• The cries of climate alarm get ever louder and more urgent. (E.g., New York Times, January 9, “It’s confirmed: 2023 was the planet’s warmest year on record and perhaps in the last 100,000 years. By far.”). We’re all about to boil! Something must be done!

• OK, but then there is the proposed solution: Order up by government fiat that our current fully working and inexpensive energy system must be replaced with a never-demonstrated pipe dream conjured up by political science and gender studies majors who know nothing about how an energy system works.

• We’re far enough into this by now that some of the pieces are starting to blow up in dramatic fashion. Are we allowed to notice?

Maybe the impetus was the California Democratic Convention that took place this past weekend, or maybe it is the upcoming first presidential debate later this month, but it certainly seems that the score-plus of Democratic presidential candidates have entered a bidding war of ever-more-extravagant campaign proposals. And in no field is this more true than in the field of what they call “climate change,” aka spending vast sums of taxpayer and ratepayer money in the futile effort to restrict fossil fuels and promote alternative and useless methods of energy production like wind and solar.

As noted here just last week, minor candidate Governor Jay Inslee of the state of Washington got the ball rolling, trying to grab this issue as his own by “making climate change the center of his campaign” and declaring a series of pie-in-the-sky goals like: “Reach 100% zero emissions in new light- and medium-duty vehicles and all buses, achieve 100% zero-carbon pollution from all new commercial and residential buildings; and set a national 100% Clean Electricity Standard, requiring 100% carbon-neutral power by 2030 .” Well, you can’t expect the other candidates just to take that kind of thing lying down. Here are some of the bids from competing candidates:

• At berniesanders.com, the program to “combat climate change” includes such things as “[p]ass a Green New Deal,” “[b]an fracking and new fossil fuel infrastructure and keep oil, gas, and coal in the ground . . . .,” and “[e]nd exports of coal, natural gas, and crude oil.” . . .

Meanwhile, out in the rest of the world, they continue to laugh at this spectacle. Just last week, Bloomberg reported on efforts by the Chinese government to get their miners to reduce the price of coal so that the price of electricity can drop and more coal-based electricity can be consumed: . . .

OK, I know that back in August (and repeated as recently as December 29) I said that “the whole idea of reducing carbon emissions as a supposed ‘solution’ to ‘climate change’ is over.” In those two posts and others, I have pointed to one country (or continent) after another giving up on so-called “renewables” and carbon taxes and even the whole idea of emissions reductions, and going instead for some good old reliable coal: China, India, Africa, Japan, Australia, even Canada and Germany. Now we have the gilets jaunes in France, still protesting after two months over a lousy 17 cents per gallon gasoline tax increase that definitely would never make enough of a difference in world “climate” that it could be measured, let alone noticed. And I haven’t even previously mentioned the new Energy Plan from Poland, presented at the close of 2018, which promises to scrap all wind turbines by 2035.

Does anybody other than a UN bureaucrat even care about this issue any more? Yes, at least if you go by what they say, plenty of people do. And we’re not talking about nobodies here.

For example, there is the new Democratic majority in the U.S. Congress. . . .