Climate and Green Energy Scams Face Long-Overdue Scrutiny, Scorn
A costly Green New Scam premised upon conflicted special interests of climate pseudoscience science and rent seeking wind/solar industries mutually invoke entirely unwarranted fear and fantasies.
Any claim of a consensus that “science is settled” regarding the existence of a dire climate crisis caused by carbon dioxide is a deceptive, destructive, and costly fraud.
A “World Climate Declaration” made public by the non-profit scientific Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL) endorsed in 2023 by 1,609 informed scientists and professionals – including two Nobel Laureates — asserts the opposite, that here is no such climate emergency consensus.
On top of this, proposals driven by climate alarmism to rapidly transition America away from the more than 80% of energy provided by fossil fuels by sufficiently increasing intermittent wind and solar systems currently producing about 3% combined are additionally delusional, with solar producing less than 1%.
The Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim observes that over the past three decades, someone who pigheadedly didn’t embrace the belief that “science was settled” that life on earth faces imminent extinction from “global warming” and, later, “climate change,” was labeled a crank, or worse a “climate denier.”
The latter characterization — an offensive epitaph sometimes hurled against me and many of my writings on the subject — presents an obvious correlation with ignorant disbelievers who’ve denied horrific historical events.
So yes, climate changes, and has been doing so ever since our planet had an atmosphere. Besides, if it didn’t, we wouldn’t need a word for it other than just “weather.”
As Swaim points out, “The possibility that an entire academic discipline, climate science, could have gone badly amiss by groupthink and self-flattery wasn’t thought possible. In many quarters this orthodoxy still reigns unquestioned.”
Fortunately, that circumstance appears to be changing.
As observed in this writer’s previous Feb. 7 column, President Donald Trump’s landslide election offers heaping amounts of evidence, that a majority of Americans have lost patience and charity for woke government policies.
Edicts premised upon unsupported alarmist climate claims and wildly unrealistic green capacity projections that choke energy-driven consumer commodity costs and lifestyles, business and employment opportunities, and national prosperity and security.
All one need do is look at California and New York as painful examples.
California’s Legislative Analyst Office (LAO) recently released a report revealing that the Golden State’s average monthly electricity rates for residential customers have nearly doubled since 2019, a trend negatively influenced by green energy policies.
LAO attributes major contributing factors for these price hikes to “ambitious” greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets and taxpayer-funded energy programs, leading to the nation’s second highest rates following Hawaii.
The California Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) requires that by 2030, 60% of an electricity provider’s portfolio must come from more costly “renewable energy” resources, and legislation signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., in 2022, seeks to require that 85% of the state’s GHGs are reduced to below 1990 levels by 2045.
Making matters worse, Californians are also seeing increased energy costs resulting from programs that are using their tax dollars to build many thousands of charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs), which-in turn, increase electricity demand and shortages.
As consequences, LAO found that, “On average, residential electricity rates in California are close to double those in the rest of the nation.”
Nevertheless, New York is making great progress in competing with California and Hawaii to achieve distinction for the nation’s highest electricity costs.
In attempting to meet a state-wide mandate that 70% of power generation come from renewables (including hydropower from Quebec) by 2030, investor-owned Con Edison, which serves New York City and its suburbs, proposes to hike utility bills by 11.4% on average and 13.3% for gas service.
This will raise average residential electricity bills to about $500 monthly, $154 more than five years ago.
And that vital hydropower from Quebec?
Another transmission line under construction to provide more is costing a whopping $6 billion, four times more than Con Edison’s proposed electricity rate increase this year.
Still, in November the New York Independent System Operator warned of potential power shortages next year if the line isn’t operational by May.
Meanwhile, last spring state regulators cancelled three offshore wind contracts owing to rising interest rates and inflation along with a planned 175-mile-long transmission line to power New York City from gigantic upstate wind and solar farms.
It hasn’t helped that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo mandated a premature shutdown of the Indian Point nuclear plant that generated about a quarter of New York City’s power plus banned shale fracking and vetoed gas pipelines.
These actions will continue to drive up electricity costs since Con Edison says they need more money for infrastructure upgrades to strengthen their power grid as more intermittent renewables come online, particularly at a time of increased electricity demands related to New York’s climate regulations banning gas hookups for new buildings.
There should be no wonder why deep blue New York and California, along with Illinois, led the nation in 2023 population losses.
Ironically, those who are least able to afford these unnecessary financial burdens caused by woefully misguided climate-alarm energy policies are typically the same lowest income ones, including many elderly, who can’t afford relocation expenses . . . the very same populations that virtue-signaling liberals hypocritically purport to care most about.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is “Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design” (2022). Read Larry Bell’s Reports — More Here.
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