Who Is Winning The Climate Wars?

If you get most of your news passively by just reading what comes up in some kind of Facebook or Google feed or equivalent, you probably have the impression that the Climate Wars are over and the Climate Campaigners have swept the field of battle. In my case, I certainly don’t rely on those kinds of toxic sources of information, but I do regularly monitor many of the media sources in the “mainstream” category — the New York Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, the Economist, Politico, and several of the television networks like CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN. All of those (and plenty more) have clearly put an absolute ban on any news or information that would cast even the slightest negative light on the proposition that there is an imminent “climate crisis” that must be solved by government transformation of the world economy.

I’ll give a couple of examples of the lengths to which this has gone. Back in September, mentally unstable Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, whose only qualification was her ignorant passion for climate extremism, got the platform of the UN “Climate Action Summit” for a big speech. Excerpt:

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

You would think that sane people would want to stay as far from Greta as possible lest they get accused of child abuse. But instead, Greta is feted as a heroine. In October something called the Nordic Council awarded young Greta its 2019 Environmental Award. (It seems that she has rejected the award, thus claiming for herself an even higher level of holiness among true believers.)

Meanwhile, over in Germany, a German think tank called the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE in the German acronym) planned to hold a climate conference this past weekend at a hotel called the NH in Munich. From NoTricksZone November 19:

According to EIKE spokesman, Prof. Horst-Joachim Lüdecke, “a left-green mob” pressured the hotel management of the NH Congress Center in Munich (Aschheim) “to illegally cancel the accommodation contract”.

Apparently, the unforgivable sin of EIKE was allowing some scientists from the skeptic camp to appear and speak at their conference. EIKE went to court to try to get an injunction against the last-minute cancelation of their contract, but the German court upheld the cancelation on the ground that “security” concerns trumped free speech. NTZ indicates in an update that the conference was able to find an alternative location at the last minute and to proceed; but of course, the last-minute change of venue and secret location were huge negatives in trying to get any publicity for the conference.

So the very last vestiges of dissent are in the process of getting stamped out. Surely then, the transformation of the world economy and of its use of energy cannot be stopped.

Actually, out there in the world, reality continues to trump hysteria. Do you remember reports from a couple of years ago that China was ceasing to develop fossil fuel power and was becoming a “climate leader” by going all in for trendy renewables wind and solar? Well, that was to fool the dopes. Just this month, something called Global Energy Monitor is out with a new report on what’s going on on the ground in China. Bottom line: 148 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity under active construction or with construction being resumed after suspension. The Global Energy Monitor people (who seem to be associated with the End Coal campaign) could not be more horrified:

[A] permitting spree [from 2014 to 2016] brought a cohort of 245 GW of new projects nearly equivalent to the U.S. coal fleet (254 GW) into the developmental pipeline, inflating what was already an overbuilt coal power fleet, with the average running hours for China’s coal plants hovering around 50% since 2015. Today, 147.7 GW of coal plants are either under active construction or under suspension and likely to be revived—an amount nearly equal to the existing coal power capacity of the European Union (150 GW). . . . Coal and power industry groups are proposing the central government increase total coal power capacity by 20 to 40% to between 1,200 and 1,400 GW as part of China’s 2035 infrastructure plan.

At 1400 GW of coal power capacity, China would be closing in on 6 times U.S. coal power capacity. Why again are we bothering with this whole decarbonization thing? (H/t Global Warming Policy Foundation)

And over in Germany, the fantasy that wind power can be competitive with fossil fuel power also keeps running into the wall of the real world. Der Spiegel reported on November 19 that the end of certain subsidies, along with opposition from local environmentalists who don’t want forests of ugly wind turbines in their localities, has put the German (and European) wind industry in “free fall”:

The manufacturers of turbines and solar panels are dropping like flies, as subsidies are rolled back across Europe. So-called ‘green’ jobs are a case of easy come, easy go. The wind and solar ‘industries’ that gave birth to those jobs simply can’t survive without massive and endless subsidies, which means their days are numbered. With the axe being taken to subsidies across the globe, their ultimate demise is a matter of when, not if. The wind back in subsidies across Europe has all but destroyed the wind industry: in Germany this year a trifling 35 onshore wind turbines have been erected, so far. Twelve countries in the European Union (EU) failed to install “a single wind turbine” last year.

Meanwhile, fracking in the U.S. continues to keep supplies of oil and gas plentiful, and prices reasonable. Petrostates like Russia, Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia are on the run. So who is really winning the climate wars?