The climate-change cabal’s all-out assault on Americans’ comfort, standards of living, and freedom continues unabated. In fact, the pace of the assault is accelerating.
In May, President Joe Biden’s so-called “climate envoy,” former Secretary of State John Kerry, gave a talk to the Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate Summit. In late July excerpts of Kerry’s address began circulating belatedly on Twitter, raising the hackles of American farmers and others concerned about the ongoing elitist assault on our lifestyle. (READ MORE: Union Opposition to Electric Vehicle Kickbacks Could Upend 2024)
Remember, ideological greenies have varying degrees of fanaticism: There are green pagans, who overtly desire a huge decrease in the human population, and slightly more moderate elitists, like Kerry, who are considerate enough not to openly advocate the demise of a few billion human beings but very much view our affluent lifestyles as a problem requiring immediate and radical action.
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In recent decades, climate alarmists like Kerry have been striving to remake our country’s electricity-generating industry, replacing fossil fuels with intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar power. In recent years, the push to replace internal-combustion-engine automobiles with electric vehicles has gone into overdrive, and the Biden administration has attacked popular items such as air conditioners, water heaters, and gas stoves. Just this week, the administration imposed a ban on incandescent light bulbs. (READ MORE: Biden Administration Nixes Incandescent Light)
In his speech on the role of agriculture in climate change, Kerry himself was careful not to specify which changes he favors. Nevertheless, American farmers are well aware of the calls by climate alarmists and global elitists like the World Economic Forum for humans to adopt a diet of plants and insects. American farmers have seen how the governments of Canada and the Netherlands have threatened the livelihoods of Canadian and Dutch farmers by increasing regulations on farming techniques — particularly those involving fertilizer usage — all in the name of averting allegedly dangerous global warming.
Kerry asserted that agriculture produces between 26 and 33 percent of CO2 emissions in the United States. Consequently, if “net zero” is to be attained, there need to be major changes in American agriculture. Factually, Kerry is off base. The U.S. Department of Agriculture itself has cited Environmental Protection Agency studies quantifying agriculture’s share of U.S. emissions at 11.2 percent.
It should not surprise us that climate alarmists mutilate science all the time, starting with their fundamental premise — the dogma that CO2 is the thermostat that regulates temperatures in Earth’s atmosphere. Scientist W. Jackson Davis “documents an overall negative correlation between global temperatures and atmospheric concentrations over the last 210 Mya [million years ago].” “Negative correlation” — i.e., if the atmospheric concentration of CO2 rises, temperatures fall more often than not.
It is a well-known scientific fact that the dominant greenhouse gas by far is water vapor. As NASA has reported: “When the [underwater eruption] of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on Jan. 15 [2022] … [it] blasted an enormous plume of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere … equal to 10% of the water already present in that atmospheric layer” — water vapor that “could remain in the stratosphere for several years,” resulting in a “small, temporary warming effect.” In other words, if you are fretting over July’s “hottest day(s) ever” hype, blame the Tonga volcano and El Niño, not CO2.
Getting back to Kerry’s speech, the veteran alarmist bizarrely asserted, “You just can’t continue to both warm the planet while also expecting to feed it.” I say “bizarrely” because as the planet has gradually and moderately warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age in the 1800s, agricultural production has multiplied. Between mildly warmer temperatures lengthening growing seasons and the sizable shrinkage of desert areas due to the enrichment of the atmosphere by increased amounts of CO2 (i.e., plant food), it has become possible to sustain over 8 billion human beings. Why this trend would stop Kerry fails to explain. The truth is that if it weren’t for socialistic policies in unfortunate countries like Venezuela and North Korea and for Russia’s vicious decimation of Ukrainian agriculture, human hunger could be virtually eliminated, given the productive capacities of contemporary agriculture.
Kerry also declared that it is not hyperbole to say that major changes are needed immediately in order to “save the world.” That is complete and utter rubbish, and Kerry doesn’t believe it for a minute. Neither do the other Green New Dealers on the American political left. If they really thought that CO2 was an existential threat to the survival of the human race, Kerry et al. would be making strenuous efforts to combat the number one contributor to increased concentrations of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere: China. China’s consumption of coal has soared over the last 20 years, accounting for 63 percent of electricity generation in China (the very electricity that is used to produce solar panels for allegedly “green” energy in the U.S.) even as coal consumption in the U.S. has been falling precipitously. In fact, China burns approximately six times as much coal as the U.S. does, and, indeed, according to the International Energy Agency, China perennially burns more coal than the rest of the world combined.
Clearly, green elitists are working overtime to reduce Americans’ standard of living, which depends on their access to affordable, reliable energy and a host of products they like. Meanwhile, they give a free pass to China, the real culprit (that is, if you believe the myth that CO2 is a problem). If Chinese actions truly jeopardize human life, our government should be leading an all-out international effort to force China to burn less coal, even to the point of waging war. As awful as war is, it isn’t as horrible as the extinction of human life on Earth. But Kerry and his ilk are too busy trying to impose a command economy on Americans to be bothered with combating China. (READ MORE: California’s Budget: A Deficit of Common Sense)
We need to heed President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning in his farewell address on the “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite” and “the prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money.” That pretty well describes the current situation: Political proponents of creating a command economy (i.e., socialistic central economic planning in the hands of a political elite, packaged as a “Green New Deal”) shovel billions of dollars a year to scientists who help to support the climate alarmist agenda. You get a very different picture from scientists who are independent of government funding. I have encountered statements endorsed by thousands of such who agree with 2022 Nobel Prize–winning physicist John Clauser that “climate change is not a crisis” and that “we are totally awash in pseudoscience.”
Over the years, we have gotten used to John Kerry and other elitists flying around the world, telling the rest of us not to fly. I wonder if someday Kerry et al. will lecture us on the importance of eating bugs while he and his cronies dine on filet mignon and cordon bleu. Could the fanatical green agenda get that far? Stay tuned.
