Americans are becoming neurotic worriers.  Covid brought out the worst in us, as politicized medical leaders rushed us into a panic response that did far more harm than the disease itself without fundamentally affecting the net outcome of the pandemic.

But Covid is hardly the only example of Americans overestimating the dangers in their lives. We fret about everything from “Christian nationalism“ arising from court decisions protecting religious freedoms to alien-bearing UFOs.

Many Americans fear police officers kill unarmed blacks by the thousands when the real number is about 10 to 20 annually. College students expect “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces“ to provide protection from exposure to opposing opinions and the literal physical harm they are thought to cause.

Part of the problem with imagining all these boogeymen is that real threats can get lost in the shuffle. Impending financial doom, a rapidly changing world order, and millions of unassimilated aliens crossing our borders could all use better-focused attention.

There is no better example of the trivial deflecting us from the critical than climate change. Sixty percent of the developed world truly believes that it will spell the end of humanity.

The World Health Organization declared climate change the most important public health issue of the 21st century. The savants of the World Economic Forum named climate action failure as the greatest policy risk of the next decade.

Third World countries, unfortunately for them, find most of their foreign aid these days linked with resources to address climate change, rather than more pressing needs like economic development, malnutrition, clean water, education, or healthcare.

The fact that some degree of warming is real and related to human activity hardly justifies the catastrophe narrative. Facts derived from official sources tell a different story, for example, that 98 percent fewer people are dying from climate-related disasters than a century ago.

Those who express doubt about any aspect of the catastrophe narrative are dubbed “climate deniers“ by the mainstream and depicted as science-adverse Neanderthals. Joe Biden claimed he could change their minds just by showing them the climate-related fires he had personally witnessed.

About those fires, Joe. The undisputed fact is that 4.2% of the land in the world burned yearly in the early 1900s. Today it has fallen to 3% due to less heating from open fires, better forest management, and more resources available for fire suppression.  Tilting at climate change will produce far less harm reduction from fires than will common sense, risk management, and prevention.

Bjorn Lonborg, a Danish economist gives other reasons to doubt climate change deserves its reputation as an existential threat. Hurricanes, despite claims to the contrary, are not increasing. On the contrary, the number of hurricanes in 2022 was unusually low, the second weakest batch of hurricanes since satellite data became available in 1980.

Landfall hurricanes, the most accurate way of charting hurricane frequency, appear to have declined slightly since 1900. Hurricanes each year cost 0.04 percent of global GDP. Projections from the scientific journal Nature, taking into account changes in climate as well as improved ability to protect ourselves from hurricane harm, indicate that by 2100 the damage will be 0.02% even without new climate policies.

The WHO claims that 95,000 worldwide deaths annually from malnutrition will be attributable to unchecked climate change between 2030–2050. That sounds like a lot, but the global total of deaths from malnutrition is 30 million or so annually, a number that is sure to come down as crop yields increase and economic development improves.

Even polar bears, the subject of one of Al Gore’s apocalyptic predictions, are doing okay. Polar bear specialists estimate that, due to hunting limits, the worldwide population is 21,000 to 31,000, up from 12,000 in the 1960s.

Nobel prize winner William Nordhaus estimates that if we stand pat, climate change will cost  4% of GDP by 2100. But the UN predicts that global GDP will rise by 450% in that tie, dwarfing the climate-induced harm.

Big-government tyrants love crises because of the power and prestige they bring. Instead of impoverishing ourselves with impractical boondoggles, we need to bear down on economic growth and innovation to pull us through. That’s what Americans do best.

As a climate and energy realist, in my heart of hearts, I dream of the day when the public recognizes climate change will not bring on an end to the world as we know it, or even a long-term net decline for human civilization. That’s what the data and the best science show, despite the claims of corporate media, alarmist activists, heads of corporations, and politicians who profit in terms of money and power by spinning the climate change end-of-the-world fairy tale. Sadly, the public rarely gets to hear this truth.

A few notable instances of the very unalarming facts about climate change getting through on a large scale in the past few years are the release of several bestselling books by prominent liberals advocating what they consider to be reasonable climate policies: Michael Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never, Steven Koonin’s Unsettled, and Bjorn Lomborg’s False Alarm. Sticking strictly to climate science, not policy, Heartland’s own Climate at a Glance for Teachers and Students has also sold well on Amazon. However, despite the success of these publications among the literati and the reading public, I’d be surprised if these books combined sold more than a million copies in the United States, which has a population of more than 330 million people, or a few million copies among the eight billion people worldwide. Sadly, I suspect more people are exposed to false climate alarm stories in the mainstream media every day in the United States than have been reached by all these books in the past two years since the first one’s release.

Still, hope springs eternal and climate realists keep on plugging away, trying to breach the nearly impregnable wall of climate change disinformation erected by powerful corporate, media, and political elites. Every so often, the realists score a direct hit, making the climate/energy realist case so powerfully that even the mainstream media and elite journals take notice. This occurred recently when The New York Times Magazine (NYTM) published an interview with eminent scientist Vaclav Smil, Ph.D., discussing his book How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going.” (You can’t get more mainstream and yet elitist than the NYTM.) Another direct-realist hit on the edifice of climate alarm came with the publication of the article “Russia’s War Is the End of Climate Policy as We Know It,” in the journal Foreign Affairs, by Ted Nordhaus.

Both Smil and Nordhaus have far more confidence than I that human activities are causing potentially dangerous climate change. Although I disagree to some extent with their assessment of the dangers of climate change, their “realpolitik” analyses of the infeasibility of the net-zero energy transition in the 2030-2050 timeline are powerful and accurate.

Despite continual cajoling by the NYTM interviewer, who basically framed the same question again and again and again, pleading for Smil to concede climate change is such an imminent disaster world leaders must forcibly decarbonize our energy systems nearly immediately, Smil refused to rise to the bait. His consistent answer, based on his assessment of the world’s energy needs and the material requirements necessary to meet net-zero in the short term, was that this goal is physically and politically impossible. Smil also made clear that the threat posed by climate change does not justify such a dramatic forced transition.

For Smil, the four pillars of modern civilization are cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia, each of which requires huge amounts of fossil fuels to produce. Therefore, he concludes, those calling for rapid decarbonization to combat global warming are dangerously foolish. “I’m looking at the world as it is,” Smil, told the NTYM interviewer, continuing,

The most important thing to understand is the scale. … [A]ccording to COP26, we should reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent by 2030 as compared with 2010 levels. This is undoable because there are just eight years left, and emissions are still rising. People don’t appreciate the magnitude of the task and are setting up artificial deadlines which are unrealistic. …

What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. I call it delusional.

I’m all for goals but for strict realism in setting them.

For Smil, radical actions to cut carbon dioxide emissions steeply and immediately are neither justified by the problem—because other problems are at least as dire as climate change, and they require fossil fuels to solve—nor are they possible, even if they were justified. It’s a matter of both physics and realpolitik, the latter meaning an honest assessment of the fact that people around the world do and will continue to want to better their lives by their own understanding of what constitutes a better life.

Smil’s assessment coincides with that of Ted Nordhaus, the cofounder (with the above-mentioned Michael Shellenberger) and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, and a co-author of An Ecomodernist Manifesto. Nordhaus’s article in Foreign Policy is a realist shot across the bow explaining how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is opening eyes to the basic energy truth that fossil fuels are still vital to the world:

[T]he headlong rush across Western Europe to replace Russian oil, gas, and coal with alternative sources of these fuels has made a mockery of the net-zero emissions pledges made by the major European economies just three months before the invasion at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland. Instead, questions of energy security have returned with a vengeance as countries already struggling with energy shortages and price spikes now face a fossil fuel superpower gone rogue in Eastern Europe.

In the decades following the end of the Cold War, global stability and easy access to energy led many of us to forget the degree to which abundant energy is existential for modern societies. Growing concern about climate change and the push for renewable fuels also led many to underestimate just how dependent societies still are on fossil fuels. But access to oil, gas, and coal still determines the fate of nations. Two decades of worrying about carbon-fueled catastrophes—and trillions of dollars spent globally on transitioning to renewable power—haven’t changed that basic existential fact. …

Given the scant effect international climate efforts have had on emissions over the past three decades, a turn back toward energy realpolitik—and away from the utopian schemes that have come to define climate advocacy and policymaking worldwide—could actually accelerate the shift to a lower-carbon global economy in the coming decades. …

The capacity to adapt to rising temperatures and extreme weather events rose significantly … as evidenced by the continued decline in weather-related deaths. But this was not due to any U.N.-led efforts to fund climate adaptation, which never materialized. What made people all over the world more resilient to climate extremes was better infrastructure and safer housing—the product of economic growth powered by cheap fossil fuels.

The geopolitical, technological, and economic competition that characterized the Cold War had more success in reducing the carbon intensity of the global economy than climate policy efforts have had since.

Nordhaus goes on to explain:

The world’s renewable energy economy is deeply entangled with geopolitically problematic supply chains. Huge parts of the world’s supplies of silicon, lithium, and rare-earth minerals rely on China, where solar panels are produced by Uyghur slave labor in concentration camps. The idea that the crisis might be resolved by choosing Western dependence on Chinese solar panels and batteries over Western dependence on Russian oil and gas reveals just how unserious the environmental movement’s pretensions to justice, human rights, and democracy really are.

For Nordhaus and Smil alike, the appropriate response to climate change is to acknowledge the reality of the importance of fossil fuels to continued economic prosperity for the present, while delivering better options through the market—which responds to price signals through efficiency gains and technological innovation—far faster and more effectively than government-mandated energy shifts. Smil states,

at the same time we are constantly transitioning and innovating. We went from coal to oil to natural gas, and then as we were moving into natural gas we moved into nuclear electricity, and we started building lots of large hydro, and they do not emit any carbon dioxide directly. So we’ve been transitioning to lower-carbon sources or noncarbon sources for decades. Moreover, we’ve been making our burning of carbon much more efficient. We are constantly transitioning to more efficient, more effective and less environmentally harmful things.

Nordhaus notes the Russian war is increasingly making it clear to countries that climate change is not “the main event,” energy security is, and the latter can be achieved while improving economic conditions in the poorest countries and respecting human rights:

But climate and energy policies, especially in the West, may shift significantly from subsidizing demand (for things like solar panels and electric vehicles) to deregulating supply (of things like nuclear power plants and high-voltage transmission lines). A shift of this sort—away from subsidizing specific green technologies favored by activists and lobbyists and toward enabling the broader technological, regulatory, and infrastructural basis for the energy transition—would put clean energy policies on much firmer economic footing. And it would better align climate objectives with energy security imperatives.

People around the world face many problems. Climate change is only one among many, and as Nordhaus and Smil point out, it is probably not the most pressing.

Nordhaus and Smil provide clear-eyed assessments of the physical, economic, and political limits of the energy transition demanded by climate alarmists on the timetable they have laid out. These analysts’ acknowledgments of the benefits fossil fuels have delivered, and the inequities and harms that would result from an attempt to go net-zero by 2030 or even 2050, are a refreshing appraisal from scholars whom alarmists cannot in any way smear as “climate deniers.”

In my heart of hearts (foolish though it may be), I still hold out hope this truth can get through the daily background noise of climate alarm.

*****

This article was published by the Heartland Institute and is reproduced with permission.

A refreshing article in the Washington Examiner demonstrates what I have repeatedly said for more than a decade: climate change does not pose an “existential threat.” In fact, that’s the title of the article: “Climate change is not an ‘existential threat.’” In discussing the energy crisis that has arisen during Joe Biden’s brief tenure as president of the United States—primarily because of Biden’s climate policies—David Simon writes,

The Biden administration’s climate change policies have sharply increased oil prices, damaging the domestic economy and increasing the cost of nearly everything consumers buy. By increasing revenues for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime, they also made Russia stronger and more dangerous at a critical time, thus damaging national security. …

But worst of all, the Biden administration’s basis for these policies, the claim that global warming presents an “existential threat,” is fraudulent. It is not based on any scientific consensus, and in fact, it ignores evidence of environmental benefits of global warming that offset its harm. 

In this article, chock full of data, Simon schools so-called journalists in the corporate media on how to examine claims that humans are causing a climate catastrophe. Simon presents data and research that conclusively demonstrate temperature and climate-related deaths have significantly declined during the period of modern warming. Climate Realism has also pointed this out on numerous occasions, refuting alarmists’ claims to the contrary.

For example, arguably the largest study ever to examine excess mortality associated with temperature was published in the July 1 edition of The Lancet, one of the world’s most prominent health journals. The study’s authors, 68 scientists representing universities and research institutes in 33 countries spanning all regions of the world, came to two clear conclusions: cold temperatures contribute to far more deaths each year than warmer temperatures, and deaths associated with extreme temperatures, hot or cold, are declining. The researchers found nearly 10 times more people die due to cold temperatures than hot temperatures. Moreover, as global temperatures modestly increase, the number of people dying because of suboptimal temperatures is decreasing.

“Importantly, cold-related death decreased 0.51 per cent from 2000 to 2019, while heat-related death increased 0.21 per cent, leading to a reduction in net mortality due to cold and hot temperatures,” the study reports.

Considering that 10 times more people were dying from cold than from heat, the study indicates the warming between 2000 and 2019 saved 3.1 million lives from cold-related deaths, at the expense of just 130,000 extra deaths caused by heat. As a result, global warming saved a net of nearly three million lives during the past 20 years.

This study confirms what previous research has consistently shown. In 2015, for example, The Lancet published the results of another large-scale temperature/mortality study, in which the researchers found cold weather directly or indirectly killed 1,700 percent more people than warm or hot weather. The scientists examined health data from 384 locations in 13 countries, accounting for more than 74 million deaths. The authors of this study wrote,

[N]on-optimum ambient temperature is responsible for substantial excess in mortality, with important differences between countries. Although most previous research has focused on heat-related effects, most of the attributable deaths were caused by cold temperatures. Despite the attention given to extreme weather events, most of the effect happened on moderately hot and moderately cold days, especially moderately cold days.

Even The New York Times acknowledged the importance of that study, with Jane Brody writing, “Over time, as global temperatures rise, milder winter temperatures are likely to result in fewer cold-related deaths, a benefit that could outweigh a smaller rise in heat-caused mortality.”

In addition to correcting the record on heat-related deaths, Simon dismantles various climate fictions about worsening natural disasters, using readily available data:

The facts regarding natural disasters also do not support the “existential threat” claim. The number of hurricanes per year, a 2021 EPA report shows, has not increased since the late 19th century. Moreover, although you wouldn’t know it from the panicky, sensationalized news coverage, the total acreage burnt by forest fires annually has decreased, and most rivers flood less today than they used to.

Since 1920, Earth’s average temperature has risen by 1.12 degrees and the world population has quadrupled from less than two billion to almost eight billion. Even so, the number of people killed each year by natural disasters has declined by about 90 percent. That statistic, more than any other, puts the lie to claims of an existential crisis due to climate.

There is also the global air pollution death rate, which has declined by about 45 percent over the last three decades. Again, no “existential threat” here.

Simon is correct. Research published at Climate Realism has refuted assertions about worsening wildfires and hurricanes on multiple occasions.

Simon also discusses research showing the positive side of climate change: “global warming has increased both agricultural yields and growth of forests, grasslands, and tree leaves.”

Climate Change Weekly and Climate Realism have refuted claims climate change is a threat to crop production more than 100 times. We have cited research and hard data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization showing regional and global crop production and crop yields have regularly, almost yearly, set new records during the recent period of modern warming.

Basic agronomy explains why crop production is booming under current climate conditions. As detailed by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change in Climate Change Reconsidered: Biological Impacts and Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, the carbon dioxide humans have been pumping into the air since the middle of the twentieth century has enriched plant growth and improved plants’ water-use efficiency, thereby contributing to record crop yields.

Laboratory experiments and real-world field research show as carbon dioxide increases, plant fitness, and flower pollination improve, plants develop more-extensive root systems to extract greater amounts of nutrients from even poor-quality soil, plants use water more efficiently by reducing the number and openness of stomata through which they lose moisture during transpiration, and plants produce greater amounts of natural substances that repel insects and fight off competing weeds.

All of this has helped bring about the largest decline in hunger, malnutrition, and starvation in human history.

Simon’s conclusion is spot-on and speaks for itself:

Biden administration climate change policies are sensationalizing the threats while ignoring all the benefits. They rely on speculative “models” that supposedly project global temperatures and predict disasters. But these models are highly unreliable, … unable even to reproduce the temperature changes of the 20th century.

The Biden administration’s campaign against U.S. oil production and pipelines is not just harmful—it is an environmental fraud.

To quote longtime radio host Paul Harvey, that’s “the rest of the story”: the very good news the mainstream media and various scientific and political shills aren’t telling you about climate change.

*****

This article was published by The Heartland Institute and is reproduced with permission.

The Biden administration altered the official federal policy on approving new interstate natural gas facilities and pipelines, requiring a climate consideration.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission announced that it will begin to “undertake a robust consideration” of the environmental justice impacts of such fossil fuel projects before granting approval, according to a fact sheet published Thursday.

The agency, which is the top regulator of domestic natural gas infrastructure, said its new policy will presume projects that cause 100,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year will have a significant impact on the environment.

In a major departure from its past policy, the FERC may also consider the eventual emissions caused by both upstream production and eventual burning of gas transported in a pipeline requiring approval.

“I believe today’s long overdue policy statements are essential to ensuring the Commission’s natural gas siting decisions are reflective of all stakeholder concerns and interests,” FERC Chairman Rich Glick said in a statement. “We have witnessed the impact on pipeline projects when federal agencies, including the Commission, fail to fulfill their statutory responsibilities assessing the potential effects of a project on the environment, landowners, and communities.”

The announcement Thursday marked the first time the commission updated its natural gas policy since 1999. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, applauded the policy change, saying it was “necessary and long overdue.”

“For far too long, FERC has allowed private pipeline developers to call the shots, while cutting those affected by the projects out of the process,” Gillian Giannetti, Natural Resources Defense Council senior attorney, said in a statement. “Communities and landowners will now have a say before new pipelines cut across their land or new compressor stations are built near their homes.”

“FERC will now need to follow through and permanently establish a meaningful climate test for pipelines,” she added.

But the new policy also attracted criticism from both Democratic and Republican lawmakers.

“Today’s reckless decision by FERC’s Democratic Commissioners puts the security of our nation at risk,” Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement. “The Commission went too far by prioritizing a political agenda over their main mission—ensuring our nation’s energy reliability and security.”

“The only thing they accomplished today was constructing additional road blocks that further delay building out the energy infrastructure our country desperately needs,” he added.

Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., the committee’s ranking member, added that the FERC decision proved the administration was “determined to make it nearly impossible” for Americans to access affordable natural gas.

In January 2021, President Joe Biden appointed Glick to chair FERC. In September, the president selected former Washington, D.C., Public Service Commission Chairman Willie Phillips to join FERC, giving Democrats majority control of the five-person commission.

*****

This article was published in The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

Global elites regularly decry the supposedly “existential” threat purported human-caused climate change poses to the environment, civilization, and even human survival.

These elites propose policies intended to avert global climate disaster, almost all of them involving ending the use of fossil fuels and fundamentally changing how people live, forcing us to live in high-density urban settings along mass transportation nodes and eat locally supplied vegetarian diets. But the elites don’t act as if they believe their rhetoric.

The alarmed climate elites’ hypocritical “do as I say, not as I do; hair shirts and gruel for thee, but not for me” attitudes were on full display at the U.N. climate conference, COP-26 for short, held in Glasgow, Scotland from October 31 through November 13.

If world leaders and the mandarin bureaucrats who supposedly serve them and the wider public were really concerned human greenhouse gas emissions endanger the Earth, they could have hosted the entire conference, backroom negotiations and all, via Zoom, Skype, Streamyard, or any of the numerous other conferencing services. After all, the world just spent a year on lockdown with media interviews, international negotiations, and legislation still getting done.

Barring virtual communication, COP-26’s participants could have arrived via commercial or shared transport and eaten only locally sourced vegetarian or vegan meals, as they propose for the unwashed masses. They didn’t do that. Instead, according to the Scotsman, carbon dioxide emissions from COP-26 were more than double those of COP-25 and more than any previous international summit in history. Sixty percent of the conference’s more than 100,000 tons of emissions was from transportation alone, with the remainder coming from water use, heating and cooling of five-star accommodations, and meat-heavy gourmet meals made with food flown or shipped in from around the world.

The world’s leading climate scolds, those wealthy, self-appointed saviors of the Earth who would have common people give up air travel and private cars, arrived in a stream of more than 400 private jets, spewing more emissions in two weeks than is emitted by more than 1,600 average people in the United Kingdom in a year. If their own pronouncements of planetary doom are to be believed, it seems Bank of America, Jeff Bezos, and other multibillion-dollar businesses and individuals feel you must first kill the Earth before you can save it.

Conference host Boris Johnson, prime minister of the United Kingdom, jetted in from a meeting of the G-20 in Rome (where climate was also discussed), only to berate the world for its profligate use of fossil fuels.

Johnson harangued the assembled attendees for their nations’ alleged climate crimes, saying, “When it comes to tackling climate change, words without action, without deeds are absolutely pointless.” Yet, after being on the ground in Glasgow for about a day, he took a private jet back to London instead of taking the train, which emits far less carbon dioxide. Later, near the conference’s end, Johnson jetted back to Glasgow to express his belief that hard commitments to reduce carbon dioxide emissions significantly were vital to saving the world. His actions spoke loudly, and they belied his words.

To be fair, COP-26 is hardly the first time those in power—who are constantly telling the poor of the world they must live with less to save the planet—have declined to live up to the ideal they set for others. President Joe Biden’s climate czar, John Kerry, is famous for using his family’s private jet to attend climate negotiations and award dinners. His excuse: he’s important! Evidently, this somehow means he is to be held to a lower standard than others. BTW, John, usually if you want to set an example you hold yourself to a higher standard than others. Just a thought.

Then there is actor/activist Leonardo DiCaprio, who once again made an appearance at a climate summit. We all know actors set the lifestyle example to which an environmentally conscious person should aspire. To his credit, for once DiCaprio flew commercial. Perhaps his image needed burnishing. After all, he is widely known for travelling repeatedly for pleasure every year via private planes and private yachts. DiCaprio has real chutzpah. As detailed in Luxury Launches,

Despite coaching viewers to “work together” to fight climate change while accepting his first Oscar in March, DiCaprio chose to fly private to pick up an award from a clean-water advocacy group at the Riverkeeper Fishermen’s Ball and back to Cannes to attend an AIDS benefit gala 24 hours later.

DiCaprio excuses his personal carbon profligacy by saying he pays someone to plant trees on his behalf. That reminds me of the medieval Catholic Church selling indulgences to wealthy sinners who could afford it.

Then there is our climate Cassandra-in-chief, former vice-president Al Gore, who profited handsomely off fossil fuels, raking in $70 to $100 million for the sale of his cable news network, Current TV, to Al Jazeera.  After years of claiming we must abandon oil and gas production and promoting legislation and lawsuits to force people to do so, Gore sold his station to a company primarily owned by the government of Qatar. That government makes most of its annual revenue from oil production and is a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). It’s akin to Baptists taking donations from bootleggers.

Not to be outdone, former president Barack Obama appeared at COP-26 to complain about climate hypocrisy. “For most of your lives you’ve been bombarded with warnings about what the future will look like if you don’t address climate change, but you see adults who act like the problem doesn’t exist,” Obama opined. “You are right to be frustrated.”

With whom should they be frustrated? Obama spent eight years as president warning climate change was causing the seas to rise rapidly and they would soon swamp much of the U.S. Eastern seaboard. Upon retiring, however, he bought an $11.75 million beachfront home in Martha’s Vineyard, just inches-to-feet above sea level. As far as I can tell, he isn’t investing in sea walls to keep out the supposedly rising tides.

None of the famous people who claim we are causing planet-killing climate change through human energy use, housing infrastructure, and agricultural systems live as if they believe this is true.

That’s something to think about the next time such a person gives a speech or appears on television saying you should give up your car, air travel, hamburgers and barbeque, and standalone single-family home in order to save the planet. They aren’t including themselves among those who should be forced to give up things.

The policies elitists are proposing will impose higher energy costs, which many people—the working poor, those on fixed incomes, and those on lower-middle incomes—will struggle to pay for. Yet the elites make no sacrifices themselves. Even if they did, the cost of their policies to them would be beneath their margins of error at the bank.

Wealthy climate alarmists apparently have a two-year-old’s self-awareness and ability to delay gratification. They remind me of Democrat apologists who claim inflation is a good thing or at least not so bad, admonishing the poor to “suck it up” and pay the higher costs without complaint. It’s not a good look, and it certainly doesn’t inspire confidence that they really believe the Earth hangs in the balance.

*****

This article was published on December 2, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Heartland Institute.