Thursday, September 19, 2024
The new Puritans: Climate Alarmists Want To Take Away Everything That Makes Life Good
When climate alarmists criticized gas stoves, people warned that they’d try to ban them, the zealots ridiculed the claim and then… tried to ban gas stoves
Then, Climate Depot alerts us to a Bloomberg piece claiming refrigerating food is for planet-destroying losers.
Next they’ll insist they’re not coming for our fridges.
No, really. . Indeed Canary Media, having relabeled natural gas “fossil gas” (nature good, fossil bad), notes with pleasure that:
“After the courts squashed its first-in-the-nation natural gas ban, the city of Berkeley, California, has emerged with a new strategy to curb the planet-warming fossil fuel: taxing large buildings that use it.”
There was a time when people would have celebrated an achievement like having huge numbers of people able to eat fresh, varied food at all kinds of times of year, cooked with a marvelous source of heat that goes on when you want, adjusts instantly, and goes off without requiring a “hot surface” warning that lingers for an hour, in a building whose temperature was Goldilocks, neither too hot nor too cold.
But no, they’re just one more disaster in our catalogue of sins against Gaia, now including your stinking fridge:
“The ‘cold chain’ that delivers our food is inconspicuous but vast. The US alone boasts around 5.5 million cubic feet of refrigerated space (that’s 150 Empire State Buildings!) and three-quarters of the average American plate has spent some time in a commercial fridge. Now, the developing world is catching up.”
Boo developing world! Boo United States! Boo preserving food. Yay pease porridge in a pot three days old. No, wait…
Among the odd things in this puff piece about “Nicola Twilley, author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves” is that the author “says this expansion of the world’s ‘distributed winter’ has wide-ranging climate implications.”
No, sorry. That’s not the odd bit. That’s the bit so obvious it almost didn’t need to be written. All bad things cause ‘climate change’, and ‘climate change’ only causes bad things, and all human actions are bad.
The odd bit is the claim that:
“‘Food waste is often touted as the reason to build a cold chain,’ Twilley says on the week’s Zero podcast. ‘The problem is that in the developed world, we are throwing away 30 to 40 percent of our food at the retail and consumer end.’”
Tell us about it. We just took Roz Chast’s classic “Journey to the centre of the refrigerator” and found some items that we had believed were extinct and which, had we eaten them, we might well have become so.
Even so, we feel the wrath of our (especially Scottish) ancestors’ ghosts when we discard anything. But surely a crucial point is that for 99 percent of human history, there was so little to eat that throwing food away really was an act of insanity and people were willing to, say, eat an oyster or a snake, or have an egg somehow get so hot it went white and cloudy and eat it anyway.
Indeed, the piece goes on to mention that:
“More than 30 percent of all food produced on farms in poor nations never makes it to a store, and a cold chain can help reduce that food waste.”
And in those countries, the food that is wasted does result in hunger, even starvation, though thanks to massive expansion of ‘fossil fuel’ use the amount of acute poverty and actual famine in the world has dropped dramatically in the last century and even the last 50 years, outside places where maniacal governments and movements deliberately starve people directly or by waging such a violent war on normal life as to do it as a byproduct.
Of course we in the rich world should be less wasteful. But a degree of abundance so staggering that we can afford to waste food is actually a sign of progress, if also of certain inherent defects in human nature.
Consider Twilley’s complaint that:
“The abundance that refrigeration has given us has translated into a sort of lack of care, a willingness to waste. The food is so plentiful and so cheap that people would rather go and buy something else.
I mean honestly rather than sniff their milk – because obviously sniffing off-milk will kill you, everyone knows that – they would rather pour it out and buy, just trust the sell-by label and buy another pint. And that is an impact of refrigeration too.”
Another way of looking at it is that food is now so cheap that people throw it out because of the government-mandated misleading label about when it’s still good. What a recommendation for capitalism and what an indictment of the state.
Or vice-versa if you’re a climate activist.
Speaking of capitalism, we have even known people with walk-in fridges. And we’re not bitter about their wealth. Well, not very. On the other hand we are a bit annoyed that the author of the book admits she didn’t understand the basic mechanics of fridges until very recently, especially as people like her are generally big enthusiasts for heat pumps.
It’s also annoying that after describing the various economic revolutions including refrigeration that let ordinary people and then the poor in the West eat a lot of meat, she dismisses the notion that meat protein is good for you as “sort of a sad mistake in the history of science”.
We might reserve that description for the government’s advice from the 1970s on to shun “cholesterol” and fat for carbs leading to a populace that didn’t just gorge on muffins but looked like them.
But according to Twilley:
“we could have had a very different world if those scientists had been like, ‘We all need to eat lentils.’ It’s all a sort of misunderstanding, but it shaped our modern food system.”
Either that or steak just tastes better. It’s not as if the poor didn’t have lentils, or know how to stretch food to the utmost, or that nobody knows what they like until some state-funded scientist tells them.
On the contrary, it’s that meat isn’t just a more efficient source of nourishment, it’s also more enjoyable. To the point that those who could afford to would spike the pease porridge with bacon or ham.
Just as those who could get it preferred wheat bread to bean bread back in the Middle Ages, but either way would make do without a bunch of nattering from their betters.
Don’t think it’s just some journalist and some writer prating. Twilley claims the “cold chain” accounts for more than eight percent of global electricity use before she and the interviewer get into the global-warming contribution of refrigeration gas, and then add that the ‘climate-change’ panic (they don’t call it that) is pushing industry back toward poisonous alternatives like ammonia.
From the government, and here to help you… use a substance that:
“wants your crevices apparently, it goes for your eyeballs. It is just really a nasty chemical.”
So yes, the upshot of this apparently fringe prattle really will be compulsory limits on the size and effectiveness of fridges, of the same sort that increasingly make your dishwasher run for two hours or more, and then a push to ban them altogether in favour of root cellars and (organic, locally-sourced) hair shirts.
We do agree with her on one point:
“you really don’t need to have a tomato in December, it’s going to taste like nothing anyway, just don’t do it.”
Except we’d say grow it yourself. And wait for them to snatch away the grow light and irrigation system with a finger-wag about the climate footprint of home gardens, good-tasting food and anything else you like.
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Stick to the Weather, World Meteorological Organization, Africa’s GDP Is Not Declining
The Associated Press (AP) posted a story describing a study by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) which claims climate change is costing Africa as much as 5 percent of its GDP. Data show this is false. Extreme weather has not become more frequent or severe in Africa, and GDP in the different African regions and particular countries cited by the WMO and discussed in the AP story has grown substantially during recent period of climate change.
Monika Pronczuk, the writer of the AP story, “African nations are losing up to 5% of their GDP per year with climate change, a new report says,” uncritically parrots the WMO’s claims that “African nations are losing up to 5% of their GDP every year as they bear a heavier burden than the rest of the world from climate change.”
“‘Over the past 60 years, Africa has observed a warming trend that has become more rapid than the global average,’ said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo, warning that it is affecting everything from food security to public health to peace,” wrote Pronczuck.
She should have checked the data.
As Climate Realism has discussed repeatedly, hard data from the United Nations and other government and international agencies refute any claims that climate change is making Africa’s weather worse or causing food insecurity. The latter claim has been debunked in repeated Climate Realism articles, here, here, and here, for example, which show that crop yields and production across the continent, except in areas of civil and cross border strife driven by religious and political conflicts, have regularly set records amid modest climate change.
Climate Realism has also shown that recent extreme weather events have not, in fact, been unusual in Africa’s history nor have they been more severe in recent decades, here, here, and here, for instance. In the few countries where food production has been hampered and economic growth has declined across multiple years in Africa, research shows it is consistently due to political strife, from civil wars, cross border conflicts, or political corruption. Climate change has not been a factor.
The main thrust of the WMO report is that because climate change has caused increasingly severe weather, it has also resulted in a GDP decline with African countries having to spend a disproportionate percentage of their incomes mitigating climate change. But since the former is false, the latter is as well. And, indeed, data consistently show substantial GDP growth across the period of recent climate change in the regions and countries discussed in the AP story, and one would presume the WMO report. In fact, the growth rate there has been at or above the world’s average GDP growth rate as a whole. For instance:
Data from the African Development Bank (ADB) shows GDP growth in the region of West Africa at or above 3 percent since 2000, topping 4 percent two of the four years. The further projects growth in each of the countries for the remainder of 2024 and through 2025, stating; “[g]reater agricultural output, expansion in the services sectors, and reforms to strengthen private sector participation in energy and mining are expected to drive growth in Benin (6.4 percent), Gambia (6.2 percent), Togo (6 percent), Mali (4.8 percent), Sierra Leone (4.6 percent), and Burkina Faso (4.1 percent).”
Data from the World Bank show that, excluding the high income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, since 2000, GDP growth in the poorest countries has topped 6 percent five different years, five percent once, 4 percent five times, and only experienced negative growth in a single year, in 2020, the year of the pandemic. The poor countries in Sub-Saharan Africa experienced GDP growth rates of 4.3 percent, 3.7 percent, and 3 percent respectively in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
The AP mentioned Mali and Zambia in particular as countries suffering economic hardship due to climate change, but the data tells a different story. Over the past decade, Mali has seen its GDP grow every year but 2020, with growth topping 5 percent five of the past 10 years (spiking to 7.1 percent in 2014), and topping three percent every other year.
Zambia’s GDP history tells a similar story. Zambia’s growth in 2023 was 5.8 percent, the highest single year during the past decade, and except for the pandemic year of 2020, Zambia’s annual GDP increased, topping 3 percent growth in all but two growth years.
The WMO is a specialized agency of the United Nations whose mandate covers weather, climate, and water resources. It is staffed with meteorologists and other scientists who specialize in weather, not economists, and as such it is not known for its incisive economic acumen or analysis. No one goes to the WMO to analyze economic trends or for its forecasts of economic growth. Based on its uninformed, deeply flawed analysis climate change’s purported threat to Africa’s GDP, it might be a good idea for the WMO to stay in its lane and leave economic forecasting to economists.
Also, it might behoove the AP to do some simple fact checking (it takes just a few minutes through the magic of the internet), looking at existing hard data on trends before promoting economic analyses from organizations without apparent economic expertise. In fact, even when economists pronounce something, its would still be a good idea for the AP to check the data before uncritically parroting a claim as if it were the gospel truth.
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Is Climate Change Fanaticism the Greatest Killer of All Time?
How many people are dying each year from climate change lunacy? The left’s immoral war on energy has now become one of the planet’s leading causes of death and infant mortality.
This is the only conclusion from a new 2024 study, finding more than 1 billion people STILL lack access to reliable electric power.
We quote from this deeply disturbing analysis:
Since 2000, access to electricity has increased dramatically across the globe, jumping from 75% of the global population to 90% by 2020. But having access means little when the power is not working, is unreliable, or is too costly to use. For too many around the world, newly gained connections to electricity services have not resulted in meaningful benefits to their daily lives. In a newly released paper, we report that at least 1.18 billion are energy poor and unable to use electricity, a total that is 60% higher than the 733 million people who lack any electricity connection at all in 2020, according to official data.
So here we are in the year 2024 and a population TWICE the size of the United States still has no electricity some 125 years after Edison’s invention of the light bulb!
Energy poverty has become one of the leading causes of death. Then we have a half-trillion-dollar climate change industrial complex (funded by the U.S. government and leftwing tax-exempt foundations) instructing poor nations in Africa and Asia to use LESS electric power and to avoid using coal and natural gas – the most plentiful and cheapest forms of energy.
If this continues, the climate change movement will be responsible for more deaths than Hilter and Stalin combined.
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Australia: Clare O’Neil says Greens holding nurses and childcare workers hostage after they managed to delay Help to Buy vote
Greens were right for once. "Help to buy" will simpy jack up prices
Labor has intensified its assault against the Greens after Anthony Albanese was forced to delay a vote on a signature housing bill by two months, with Clare O’Neil accusing the minor party of holding the home ownership aspirations of childcare workers and nurses hostage.
The Prime Minister will visit the Queensland battleground seat of Leichhardt on Thursday to talk up his government’s plans to increase housing supply after the Coalition, One Nation and the United Australia Party’s Ralph Babet backed a Greens amendment to put off a Senate vote on the Help to Buy scheme until November 26.
Independent senators Jacqui Lambie, David Pocock and Tammy Tyrrell sided with Labor to reject the extension, as Mr Albanese warned: “Australians want their leaders to act now to make housing more affordable. This is too important to wait.”
Greens leader Adam Bandt declared the government had two months “to get serious about the housing crisis” and negotiate, while Housing Minister Clare O’Neil insisted the party had offered no amendments.
“What the Greens are doing is holding the aspirations of childcare workers and nurses to own their own home hostage, to generate media and attention,” she said. “This bill is not the silver bullet to Australia’s housing crisis, because there isn’t a silver bullet. Help to Buy is an important piece of the puzzle that would change the lives of 40,000 Australians and their families.”
Under the Help to Buy plan, which was a 2022 Labor election promise, eligible Australians would be able to purchase a home with a minimum deposit of 2 per cent. The government would own up to 40 per cent of a person’s home and recoup its funding, plus its share of capital gain, when the property is sold.
The Greens argue it would help just 0.2 per cent of Australia’s 5.5 million renters and push up housing prices for those who can’t access the program. They have demanded a cap on rent increases, a winding back of negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount and money for a “massive” public housing build in exchange for their support.
As Peter Dutton labelled the tensions between Labor and the Greens a “civil war”, Mr Albanese and Queensland Premier Steven Miles will go to the state’s biggest social housing project – with 490 homes due to be built – ahead of work commencing next week.
“In spite of the No-alition of the Liberals, Nationals, Greens and One Nation we are determined to increase housing supply,” Mr Albanese said.
“This project will deliver hundreds of homes in regional Queensland, while complementing our plan to deliver thousands of homes through our Housing Australia Future Fund all around Australia.”
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