Democrats participating in CNN’s tortuous, seven-hour climate change town hall event proved, not unexpectedly, to lack any real understanding of climate science, promoting policies that would cause more harm than the so-called “climate crisis” itself.
Each Democratic candidate at the climate town hall proclaimed, in one form or another, the world will end in 10 or 11 years if we don’t cut carbon dioxide emissions in half, and cut them out altogether soon thereafter. Joe Biden, among the most moderate of the Democratic death cult brigade, gave us until at least 2050 to transition from fossil fuels.
However, these doomsday predictions aren’t supported by science. Even the worst-case scenarios promoted by climate alarmists don’t say the Earth will become a burned-out husk if we don’t stop using fossil fuels for energy, rather they project seas might rise a little more and a little faster and hurricanes might become a little more powerful and sustained than they otherwise would be absent fossil-fuel use.
If the world is not coming to an end, why are Democrats saying it is? The answer is simple, to scare people into embracing the socialist policies they wish to foist upon the world. If you claim fighting climate change is a moral crusade to save the world, then they don’t have to discuss the costs of the policies they are pushing.
The candidates all acknowledged their climate policies, all versions of the Green New Deal (GND), would cost trillions of dollars. They must have hoped the audience wouldn’t examine their programs in detail, because if they did they would find the policies wouldn’t do much to prevent climate change, but they would harm the people and the environment in other ways.
Multiple studies have shown the GND’s energy policies would cost typical households thousands of dollars each year in lost income, higher energy prices, and more expensive goods and services
Ending fossil-fuel use will kill people, not save the planet. Wealthier countries are better able to cope with natural disasters. One critical component of a country’s wealth is access to cheap, reliable fossil fuels. Countries with access to fossil fuels suffer less and recover faster when natural disasters strike than do poorer countries lacking such access.
Fossil fuels are the foundation of modern agriculture, infrastructure, medicine and transportation. They have contributed to a more than doubling of the average human lifespan, a steep decrease in poverty, and a huge increase in global food supplies over the past century. For instance, a March 2019 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found “that the drop in natural gas prices in the late 2000s, induced largely by the boom in shale gas production, averted 11,000 winter deaths per year in the US.” This progress would be reversed if the Democratic candidates have their way and end fracking either immediately or in the near term.
Democrats’ plans to pay for this unprecedented makeover of the economy by shutting down the federal government’s second largest source of revenues — the fees and leases from oil and gas production. At the same time, they propose to pay for, among other things, relocating at-risk communities, retrofitting every building in the United States to increase energy efficiency, giving displaced fossil-fuel energy workers an income and training for new jobs, and “investing” — government-speak for “subsidizing” — in increasingly more research and “green” technologies. Mind you, green energy companies receive more in subsidies than they pay in taxes, so with the end of fossil fuels, government expenses will grow by the tens of trillions.
Democrats will have to print money day and night to pay for their proposals, which will devalue the U.S. dollar, just like inflationary policies the world over always have. If you like the economic chaos and shortages of Weimer Republic Germany or modern-day Zimbabwe or Venezuela, then you are going to love the Democrats’ climate plans.
Yet for all this pain, assuming mainstream climate modeling is correct, eliminating all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions tomorrow would avert only 0.034 degree Celsius to 0.062 degree Celsius of global warming by 2050, a change far too small to affect weather patterns, crop yields, the spread of tropical diseases, or to prevent wars or avoid a crush of climate refugees.
CNN’s Democratic climate town hall was a pain to watch, but the real pain will come if any of the climate plans offered to the audience become re
