carbon dioxide) is not a pollutant. On the contrary, each of us is exhaling approximately one kilo of (carbon) dioxide per day. At night, plants release carbon dioxide. During the day they use them for photosynthesis. It is something totally natural. And now we don’t have enough. We should have more…

– What data do you have to prove that warming is not caused by man?

– I do not believe that men are exempt from responsibility. What I am saying is that human intervention is minimal in global warming.

– Why do countries demand reduction?

– It makes no sense to ask countries to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. There are other greenhouse gases.

The effect of these gases is much greater in areas that are very remote, that are very cold: northern Russia, in Patagonia. The effect of the gases at the level of the Equator is almost zero. The intervention of its greenhouse effect is much greater at night than during the day. Countries should not reduce their emissions. It’s crazy.

-Those summits, the one in Copenhagen, the one in Paris, the one coming up now in Bombay, what are they then: tourist outings? Why do countries give it so much importance?

– I insist: it doesn’t make sense. My country, the United States, banned alcohol in the 1920s with Prohibition. This allowed the growth of organized crime to traffic alcohol clandestinely. It was wrong. Many of the drug problems we have today already began at that time, because of state actions that make no sense. Pollution is real. For example, if you have a coal plant and you do not have your cleaning system properly, that will produce real pollution. In large cities it is solved by restricting the circulation of vehicles that emit real pollutants. Their energy sources are not clean.

Nuclear physicist, William Happer, professor at Princeton University, home of Einstein and Oppenheimer.

– Are you a denier?

– I am against hysterical legends. Climate change is real. Dioxide is not the reason. Carbon dioxide is invisible. That’s not what warms up the atmosphere.

– But are human beings in danger or not?

– No. We are not in danger: famines and floods exist and will continue to exist but it is not because of climate change. If man actually wants to contribute to the elimination of hunger, the best thing is to increase carbon dioxide. In the United States, the increase in this period caused wheat yield to rise 40%. It is thanks to that small elevation of carbon dioxide.

– It’s natural?

– It’s natural.

– So, who should we attribute this global consensus on global warming? The new president of Argentina, Javier Milei, says that it is an invention of socialism, the Marxism that “dominates” global culture…

-There is a principle known as “Hanlon’s razor”. It is a rule of thumb that states: “never attribute to evil what is adequately explained by stupidity.” It is a human characteristic. Much was written about that.

– Does it have to do with a campaign of global domination?

– I worked for the United States Government. In the George Bush Sr. Administration I was in the Department of Energy. I was in charge of 1,000 officials when I only needed 300. That is the problem of governments. They hire many officials and those officials look for what to do. Sometimes they invent charges and give themselves (fictitious) causes to fight for those causes. That could be it.

– Are you a Republican?

– Yes, but don’t worry, Republicans are just as bad at those weaknesses as Democrats. Politicians often have to somehow reward the people who put them in that place.

– It is political clientelism as we know in Paraguay.

– Exactly. There are people who access public positions on a supernumerary basis because political clientelism – which also exists in my country – makes them look for causes that justify their presence in the State. Maybe that’s it.

– There are rulers who fully support and do politics with the climate of global warming: Lula, López Obrador, Biden, Petro in Colombia, Maduro, Boric in Chile, Arce in Bolivia, to name some socialist governments…

-Angela Merkel too, and she is right-wing. It is not a right or left issue. What we have to see here is whether the data that is put on the table is real or not. That is the point. It’s not so much the politics but the science behind it.

– Why do they say that your point of view is anti-scientific, obscurantist, reactionary? They say it is the expression of “decadent capitalist” politics…

– It’s typical as always. It is the ad hominem argument, that since one has no way to refute the facts then one targets the people. What I transmit are not ideas, they are facts.

– What do you think about investing in the so-called green economy?

– Most of it is a waste of money. The result of this policy is that energy prices are suffering enormously and produces capital flight. Companies do not want to be where the price of energy is expensive. In green conversion, so much money is being spent and so many opportunities are being lost that in the end there is no investment.

Nuclear physicist, William Happer, professor at Princeton University, home of Einstein and Oppenheimer.

-How do you see Paraguay in the global context? Sell ​​clean and cheap energy…

– Its energy is clean and renewable. That’s the advantage. There is no need to do any type of energy conversion.

– Does Paraguay have to continue investing in hydroelectric plants?

– If you have abundant hydroelectric energy, go in that direction. I assume they will continue to develop this energy in the future.

– And the Chaco? It is far from power generation sources.

– Looking to the future, in-depth geological studies must be carried out to see what resources the Chaco has in all terms: if there are hydrocarbons, if there is gas. You must have all the information about your energy riches.

– Solar energy?

– Solar energy is probably the least convenient because it is very expensive. It doesn’t work at night. On cloudy days it does not produce, in winter it produces less, even in sunny countries like Paraguay. In the Chaco, solar energy is not a bad idea as long as it is for something specific. Outside of that it is not very useful.

– Is it better to carry hydroelectric energy despite the distance? It’s like 500 km at least from Itaipu or Yacyretá.

– Hydroelectric energy is a good investment. In the United States, energy is normally transported 1,000 km inclusive…

Podcast Report: Mann v Steyn Weeks Away

If you’re defending Michael Mann, you’re not defending science, or defending climate science, or theories on global warming or anything else. Defending Michael Mann means defending Michael Mann – and it turns out not many people are willing to go there.

Climate Scepticism

BY MIKE DOMBROSKI

Apparently there are some things you can only find in a podcast. On this week’s Heartland’s Climate Change Round Table #84, Marc Morano was a guest to report on attending a hearing in the Mann v Steyn case where Mann was actually forced to appear in person. At 18 minutes in, a little more than 20 minutes of this hour long panel discussion is devoted to the case:

I don’t seem to be able to find anything else on this hearing, but there’s quite a few revelations in this podcast. The trial is set to start within a couple of weeks. Judith Curry, Richard Lindzen and Naomi Oreskes are scheduled to testify. Mann’s lawyers are working to prevent Steven McIntyre from testifying and if all that’s not enough, Mark Steyn is acting as his own lawyer! It seems like a lot of people would be commenting on this, but I can’t find any posts, even at Climate Depot (Marc Morano’s site).

This case has dragged out for more than a decade. I don’t know how nobody, including me, didn’t note the ten year mark. I’ve been arguing about this case in blog comments at places like Climate Etc. and Rabett Run since the beginning. My views are echoed by Sterling Burnett at 23:00 in the above video. This is a first amendment case that should’ve been promptly dismissed. Steyn received amicus briefs from the ACLU and several major news organizations while Mann received none. So much time has passed and with the revelations unveiled in the Twitter files, one has to wonder if these still even apply. In the video, the panelists have trouble remembering details correctly. Steyn’s book, A Disgrace to the Profession, is referred to as The Hockey Stick Delusion and no one picks up on it. The outrageous delaying is clearly from Mann’s side. Steyn promptly submitted to discovery requests and has waited years for Mann to respond. In the meantime he’s even suffered from a couple heart attacks.

There are a few worrisome things. This will be a Washington DC jury that one might suspect will be sympathetic to Mann. Steyn will be acting as his own lawyer. It will be hard to chide him considering how long the court system has let this drag on, but I wonder how well he’ll be handling the objections which there are bound to be for nearly everything he says. At 34 minutes in, Morano talks about how Steyn says that a convicted criminal presided over the investigation of Mann and the Sandusky case and whitewashed both. Morano notes that this official may have been charged and even gone to jail. He is correct. This official is former Penn State president Graham Spanier who got charged with several felonies, went to trial, got acquitted on all the felonies, but was convicted on one misdemeanor. This conviction was then thrown out, because this statute did not exist at the time that the alleged crime occurred. But Pennsylvania had a grandstanding district attorney named Josh Shapiro who put Spanier in jail anyway. Shapiro is now Pennsylvania’s governor.

Did Graham Spanier deserve to go to jail for covering up the Sandusky case? NO! He did not cover up for Sandusky, because there is nothing to cover up. As unlikely as it sounds, the whole case is mass hysteria, stemming from a moral panic caused by a false account of graduate assistant, Mike McQueary, seeing Jerry Sandusky sodomizing a boy in a Penn State shower. There’s an actual email record of McQueary complaining to a prosecutor that his words were twisted. I have a previous Climate Scepticism post entitled: Is Mark Steyn Walking into a Trap? where I try to summarize this very intricate and complicated case. For a good updated summary I would recommend Frederick Crew’s review of the book, In the Lion’s Den by the above mentioned Graham Spanier. For people who want more details (perhaps fans of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul) there’s an epic 70+ hour podcast series called With the Benefit of Hindsight.

If you’re still with me, Mann’s lawsuit is over two blog posts that are about comparing Penn States handling of the Sandusky case with their handling of their inquiry into Michael Mann and the controversy over his hockey stick. At the time, there was no reason for anyone to doubt what they were hearing in the media about the Sandusky case and most people have not heard about all the unreported stuff that’s come out later. Mark Steyn most likely believes the widespread view. Why should he believe the odd Twitter responder who goes by the handle Canman? At 34 minutes in, Morano talks about how Steyn interrupts the judge when he mentions child molestation and says “Excuse me judge. This was not child molestation. This was child rape. We got multiple counts. This guy’s convicted. We can’t whitewash this. ..” This might not be verbatim, but it makes it clear that Steyn intends to use the emotional appeal of the sensationalized charges against Sandusky. It’s irritating to see these false charges used in a case that many say is about truth, but it’s probably a winning tactic/strategy. Looks like it worked wonders for Josh Shapiro.

I actually think there is a small chance that Steyn could get blindsided. Mann looks to me like he’s more of a left wing political pundit than a climate scientist. He’s up to almost 175 thousand tweets and seems to tweet as much about politics as he does climate. he seems to have a regular column at Newsweek. As I mention in my previous post on Steyn, Mann does acknowledge Graham Spanier in his last two books. Could this be some kind of doomsday weapon being held in reserve? In a worse case scenario, what if Steyn subpoenaed Spanier and Mann’s Lawyers convinced the jury and possibly the press that Spanier and Penn State did nothing wrong in the Sandusky case so they likely did not whitewash the Mann inquiry, which they clearly did. If Mann and his lawyers could pull this off they would divert attention away from all the bad hockey stick science and make Mann a rock star in left wing politics. I know this is all pretty far-fetched, but you never know what a mann will do when he’s cornered and Mann is cornered.

“Climate crisis” is an exercise in mass hysteria

From CFACT

By William Kovacs

Ever since the Biden administration promised to eliminate fossil fuels, climate activists have combined their quest to use the government to control society with creating a collective group possessed by illusions and excessive fears that climate change is destroying Planet Earth. This Climatism Collective believes that dismantling society will enable government to prevent the end of the world.

Researchers refer to such collective fears as mass hysteria. They consider it a psychogenic illness, “a condition that begins in the mind rather than the body.” It involves people feeling anxious, sick, or crazed, notwithstanding the absence of any physical reason for their condition.

A recent Lancet study of 10,000 young people, ages 16–25, found that 59% were extremely worried about climate change, and 84% were at least moderately worried. The respondents suffered from sadness, anxiety, and anger and felt powerless, helpless, and guilty.

The authors concluded that climate anxiety is so great that these young people believe humanity is doomed, everything they value is being destroyed, and they should refrain from having children. They also believe the government could protect them if it would listen to their feelings, validate and respect their beliefs and demands, and implement policies that eliminate fossil fuel use and “unsustainable” lifestyles.

Mass hysteria episodes have been recorded since the Middle Ages. There were witch trials, screaming trances, and even a “dancing plague” in 1518, with stressed-out participants dancing for weeks, sometimes until they were so tired they died.

In recent times, we’ve witnessed hysteria over the Covid pandemic, the Red Scare about communism, and the Y2K belief that when clocks struck midnight on January 1, 2000, computer systems would fail to recognize the year, and massive electrical outages would devastate society.

Influencing today’s Climatism Collective is a federal government, media, and academic alliance that incessantly promotes the disinformation that society’s use of fossil fuels causes every problem on Earth. If an area of the world is hotter or colder than “normal,” it’s climate change. If there are forest fires, storms, floods, or droughts, it’s climate change. Even poverty results from manmade climate change.

The “climate crisis” is cited for driving unsubstantiated assertions that the oceans are getting warmer, ocean currents are slowing or speeding up, species are dying, and humanity faces worsening health risks. It’s even used to justify programs that offer “eco-anxiety counseling” for federal bureaucrats.

The fact that our Earth, and especially the United States, has much cleaner air and water today than a century ago is irrelevant to those possessed by climate hysteria. So is the fact that far more people are healthy, well-fed, and living longer than ever before.

Pulling together these disparate report findings is a recent National Institutes of Health study on “Covid-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria.” While the study focused on how the political system and social media negatively impacted the public mind during the Covid pandemic, its findings certainly apply to situations where large segments of a population believe they are continuously exposed to dangerous conditions, despite no serious injuries or damages.

The NIH study authors describe mass hysteria as “a large group of people get[ting] collectively very upset” by negative information. The false or misleading information “evokes fear and spreads in society.” They appropriately call this spread of emotions and anxiety through impacted groups a “contagion.”

Once an infected group is in a state of mass hysteria, the government can “impose measures on the rest of the population, inflicting almost unrestricted harm,” including abrogating and trampling on civil liberties, all of it justified by assertions that it’s necessary to prevent a catastrophe.

The authors describe how the federal government used lockdowns and social distancing to create greater Covid hysteria, decrease psychological resistance and impose penalties for non-compliance. The government’s actions, combined with news agencies and social media, promoted massive negative news campaigns that further deteriorated psychic health by intentionally scaring already anxious populations.

Having learned from Covid, the Biden administration increasingly resorts to climate fear-mongering, using the “climate crisis” to create anxieties that cause mass anxiety and hysteria. President Biden regularly insists: “Climate change is an existential threat to humanity…. Unchecked, it is going to actually bake this planet. This is not hyperbole. It’s real.”

Mr. Biden claims a “whole-of-government approach” to the “climate crisis” is essential and must be mandated since it affects every aspect of society and all things made by society.

By implementing a whole-of-government approach, the President makes climate change the top federal priority. Policy changes are made in every aspect of governing to address climate change, including new taxes, electric vehicles, refashioning U.S. military missions, altering the framework of international relations, and regulating appliances, power plants, the electrical grid, oil production, and manufacturing.

The media follows this climate change narrative to ingratiate itself with the government. By November 2021, U.S. news coverage of climate change reached an all-time high. Key to the coverage increase was a change in describing it: from global warming to “more intense words and phrases” to describe the phenomenon, such as “climate crisis,” “climate catastrophe,” and “climate emergency.”

These new terms are then incorporated into media and social media tracking algorithms, to increase preferred stories by 50% or more. One “expert” says this “helps describe the realities of our world” – or at least the climate collectivist world they seek. Within two years, the Biden administration and its allies have greatly increased mass hysteria about climate change, especially among the young.

These young people now believe climate change is so harmful that every aspect of society must be regulated. In fact, the Lancet study finds, the anxiety has become so deep-rooted that even the government’s whole-of-government response is deemed insufficient.

Team Biden and its media, academia, and corporate partners in deception have not only acquired enormous, unprecedented power over our lives and living standards. They have created a mental health crisis within a population segment that will soon become leaders in the United States, in nearly every sphere of society.

Unless we can restore a sense of reality to climate change (today and throughout history) and the essential role of reliable, affordable energy and fossil fuels in our lives, the United States will soon head down a rocky road to Third World status.

Author


William Kovacs

Bill Kovacs has been involved in the nation’s policymaking process for over four decades.

He is an award-winning author for his book, Reform the Kakistocracy: Rule by the Least Able or Least Principled Citizens.

The Climate Crisis Frenzy Is a Mass Hysteria Movement

From Watts Up With That?

Climate fear-mongering, eco-anxiety counseling and a rocky road to Third World status

William L. Kovacs

Ever since the Biden administration promised to eliminate fossil fuels, climate activists have combined their quest to use the government to control society with creating a collective group possessed by illusions and excessive fears that climate change is destroying Planet Earth. This Climatism Collective believes that dismantling society will enable government to prevent the end of the world.

Researchers refer to such collective fears as mass hysteria. They consider it a psychogenic illness, “a condition that begins in the mind rather than the body.” It involves people feeling anxious, sick or crazed, notwithstanding the absence of any physical reason for their condition.

A recent Lancet study of 10,000 young people, ages 16–25, found that 59% were extremely worried about climate change, and 84% were at least moderately worried. The respondents suffered from sadness, anxiety and anger and felt powerless, helpless and guilty.

The authors concluded that climate anxiety is so great that these young people believe humanity is doomed, everything they value is being destroyed, and they should refrain from having children. They also believe government could protect them if it would listen to their feelings, validate and respect their beliefs and demands, and implement policies that eliminate fossil fuel use and “unsustainable” lifestyles.

Mass hysteria episodes have been recorded since the Middle Ages. There have been witch trials, screaming trances and even a “dancing plague” in 1518, with stressed-out participants dancing for weeks, sometimes until they were so tired they died.

In recent times, we’ve witnessed hysteria over the Covid pandemic, the Red Scare about communism, and the Y2K belief that when clocks struck midnight on January 1, 2000, computer systems would fail to recognize the year, and massive electrical outages would devastate society.

Influencing today’s Climatism Collective is a federal government, media and academic alliance that incessantly promotes the disinformation that society’s use of fossil fuels causes every problem on Earth. If an area of the world is hotter or colder than “normal,” it’s climate change. If there are forest fires, storms, floods or droughts, it’s climate change. Even poverty results from manmade climate change.

The “climate crisis” is cited to drive unsubstantiated assertions that the oceans are getting warmer, ocean currents are slowing or speeding up, species are dying and humanity faces worsening health risks. It’s even used to justify programs that offer “eco-anxiety counseling” for federal bureaucrats.

The fact that our Earth, and especially the United States, has much cleaner air and water today than a century ago is irrelevant to those possessed by climate hysteria. So is the fact that far more people are healthy, well-fed and living longer than ever before.

Pulling together these disparate report findings is a recent National Institutes of Health study on “Covid-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria.” While the study focused on how the political system and social media negatively impacted the public mind during the Covid pandemic, its findings certainly apply to situations in which large segments of a population believe they are continuously exposed to dangerous conditions, despite no serious injuries or damages.

The NIH study authors describe mass hysteria as “a large group of people get[ting] collectively very upset” by negative information. The false or misleading information “evokes fear and spreads in society.” They appropriately call this spread of emotions and anxiety through impacted groups a “contagion.”

Once an infected group is in a state of mass hysteria, the government can “impose measures on the rest of the population, inflicting almost unrestricted harm,” including abrogating and trampling on civil liberties, all of it justified by assertions that it’s necessary to prevent a catastrophe.

The authors describe how the federal government used lockdowns and social distancing to create greater Covid hysteria, decrease psychological resistance and impose penalties for non-compliance. The government’s actions, combined with news agencies and social media, promoted massive negative news campaigns that further deteriorated psychic health by intentionally scaring already anxious populations.

The authors conclude that government elimination of information that questions, challenges or competes with its preferred narrative – combined with false or negative information spread by news and social media – makes society more prone to developing mass hysteria.

Having learned from Covid, the Biden administration increasingly resorts to climate fear-mongering, using the “climate crisis” to create anxieties that cause mass anxiety and hysteria. President Biden regularly insists: “Climate change is an existential threat to humanity…. Unchecked, it is going to actually bake this planet. This is not hyperbole. It’s real.”

Mr. Biden claims a “whole-of-government approach” to the “climate crisis” is essential and must be mandated, since it affects every aspect of society and all things made by society.

By implementing a whole-of-government approach, the President makes climate change the top federal priority. Policy changes are made in every aspect of governing to address climate change, including new taxes, electric vehicles, refashioning U.S. military missions, altering the framework of international relations, and regulating appliances, power plants, the electrical grid, oil production and manufacturing.

The media follows this climate change narrative to ingratiate itself with the government. By November 2021, U.S. news coverage of climate change reached an all-time high. Key to the coverage increase was a change in describing it: from global warming to “more intense words and phrases” to describe the phenomenon, such as “climate crisis,” “climate catastrophe” and “climate emergency.”

These new terms are then incorporated into media and social media tracking algorithms, to increase preferred stories by 50% or more. One “expert” says this “helps describe the realities of our world” – or at least the climate collectivist world they seek. Within two years, the Biden administration and its allies have greatly increased mass hysteria about climate change, especially among the young.

These young people now believe climate change is so harmful that every aspect of society must be regulated. In fact, the Lancet study finds, the anxiety has become so deep-rooted that even the government’s whole-of-government response is deemed insufficient.

Team Biden and its media, academia and corporate partners in deception have not only acquired enormous, unprecedented power over our lives and living standards. They have created a mental health crisis within a population segment that will soon become leaders in the United States, in nearly every sphere of society.

Unless we can restore a sense of reality to climate change (today and throughout history) and the essential role of reliable, affordable energy and fossil fuels in our lives, the United States will soon head down a rocky road to Third World status.

William L. Kovacs has served as senior vice president for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, chief counsel to a congressional committee, and a partner in DC law firms. His book Reform the Kakistocracy (government by the least qualified, most unscrupulous) is the winner of the 2021 Independent Press Award for Political/Social Change. He can be contacted at wlk@ReformTheKakistocracy.com

Earth Day 2023: Utterly bereft of ideas

From CFACT

By Benjamin Zycher 

Earth Day falls on April 22 — Lenin’s birthday, appropriately enough — so let us first recall the blessed memory of the official theme for Earth Day 2022: “Invest In Our PlanetTM.” “This is the moment to change it all — the business climate, the political climate, and how we take action on climate. It’s going to take all of us. All in. Businesses, governments, and citizens — everyone accounted for, and everyone accountable. A partnership for the planet.”

Put aside the profound totalitarian implications of the “change it all” exhortation; suffice it to say that centralized attempts in the past to change everything uniformly have engendered mass murder by governments and attendant economic, environmental, and moral destruction. Focus instead on the official theme for Earth Day 2023: “Invest In Our PlanetTM.”

No, that is not a copy-and-paste error. Last year’s Earth Day slogan is this year’s Earth Day slogan. Given the shameless groveling by a long queue of corporate officials and public relations gasbags desperate to advertise their environmental bona fides so that the green alligators might eat them last, one would think that the massive financial support from the corporate boardrooms for the Earth Day charlatans might have financed a contract with a PR firm to come up with something new.

And one would be wrong. The basic imperatives of the Earth Day environmental left are eternal, immutable, unchanging, impervious to evidence, and utterly mindless. “Ensure that students across the worldbenefit from high-quality education to develop into informed and engaged environmental stewards.” Translation: Propagandize the young, Komsomol-style. “Sign the petition for a global plastics treaty.” Over three-quarters of ocean plastic pollution is discharged from rivers in Asia and other less-developed regions. (Your plastic straw is irrelevant.) Needless to say, the Earth Day proponents have not bothered to tell us how those governments can be induced to make the attendant massive changes; bribing them will not work because the western governments will prove curiously parsimonious, as the travails of the Green Climate Fund (part of the thunderously-applauded Paris Agreement) make clear.

And on and on. “Plant trees.” Yes, trees absorb carbon dioxide, but because forest canopies for the most part are dark, forest expansion would reduce albedo (reflective) effects, and the net impact is likely to be a small warming. Oops. As an aside, there are important benefits from mild warming, among them reduced mortality, planetary greening, and an increase in agricultural productivity. “Vote Earth,” by which the Earth Day campaign means “send us your contact information so that we can ask you for money.” “Global Cleanup,” the local neighborhood version of the crusade against plastics, except that the neighborhood mobilizations might actually yield some small measure of waste removal, presumably to be taken to local landfills, ironically not a favored outcome for the environmental left.

My favorite among the Earth Day 2023 nostrums is “Sustainable Fashion”: “Behind every piece of clothing in a store, there is an industry stripping the Earth of its limited resources and exploiting the labor force that works in its garment factories. Tremendous waste characterizes this industry as it depletes healthy soil, contaminates fresh water sources, pollutes the air we breathe, defiles our oceans, destroys forests and damages eco-systems and the health of their biodiversity.”

Wow. Who knew that blouses, blue jeans, and bras are mass murderers? And in the circular argument department, one floor up from the clothing aisles, Earth Day 2023 informs us that “In order for true recycling to take place, clothing must be collected, sorted and distributed to recyclers.” Do Earth Day staffers actually receive salaries to come up with such drivel? One wonders why the Earth Day proponents do not simply argue for a return to the pre-serpent nakedness of the Garden of Eden. After all, would that not eliminate a vast source of “unsustainability,” whatever that means?

Let me be blunt: The Earth Day initiatives are destructive silliness, a form of mass hysteria, and utterly unsubtle. It can surprise no one that the Earth Day propagandists now scream that “CLIMATE ACTION IS NOW THE BEST PATHWAY TO A STRONG ECONOMY.”

Oh, dear. One wonders why “climate action” requires massive subsidies and economic upheaval. The Earth Day proponents assert that “The cost of renewable energy has plummeted in the last decade,” but even if true (a deeply problematic premise) it is irrelevant in that the appropriate comparison is with the costs of conventional energy and electricity generation, and with the costs of renewables when combined with the costs of backup generation required to avoid constant service interruptions. Example: The cost of onshore wind power including backup capacity is four times greater than that of gas-fired electricity. Earth to Earth Day: There are enormous engineering and reliability problems inherent in wind and solar power, which cannot be wished away.

The cost realities for electric and hybrid plug-in vehicles yield the same conclusion: Unconventional (that is, expensive) energy is uncompetitive. Accordingly, the “climate action/strong economy” assertion is propaganda: Radically higher energy costs cannot engender economic wellbeing. Even the International Energy Agency — far from immune to the political pressures exerted by fashionable opinion and the environmental left — in its latest World Energy Outlook projects that by 2050 global oil consumption will be about equal to that in 2015, coal consumption about equal to that in 2010, and natural gas consumption higher than that in 2020. If we assume annual real GDP growth of only 1 percent, global GDP in 2050 will be a third higher than now. Trust me: The IEA projections will prove vastly too low.

But the Earth Day beat goes on. Many billions of people are little more than environmentally destructive mouths to feed, without moral standing and devoid of the ingenuity, intelligence, and inventiveness to solve problems. They are, therefore, environmental sinners, and only massive economic destruction and impoverishment can redeem mankind. And just as the pagans for millennia attempted to prevent destructive weather by worshipping golden idols, so now does the Earth Day congregation attempt to prevent environmental Armageddon by bowing down before recycling bins.

The Earth Day revision of the Old Testament might read: “In the Beginning, Earth was the Garden of Eden. But Mankind, having consumed the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Technological Knowledge, has despoiled it. And only through repentance and widespread suffering can we return to the loving embrace of Mother Gaia.” Dogbert’s version is pithier: “You can’t save the earth unless you’re willing to make other people sacrifice.” Truer words were never spoken.

This article originally appeared at Real Clear Energy

Author

  • Benjamin Zycher
  • Benjamin Zycher is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.