Finally, thankfully, the global warming craze is dying out. To paraphrase Monty Python, the climate parrot may still be nailed to its perch at the recent COP summit in Belém, Brazil – or at Harvard and on CNN – but elsewhere it’s dead. It’s gone to meet its maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. By failing to pledge a cut in fossil fuels, COP achieved less than nothing, the venue caught fire, the air-conditioning malfunctioned – and delegates were told on arrival not to flush toilet paper. Bill Gates’s recent apologia, in which he conceded that global warming “will not lead to humanity’s demise,” after he closed the policy and advocacy office of his climate philanthropy group is just the latest nail in the coffin. In October, the Net Zero Banking Alliance shut down after JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs led a stampede of other banks out the door. Shell and BP have returned to being oil companies, to the delight of their shareholders. Ford is about to cease production of electric pickups that nobody wants. Hundreds of other companies are dropping their climate targets. Australia has backed out of hosting next year’s climate conference. According to analysis by the Washington Post, it is not just Republicans who have given up on climate change: the Democratic party has stopped talking about it, hardly mentioning it during Kamala Harris’s campaign for president last year. The topic has dropped to the bottom half of a table of 23 concerns among Swedish youths. Even the European Parliament has voted to exempt many companies from reporting rules that require them to state how they are helping fight climate change. Switching to renewable energy made no difference, literally. Here’s the data: the world added 9,000 terawatt-hours per year of energy consumption from wind and solar in the past decade, but 13,000 from fossil fuels. Not that wind and solar save much carbon dioxide anyway, their machinery being made with coal and their intermittency being backed up by fossil fuels. Despite trillions of dollars in subsidies, these two “unreliables” still provide just 6 percent of the world’s energy. Their low-density, high-cost, intermittent power output is of no use to data centers or electric grids, let alone transport and heating
You are asking the right questions and, if you study diligently, will be on a path to understanding.
The rest of us are well past this. Repeat it to yourself if you need to.
