There’s a whole lot of hot air coming out of New York City this week.
As politicians, celebrities and academics descend on the Big Apple for Climate Week NYC, expect a lot of bad ideas — and ironically a lot of carbon dioxide emissions — from elites eager to force their political agenda on the masses but unwilling to make the sacrifice themselves.
These self-appointed climate crusaders are busily lecturing ordinary Americans about how to live, what to drive, and even what to eat, all while flying in on private jets and being chauffeured around town in SUVs.
As they pontificate from podiums and plush panels about reducing carbon footprints, they conveniently ignore their own outsized ones.
Climate Week is rehashing the same tired, failed schemes of the climate movement, branded this year with an “age of urgency,” perhaps in recognition that their ideas still don’t work. Despite the ramped-up doomsday rhetoric, our environment is better than ever and this is the best time in human history to be alive.
If you’re looking for someone to blame for inflation, you can start with Climate Week. Their anti-fossil fuel proposals have resulted in increased energy prices, which means increasing the cost of everything. Added to that are the tax burden of the hundreds of billions spent on renewable energy subsidies (which have barely moved the needle on our energy landscape) and pressure from the ESG movement, which bullies businesses into adopting climate initiatives or risk debanking.
Yet for all that investment — and all that cost increase — wind and solar power still represent just 5% of the nation’s energy.
Despite the best efforts of the Left, wind and solar are largely failed technologies. They work all right when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, but weather conditions are notoriously difficult to predict and rarely track with demand for electricity. That’s why, no matter how many industrial wind farms and solar panels we build, they will always be dependent on fossil fuels to make ends meet.
Let’s imagine for a moment that climate activists achieved their goal. Somehow they managed to delete every drop of oil and gas and vanish every lump of coal nationwide. It would destroy our society and turn us back to the Middle Ages — as Venezuelans found out firsthand when week-long blackouts struck the once prosperous nation. The American people would riot, and rightly so. But let’s imagine they succeeded. What would happen?
Nothing. According to the same data models climate radicals misuse to claim the sky is falling, even banning fossil fuels entirely would shift global temperatures by a few hundredths of a degree at most. These models have significantly overestimated warming every time, so even that may be a stretch.
Even if the whole world participated, the effect would still be so minute it wouldn’t be worth the trillions of dollars spent, lives and livelihoods lost, and destruction of our modern way of life.
But we’re not doomed. Contrary to the Climate Week event snappily titled “Let’s Not Die,” climate-related deaths are down 99% in the last hundred years even as the world’s population has quadrupled. We’re not dying — and in fact, we’re growing more resilient to climate-related disasters at a faster rate than non-climate-related disasters like volcanoes and earthquakes. Clearly, the weather isn’t the problem here.
In reality, this is the best time in human history to be alive. Around the world, in the wealthiest urban centers and the most impoverished developing nations, people are living longer, healthier, and better lives than ever before. They have energy to thank — and not the unreliable, unaffordable energy the climate movement promotes.
Access to affordable, reliable energy from fossil fuels dramatically improves life expectancy, infant and child mortality, and economic opportunity while fighting poverty and disease. Fossil fuels are the reason we have comfortable homes, access to nutritious foods, and life-saving medicines. They are the reason you can spend your free time reading this article instead of the back-breaking labor of life without fossil fuels: subsistence farming, walking miles to collect water or firewood, and accepting the likelihood of a short and difficult life.
Climate Week’s dreams are nothing more than that — fantasies that won’t stop climate change but would ravage our society.
If its organizers really hope to create a brighter future, they should unapologetically embrace fossil fuels and their power to transform the human condition for generations to come. In other words, embrace the high carbon lifestyle.
Originally Published in the New York Post
The Honorable Jason Isaac is Founder & CEO of the American Energy Institute. He previously served four terms in the Texas House of Representatives.
I don't believe this has ever been about climate change, but the grift that they want to keep on giving and I think the influence of China as a nefarious actor has a large part to play.
You are perfectly right about this being the best time to be alive, and now they don't want us to have that privilege.
Keeping the masses in a panic means control and they know they can't go there in this country without a long term plan - but they are getting there quicker than I would like - aided by AI of course!
Pity they can take something that could be so good and take it down a dark road.
It's sad when we can have for a representative a demented old fool and now a cackling hyena, or maybe that's an insult to a hyena - I think they are smart! We are being convinced that up is down and down is up and no one seems to notice.... so maybe that is what we deserve, so maybe it is time to die!!!!! Can't do that we need to keep bring those dollars to the coffers!
Alas, solar panels and wind turbines for us idiots out here in fly over country that we are, and what ever they want to keep them warm and cool as they see fit!
Maybe we were just kidding ourselves for a few years that we weren't surfs, and only thought we had freedom!
“Let’s Not Die”? Seriously? That’s their latest panic porn call to arms?
These people are truly insufferable.
Superb article!
I hope the whole world reads it and wakes the heck up.