Pirate's Cove

Remember back to beginning of the Chinese coronavirus, when Warmists wanted to apply all the restrictions being put in place to Doing Something about the Climate Emergency? Yeah, they still want that

Did We Just Blow Our Last, Best Chance to Tackle Climate Change?

In mid-2020, after the pandemic had settled in, I wrote in a TIME cover story that the stars had aligned to make 2020 and 2021 the “last, best chance” to keep the world from experiencing the worst impacts of climate change. Temperatures have risen more than 1.1°C since the Industrial Revolution, and the COVID-19 pandemic had unexpectedly opened up new pathways to rethink the global economy to help the world avoid the 1.5°C of temperature rise, long seen as a marker of when the planet will start to experience the catastrophic and irreversible effects of climate change.

Now, 18 months later, the world seems poised to blow it. Governments across the globe have failed to spend big on a green economic recovery. Political leaders from the world’s largest economies have made lofty promises to eliminate their carbon footprints but failed to offer concrete policies to get there. And President Joe Biden’s ambitions for bold climate legislation have been stymied in Congress.

“We’re sort of standing on the precipice,” says Rob Jackson, an earth system science professor at Stanford University and the chair of the Global Carbon Project. “I am loath to say it, but I’m deeply skeptical that we will reduce emissions fast enough to keep global temperatures from rising 1.5°.”

What happens if it doesn’t hit 1.5C? What if it takes another hundred years to go up another .5C? It took 170 years to go up 1C from 1850, the end of the Little Ice Age? Also, no one is stopping Warmists from doing stuff in their own lives. Why is it necessary for government to spend a ton of taxpayer money, which would include all the restrictions and control of people’s lives?

The most obvious—and perhaps easiest—opportunity to turn the COVID-19 pandemic into progress in the fight against climate change boiled down to dollars and cents. COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdowns shocked the economy, requiring governments to spend trillions to keep the wheels turning. Quickly hard-nosed analysts and idealistic activists alike said governments should focus that spending on initiatives that would foster clean energy and push polluting industries to transform.

This message caught on quickly, and a “green recovery” became a key talking point for heads of government from countries large and small. But, as the pandemic wore on, most of those policies failed to materialize….

They failed to materialize because people weren’t working, things were shut down, and people didn’t have the skills. And so many were being paid to not work.

The Biden Administration has described its strategy as an “all of government” approach, meaning every agency and official needs to consider how their work can help address the issue. But, despite a swathe of new rules and regulations targeting emissions, the Administration has hinged much of its agenda on a key piece of legislation dubbed Build Back Better.

And BBB is actually the point of this all. Here’s an idea: separate the climate crazy from the rest of the bill, put it up for a vote. Let’s see how that goes.

Without it, or something of equal scale, the target remains an empty promise. “It’s impossible to get from here to there without these investments,” says John Podesta, the former advisor to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who now works on climate issues, of the role Build Back Better bill plays in meeting Biden’s goal.

We heard that with the Stimulus, and how’d that work out? Solar panel makers taking a ton of money, starting up, then collapsing, like Solyndra, which also left a big environmental mess. How much was pissed away for “weatherization”? But, it’s not about money, it’s about central government control.