Green New Deal: Climate Change

The Climate Change Apocalypse is already upon us. The only thing we can do now is unleash the powerful ideas inside the Green New Deal beast. We must throw everything we have at the ominous threat of rising sea levels and temperatures or all is lost.

That’s the storyline anyway. Do you believe it? If you’re somewhat skeptical of the over-the-top hyperbole, you’ve got a functioning BS meter. There’s plenty of reason to be wary.

For starters, promoters of the Green New Deal speak as if the science behind their predictions is irrefutable. They’re blowing smoke. While some scientists view man-caused climate change as a significant threat, many, even most, see it somewhere between a small to serious but manageable problem. How about a reality check? Aside from the human brain, there is nothing on Earth more complicated than its climate system. We are only beginning to understand the natural forces that are constantly moving the climate in one direction or another…. Big forces such as the sun, ocean currents, clouds and variations in the earth’s orbit. Because of media bias, most people don’t even realize there is no way to test how much climate change is due to human activities and how much is just…climate.

But even if we assume that humans are having a large and destructive impact on the planet, would GND even help? That answer is irrefutably, “No.”

Climatologist Pat Michaels of the libertarian CATO Institute says even if all of GND’s goals were achieved, at best the effect would be “barely detectable”. Michaels ran his calculations based on a climate model simulator developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research with funding from the EPA. Michaels is just one of a large number of climate scientists who see GND’s potential as pure fantasy.

The fact is, even if the United States could wave a magic wand today, immediately stopping all emissions, it wouldn’t matter. Emissions from Asia alone are two and a half times that of all of 35 countries in the Americas and the vast majority of the increase in emissions in the years ahead will be coming from China, India, the African continent and other developing regions.

Even the Paris Climate Accord predicts the dramatic emissions reductions called for worldwide would only achieve one percent of the goal by 2030—the end point of the so-called Green New Deal. So far, China and other developing countries that signed the Paris Climate Accord are significantly increasing emissions. Meanwhile, the United States is actually reducing its emissions—and that is happening because of our increased use of natural gas—one of the fuel sources GND wants to eliminate.

To sum up. The science behind catastrophic man-caused global warming is in its infancy. Predicting what climate will be 50 years from now is nothing more than an educated guess based on spotty data. Even a wildly successful GND would not help the problem if, in fact, it is a problem.

As crazy as GND sounds, it gets even wackier when you consider that the emissions-reducing solutions being proposed aren’t even technically feasible—not by a moonshot.

For the Clear Energy Alliance, I’m Mark Mathis. Power On.