Before we go to the main event and meet the only Greenie talking sense on climate change and the environment, let’s first catch up with the latest in Climate Stupid…
Extinction Rebellion protestors in Germany have been caught green-handed powering their camp with a ‘planet-destroying’ diesel generator – which they tried to hide with wooden pallets.
The BBC has been caught lying again about climate change, this time with a cock and bull story about rising sea levels displacing families in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. (The real reason is soil subsidence: but that doesn’t suit the climate change narrative, obviously)
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been caught data-tampering again to make ‘global warming’ look more ‘real’ and scary than it actually is.
Disgraced climate ‘scientist’, fake Nobel prizewinner and failed litigant Michael Mann has been caught trying to erase from history the well-documented Medieval Warm Period (MWP) using ‘dubious, revisionist temperature data.’ Why are Mann and his co-conspirator Katharine Hayhoe so keen to ditch the MWP? Because between 900 AD and 1200 AD, the world was at least as warm – if not warmer – than it is today. Yet there were no 4 x 4s or planes or factories ‘pumping out CO2’ to make this happen – so gosh, what might this tell us about Anthropogenic Global Warming theory?
The BBC’s only politically unbiased interviewer Andrew Neil has totally owned an Extinction Rebellion activist called Zion Lights. (He/she was presumably named after some kind of super potent indica/sativa hybrid you buy on the dark web). Having been Andrew Neiled myself, I do have a tiny smidgen of sympathy for Zion Lights. Except then again I totally don’t because I’m right on the No Deal Brexit thing whereas Zion Lights is totally wrong on her/his/its entire belief system.
Extinction Rebellion crusties are currently trying to close down London City Airport. If you listened to Nick Robinson’s questions on the Today programme this morning — my wife forced me to listen as I drove her to work because she hates me and because she wanted me to see just how much worse the BBC has got since I stopped listening to its drivel a year ago — you would have got the impression that this is perfectly legit and that London City’s Airport’s management really should be in the business of having to justify their core business (viz being an airport, where aeroplanes take off and land, with business people and holidaymakers inside) to tone deaf, left-biased BBC reporters.
The police have made some arrests, including of some whiny harpie who screeched ‘You’re hurting me’ as she was dragged off. “Not enough,” I imagine one or two air passengers are muttering this morning…
What does all this tell us about climate change? Nothing that we didn’t know already: that it’s a bogus cause, invented by dodgy, activist scientists, propped up by mainstream media lies and hysteria and promoted by soap-dodging loons who are not only naive and ill-informed but outrageously hypocritical in the way that they want to end Western Civilisation but still somehow keep their mobile phones powered…
This is why I was so pleased to meet just about the world’s only sensible Greenie, Mike Shellenberger. Shellenberger used to be a deep green activist – pushing heavily for renewables – but then saw the light.
He still cares about nature very much. But he thinks greenies like Extinction Rebellion are doing more harm than good.
I asked him what the red-pill moment was that made him see the light.
“So in the early 2000s I was the co-founder of our original Green New Deal. We called it the New Apollo Project. It was for a $300 billion investment in renewables. And we succeeded. We got President Obama, he did about $150 billion in renewables between 2007 and 2015 but right away we started running into big problems.
The first you’re all familiar with: unreliable electricity means you always have to have fossil fuel power plants backing up when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. But the other issue, which had a bigger impact on my heart, is the environmental impact of all those solar and wind farms.
So you started having local conservationists raising concerns about the impacts of wind farms on bird and bat species; about the impact of solar farms on our desert tortoise. So you started having environmental consequences of renewables. I started running the numbers. It takes 150 times more land to get the same amount of electricity from a solar farm as from a nuclear plant; 17 times more materials are required for solar than for nuclear; and if you just total up all the used solar panel waste compared with nuclear, solar actually creates 300 times more toxic waste than nuclear.
For me it was like, if I care about the environment, why are we not doing more nuclear power? Even if you don’t care about climate change. Nuclear has the smallest environmental footprint because it has the highest energy density. So for me my red pill moment was realising that energy density determines environmental impact. A single coke can of uranium provides enough energy for my entire life. Whereas it would require many train cars full of coal, oil or gas; many more of renewables. So that for me was what made me change my mind.”
I was very impressed by Shellenberger (who, incidentally, may soon be running for Governor of California). You can hear more from him on my Delingpod podcast and vidcast next Thursday (details here).
Be seeing you
MCViewPoint 