The central-government created Climate Change Commission presents its final report to the government today. Can't wait to hear how they will recommend centrally-planning the country's people and their production to combat a cock-and-bull "crisis," and how the government must throttle our thriving dairy industry -- the one that essentially pays the country's way -- and strangle our fledgling oil and gas industry.
A shame this country doesn't have someone sensible to talk to the parliament along the lines Alex Epstein just did to the US Congress. Invited to speak to the 'Natural Resources Committee' on May 19, Epstein, from the Center for Industrial Progress, told them that's if human flourishing is your standard and eliminating poverty your goal (as our Prime Minister often says it is), then shuttering industry -- especially the oil and gas industry -- is a massive own goal.
How important is an industry that produces low-cost, reliable energy for billions of people? If you care about human life, nothing is more important. Energy is the industry that powers every other industry. The lower cost energy is, the lower cost everything is.
Low-cost, reliable energy enables billions of people to enjoy the miracle of modern machines that make us productive and prosperous — such as the oil-based agricultural machines that enable one modern farmer to do the work it used to take hundreds of farmers to do.
Low-cost, reliable energy produced by the fossil fuel industry has made humanity so productive that since 1980, the fraction of people living in extreme poverty — less than $2 a day — has gone from more than 4 in 10 to less than 1 in 10.
While billions of people today get low-cost, reliable energy from the fossil fuel industry, billions more need it. For example, there are 800 million people who have no electricity and 2.6 billion people are still using wood or dung for heating and cooking. 4.5 billion live on less than $10/day.
The global leader of the fossil fuel industry is the US oil and gas industry, which, through incredible innovation, has become a world leader in producing oil — the essential fuel for mobility — and natural gas, an amazing fuel for electricity, industrial heat, and residential heat.
The US oil and gas industry has helped billions of people climb out of poverty. What could be a more positive impact on the world? And yet so few in our media and government ever even talk about this impact, denigrating this life-giving industry as "polluters."
Yes,
fossil fuels do impact the climate. Climate change is real. But “climate crisis” is a fiction that comes from wildly exaggerating fossil fuels' negative climate-related impacts and ignoring fossil fuels' massive positive climate-related impacts.
The fossil fuel industry ... makes the world a far better place to live—and is needed by billions more. We don't have a moral obligation to shrink this industry, we have an obligation to liberate and expand it.
But is there really a "crisis," as New Zealand's Climate Change Commission will undoubtedly claim later today?
When you hear scary claims about a “climate crisis,” keep in mind that climate catastrophists have been claiming climate crisis for 40 years. For example, President Obama's science advisor John Holdren predicted in the 1980s that we could have up to 1 billion climate deaths today.
To be sure, many prominent scientists and organisations predict catastrophe--but this is wild speculation and nothing new. Indeed, many of today’s thought leaders have been falsely predicting catastrophe for decades. 30 years ago, NASA climate leader James Hansen predicted that temperatures would rise by 2-4 degrees between 2000 and 2010; instead, depending on which temperature data set you consult, they rose only slightly or not at all.
Thirty years ago, President Obama’s top science advisor, John Holdren, predicted that by now we’d be approaching a billion CO2-related deaths from famine. Instead, famine has plummeted as have climate related deaths across the board. According to data from the International Disaster Database, deaths from climate-related causes such as extreme heat, extreme cold, storms, drought, and floods have decreased at a rate of 50%8 since the 1980s and 98% since major CO2 emissions began 80 years ago.
How is it possible that we’re safer than ever from climate?
Because while fossil fuel use has only a mild warming impact it has an enormous protecting impact. Nature doesn’t give us a stable, safe climate that we make dangerous. It gives us an ever-changing, dangerous climate that we need to make safe. And the driver behind sturdy buildings, affordable heating and air-conditioning, drought relief, and everything else that keeps us safe from climate is cheap, plentiful, reliable energy, overwhelmingly from fossil fuels.
Thus, the [US] President’s anti-fossil fuel policies would ruin billions of lives economically and environmentally--depriving people of energy and therefore making them more vulnerable to nature’s ever-present climate danger.
Something to think about.
Something about which to wish the local Climate Change goons could hear.
The sort of something you'd like to hear from the local dairy industry, and all the other targets of the goons: i.e., forthright fightback instead of supine surrender.
The Congressional Committee sat through his testimony, and one sought more questioning later. Read or watch the five-minute testimony above to the hearing (which was hosted online), or the 66-minute complete overview below, which includes the entire Q+A with the congress-things.
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