I need to point this out once again. There’s a democrat in the White House, the kind of liberal elitist who wants to tax your carbon and make you eat bugs and live in a pod, right? And guess what we get:
Here you see how seriously this administration takes the problem. They’re bragging that they’re boosting oil and natural gas production to new record levels next year, which will be the third year of his presidency.
So, I’ll ask you: How much political representation do you think those of us who want to keep our atmosphere normal have? The only thing we want is to have the sort of atmosphere that we had before industrial civilization, without all sorts of human waste products building up that warm up the planet, acidify the oceans and reduce your brain function.
But even with Democrats in power, we’re a fringe minority that’s basically given lip service by governments and otherwise ignored. How’s that for an elitist scam? And yet, the right keeps giving us endless shit, constantly insisting that we must be brainwashed:
“How come RFK jr sees through the vaccine scam, but falls for the climate change scam?” -Every low status white male ever.
Well here’s a suggestion: Maybe he’s smarter than you. Maybe he’s right and you’re wrong. Did that thought ever occur to you?
Big Pharma wants to push their toxic witch brew on you that makes you sick and chronically dependent on more medication. A company like Moderna saw their mRNA junk go nowhere, they had been working on this stuff for years without getting a marketable product, so they moved to producing a vaccine.
Well guess what Big Oil wants? Guess what Big Coal wants? I dunno, maybe they want to continue pushing their toxic products, even as the waste from their toxic junk builds up in our atmosphere and starts trapping heat so that our whole climate is disrupted?
Did that thought ever occur to you, that there might be very rich and powerful people out there, who have a massive incentive to make you believe we can use our atmosphere as a waste dump for the waste their product produces?
Have you ever considered the simple fact that the exact same scientist who was getting paid to deny the idea that smoking causes lung cancer and that CFC’s are responsible for the hole in the ozone layer, started pushing the idea in the 80’s that fossil fuels don’t cause global warming?
Seems a little suspicious, don’t you think?
“Nah he just sees through the elitist tobacco-lung cancer scam, the elitist ozone layer hole scam and the elitist global warming scam!”
Well then he must truly be a lone genius. Except there are other guys he worked with, like Fred Singer, who ALSO somehow saw through the elitist tobacco-lung cancer scam, the elitist acid rain scam and the elitist global warming scam. Another lone genius! And of course he also set up his own advocacy group that got plenty of fossil fuel bucks, because the fossil fuel industry is also filled with lone geniuses who see through all these elitist scams.
These guys of course are just scientific prostitutes, who sell their reputation to the highest bidder. They will argue against whatever “elitist scam” your industry needs them to argue against. They’ll paint a pretty dystopian picture of how miserable the world would look, if the industry that pays them could no longer pay out massive compensation packages to its board members and big dividends to its shareholders, because they have to stop burdening the rest of us with their waste products.
Turns out “Tommy” from the Alex Berenson comments is right. The exact same tactics are used by the fossil fuel industry as by big pharma. But when it comes to the fossil fuel industry, American low status white males insist on swallowing their load like a crackwhore who needs her next fix!
The big oil companies generally had to stop with this in the late 90’s, because it was getting embarrassing. The American coal companies had no such incentive to stop because if we took climate change seriously they would inevitably be among the first casualties. In other words, they have generally been much more blatant than the oil companies have been.
One of the biggest coal player in the US denial industry was Peabody Energy, which officially maintained until 2015 that there is no climate change threat, that it’s actually good for us to use the atmosphere as our waste dump. They funded at least two dozen climate change denial organizations and front groups such as the George C. Marshall Institute, the Institute for Energy Research, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, along with the scientists most famous for their denial, like Willie Soon, Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer.
And then there are of course the Koch brothers. They have been funding the whole elitist “global warming is an elitist scam” scam for decades, they were instrumental in starting the scam. And it worked really really well for them. Put together, these two brothers ended up with a greater net worth than Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
All they had to do was fund a number of conservative foundations and some corrupt scientists, who would spend their days fooling American low status white males into thinking that global warming is an elitist hoax. The return on investment of their lobbying has been MASSIVE. It cost us our planet, but it worked well for them.
How did they do this? Well it was pretty clever. They know how to play on the average American low status white male’s fears and emotions. Look at what the Koch brother’s “Americans For Prosperity” did in 2010:
AFP’s 2010 Regulation Reality Tour, featuring Smart cars and “carbon cops” at stops across the country, was launched to obstruct U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulation of major greenhouse gas emitters and undermine the seriousness of climate change.92
Citizens observing the tour were given fake citations for mowing their lawns or filling gas tanks, falsely alleging that the EPA would regulate individual consumers.93
Your dumb ass was literally scammed out of having a habitable planet and you still don’t even see it.
The wealth and wellbeing of population is tied to energy consumption. What feasible alternatives are there to replace low-cost fossil fuels? Wind/solar do not meet baseload requirement. After spending trillions on alternatives in last few decades, the world is still overwhelmingly relying on fossil fuels today. I simply don’t see any solution except going all-in on nuclear energy with today’s technology. As we lift billions of people out of poverty in coming decades, energy demands will only rise further. @DoombergT on Twitter is the expert on energy.
>What feasible alternatives are there to replace low-cost fossil fuels? Wind/solar do not meet baseload requirement.
It was perfectly possible, if we took the problem seriously.
Geothermal and hydropower can provide perfect baseload capacity. Energy intensive processes would then have to move towards those parts of the world where geothermal and hydropower are available, or they would have to adjust to seasonal availability of energy.
This is not an easy or fast process, so we would have had to start early, around 1990 when we had the first climate conference in the Hague would have been good. Unfortunately we had decades of fossil fuel lobbyists pressuring US administrations and sowing disinformation among the general public, so none of this worked out.
Maybe we would still have overshot 1.5 degree, but if we started early, we would have had real progress in negative emissions technology now too: Olivine mining, oceanic iron fertilization, seaweed biomass energy, etcetera.
There are solutions to our problem, but the solutions take decades to implement. The whole problem we face is that we waited too long, we should have started much much earlier.
Nuclear is mostly good for generating wildlife reserves and making your nation vulnerable to terrorist groups/state actors (see: Ukraine).
I live in a state where it benefits from hydropower. That said, I have serious reservation on your alternative sources. The human population has grown exponentially in the past century. Until we slow down the growth and reverse the trend, there is no ‘green’ solution that can meet the needs of growing population. Perhaps the best approach is to educate and incentivize poor countries to keep their fertility replacement rate to under 2. But we are clearly not making it a priority (because there is no money to be made?!)
>”Perhaps the best approach is to educate and incentivize poor countries to keep their fertility replacement rate to under 2.”
Governments should stop subsidizing IVF and childcare for one.
There is also the factor of the Hajnal Line:
>To the west of the Hajnal line, about half of all women aged 15 to 50 years of age were married at any given time while the other half were widows or spinsters; to the east of the line, about seventy percent of women in that age bracket were married at any given time while the other thirty percent were widows or nuns.[13] The marriage records of Western and Eastern Europe in the early 20th century illustrate this pattern vividly; west of the Hajnal line, only 25% of women aged 20–24 were married while to the east of the line, over 75% of women in this age group were married and less than five percent of women remained unmarried. Outside of Europe, women could be married even earlier and even fewer would remain celibate; in Korea, practically every woman 50 years of age had been married and spinsters were extremely rare, compared to 10–25% of women in western Europe age 50 who had never married.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_pattern
We should have started back in early 70s right after the Club of Rome ‘Limits to Growth’ report. Every action after that is just a futile exrcise in ‘let’s see what will stick to the wall’. On the other hand our overreliance on FF paired with the decreased availability of said FF most probably will bring collapse to IC – pop implosion, societal unrest explosion and all kinds of aggresion. Thic collapse will wipe out our greenhouse emissions and our most complex industrial processes which perhaps will be enough to reverse the climate change trends.
Embrace the darkness, Rada, start praying for the collapse of humanity.
See you on the hunter trail 😉
“The wealth and wellbeing of population is tied to energy consumption. What feasible alternatives are there to replace low-cost fossil fuels?”
Since fossil fuels are ultimately a limited resource, then if there aren’t realistic alternatives, shouldn’t we use less for the sake of the future, even if we ignore the pollution?
Orca may or may not support conservation, but the pro-extraction and pro-consumption propaganda I see in corporate media never takes that short logical step from the assertion that “fossil fuels = civilization” to the necessity of leaving some for people yet to be born. The one U.S. president who wore a sweater while advocating for lowering the thermostat in winter is still considered a laughingstock.
The reason “low status” white males don’t worry about the climate change problem hard enough for you is that they don’t share your optimism about solutions. They see what you see. Which is that “world leaders” politicians are driven by money and power, and are incapable of successfully managing the long-term climate. They are not incentivized to care about the weather 100 years from now, so they don’t. None of their proposed solutions go after the biggest emitters: China, the Pentagon, the top 50 global polluting corporations. Instead, their solutions conveniently give them more money and power, at the expense of individual citizens.
I really wish you would check out A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell. The technocratic progressives believe that “the best and the brightest” can operate as gods, solving long-term problems so well that they can even divert most of the funds for self-enrichment while STILL saving the world. While the pragmatic conservatives believe that “leaders” suffer from the same human nature as “low status white males.” They think that all humans, no matter how fancy and no matter how “well-intentioned,” are prone to be tempted by greed and fear and status-seeking and short-termism.
You don’t need to convince the rubes that “climate change is real.” The problem is not a lack of enthusiasm among the voters, nor stupid allegiance to petrochemical companies. All the big emissions reductions efforts circumvent voters anyway.
Who cares what the low status white males think? There’s something very Vassar college sophomore about the idea that we just have to convince all the Republicans that they are stupid, convince all the “deniers” to become “believers,” and THEN we’ll finally be able to solve the problem.
The solutions proposed by “world leaders” are ridiculous. Exempt all the big polluters, promote scammy electric cars from Tesla, and transfer more power to unaccountable “global” organizations full of power-hungry profiteers who yearn to control the masses through forced energy scarcity and surveillance.
The reluctance of low status white males to willingly transfer MORE power to Davos Man is quite rational. After all, those kind of people just destroyed the world over Covid, and are actively promoting Covid-style lockdowns of normal citizens as a good plan for emissions reduction. They are celebrating the criminal destruction of European industry and living standards because it will “reduce emissions” (in Europe. Their attitudes and plans are incredibly costly and destructive to normal citizens, with NO likely benefits to the climate, because the big polluters are all exempt.
You yourself are on record saying lots of people have to die to save “the climate.” Is it any wonder people don’t yearn for your “leadership”?
Have the Koch brothers and their propaganda partners successfully sown some doubt about the doomsday predictions of climate science promoters? Sure.
But the reason regular people aren’t excited about the climate “solutions” posed by “world leaders” has nothing to do with petrochemical propaganda. It’s because the self-proclaimed “problem-solvers” are so obviously greedy, power-mad, ineffective, and sociopathic.
Would your fringe group of climate obsessives do a better job than the current crop of “World Leaders”? Probably. You don’t just give it lip service, you would truly prioritize solving the problem instead of just reaping the rewards of more centralized control over people’s energy use, and you wouldn’t exempt all the big polluters because they aren’t your cronies.
But, you do share a few of their unsavory traits: a sense of superiority, an animating disdain for conservative white males, an overconfidence about your godlike ability to micromanage the vast forces of nature and human activity, a willingness to impoverish people, and a willingness to “arrange” or at least “accept” a population cull to achieve your goals. Are you really surprised that normal people with a healthy instinct for self-preservation might be hesitant to put you in charge?
You raise some reasonable arguments.
>The solutions proposed by “world leaders” are ridiculous. Exempt all the big polluters, promote scammy electric cars from Tesla, and transfer more power to unaccountable “global” organizations full of power-hungry profiteers who yearn to control the masses through forced energy scarcity and surveillance.
That’s because those world leaders were ultimately chosen by the dumb herd, either directly (through voteS) or indirectly (through our wallets). Hence why they try to peddle the sort of solutions the dumb herd can stomach: Electric cars, instead of bicycles and public transport.
What elites have in common with the dumb herd is that neither is willing to accept that there have to be limits to human prosperity. The limits didn’t need to be draconian, but we can’t have EVERYTHING that we want.
The Administrative State isn’t elected. Davos Man isn’t elected.
They just seem like overhyped bureaucrats dressed badly with a crappy supervillain aesthetic like Klaus Schwab himself.
They don’t even look like a proper ruling class that is supposed to be living in Palaces and all that Jazz. At least the old rulers had more style. And have finer Artistic tastes that actually is easy to romanticize and look like a piece of heaven on earth.
Let’s hypothetically start setting limits. I’m interested in knowing the top 5 limits to human prosperity that you propose.
The dumb herd has very little influence over policy, at least in the U.S. The candidates, and the winners, and the policies, are determined by the “elite” donor class, by corporate lobbyists, and by various meddlers from the “Intelligence Community,” the media, and transnational organizations.
The dumb herd does not care about Teslas. The useful idiot upper-middle-class strivers do. They can’t fly to Davos via private jet, but they CAN ape their “betters” by pretending that buying new electric cars “helps the climate.”
The crux of the problem we face is that someone has to enforce the limits to human prosperity you propose. Which is just warmed-over (no pun intended) communism. While the stated goal is to make the world better for everyone, in practice it becomes a mechanism for control and exploitation by the “leaders.” Some pigs are still planning to be more equal than others.
And the people pushing for global control over energy in the name of saving the climate are the exact same elites who you say didn’t move fast enough to address this threat when it would have been less painful. They have already demonstrated that they are incapable of solving this problem. Because human nature.
Maybe your fringe group, focused single-mindedly on climate modification through human behavior modification, would do better. I expect you WOULD do somewhat better. The current “elites” are trash. But there are inherent challenges with the whole enterprise. Because top-down central control just isn’t that effective at managing complex systems. Because power corrupts. And because no-one even LISTENS to Cassandras, much less lets them RULE in hopes of fending off a future catastrophe.
Creating a heavy-handed dystopian world government to save the climate would impose horrible costs, without any guarantee that it would “flatten the curve” of the climate. And, as you yourself say, we already squandered the opportunity to do this less painfully, which makes the emissions permissions game even harder to win. The severity of the limits to be imposed would cause the world government to be deposed, no matter how persuaded the people were. Very few people want to die or go hungry to “restore the atmosphere to its pre-industrial condition.” It is what it is.
It seems to me that your camp should abandon the goal of convincing low status white males to adopt your opinions, and abandon the goal of supporting a world system controlling energy use, and focus on some other alternatives. Like:
– investing in amelioration of climate change rather than prevention
– innovating and improving alternative energy technologies
– innovating and improving alternative energy/economic/political systems on a small scale. Demonstrate to the world the lifestyle and happiness possibilities in a low-growth, lower-prosperity intentional community. Demonstrate to the world what’s possible with alternative local monetary systems that don’t depend on exponential growth. Demonstrate to the world how well factories can run on hydro.
– And above all, focus the attention where it belongs. The elites themselves ARE the polluters. Their governments, their favored corporations, their cronies. They won’t shut up about climate change. Make them put their money where their mouths are.
Very good comment.
What ever happened to Peak Oil, that the same cast of characters were threatening us with in the 1980s? Won’t the warming end soon, when we run out of all the oil? Problem solved.
Climate Change is very obviously a political scheme that started with some favored political outcome and then worked backwards to a justification.
As it turns out the chain of logic doesn’t really work because nobody has given any convincing evidence that the earth warming up would cause significant damage.
What is clear is that if the people who claim to believe in this problem really did believe in it they would already have built huge numbers of nuclear power stations, which don’t inconvenience boomers or white men who don’t work for the government or government-adjacent service providers like banking. Maybe as a stepping stone to something else but they would have done it because it was the only solution that could have been implemented cheaply three decades ago and been effective.
Instead they campaigned against nuclear power because their goal is to bring about a set of political outcomes (Pol Pot-style primitivo-communism) and they either do not believe in the technical problem of climate change or think it incidental and unimportant.
That we immediately saw covid-like psyops deployed to support the climate change narrative as soon as covid itself was declared over in the West is proof that covid and climate change are adjacent scams being run by the same people.
If you are really so virtuous, why do you censor my postings?
I have posted three times at
https://www.rintrah.nl/they-left-the-stitches-in-the-lab-origins-of-sars-cov-2/
but you deleted all of my comments. Why is that?
Isn’t the Spike-catastrophe currently the way bigger threat for humankind than climate change?
Ok, you could say the threat for mankind is not relevant, only the threat for the planet, but this would mean humankind should sacrifice itself for the planet.
Earth, only populated with plants and animals, circling the Sun a few billion times more before all gets erased from our Supernova … should that be our maximal idealistic goal?
You’ve wasted several more hours of your life being mad at american conservatives for being american conservatives.
This can’t possibly be making you happy.
To me, resolving the left/right dichotomy in the mind of an american requires going exceedingly further “right” than the american founding itself. Once achieved, however, it makes it far easier to acknowledge things like climate change without being #triggered, because at that point you’re no longer trapped in the american mental bubble in the first place.
I try to wake up as many americans as possible to the fact that they are not “americans,” they are europeans living in north america, and that everything about them is fundamentally european – from their catholic appropriated yule traditions at christmastime, to their redneck linguistic dialect which is the direct result of directly translating scandinavian languages to english, to their fundamentally nordic obsession with freedom, homesteading, elbow room, and small high trust towns… examples run over. I just make it my business to remind aryans that they are aryan, so they can stop thinking in terms of stupid modern ideas like “democracy” and whatever ideologies they’ve picked up from television and the internet.
If americans did not waste hours per week on using sophisticated digital technology to argue with fellow Walmart shoppers about ideas that are not even 100 years old, they might be able to redirect that energy into noticing that it is perennially important to not to turn your living environment into an uninhabitable toxic shithole, or to permit anyone else to do this.
Like I said, I think the mental block americans typically have on this topic, stems from the fact that they are mired in the stupid modern ideas that make them “americans” in the first place, and that fixing the problem therefore starts with reorienting them towards a historically normal worldview.
Just my take.
>Did that thought ever occur to you, that there might be very rich and powerful people out there, who have a massive incentive to make you believe we can use our atmosphere as a waste dump for the waste their product produces?
Hmm… yes, actually it has. But you see, the hopium industry also has incentives to convince me that solar panels and idling wind farms will save the world, that carbon compensation actually means something, that sustainable development is a thing, that reusing coffee mugs works, and then EVs, organic farming, recycling, the hydrogen nonsense, down to the more extravagant cases like elephant poop paper.
Which set of technologies built a strong industrial world where even the lower classes could live like kings, and which set of technologies are vaporware that sucks blood out of the real economy and only profits the PMC?
Any wonder that the working classes are more worried about their day-to-day lives than virtue signalling?
About previous comments: Charlie wins hands down on this one.
I would not say that climate change is a hoax.
It is a weapon.
Or for the sake of it, it has been turned into a weapon.
It is very difficult to figure out if it has not been in the first place.
https://principia-scientific.com/maurice-strong-climate-change-and-the-great-reset-agenda/
If we want to spend Trillions on a global transformation I do not remember any option where I had a say in it.