The Upcoming Biden Administration Calls For Extreme Levels Of Reality Denial

As discussed here in a recent post, being a climate “believer” requires basic refusal to deal with the real world as it exists. And no matter how crazy it has been up to now, with the incoming Biden administration, get ready for the make believe to move up to a whole new level. Can we actually change the weather by throwing trillions of taxpayer dollars into windmills and solar panels? That’s what we are all now going to pretend. Kim Strassel sees where it’s going in today’s Wall Street Journal:

[I]t’s all about green. Climate will be the driving priority of this White House—Mr. Biden’s make-nice to progressives. He’ll have a climate envoy ( John Kerry ), a climate czar ( Gina McCarthy ), and climate obsessives leading every department ( Janet Yellen, Pete Buttigieg, Jennifer Granholm ).

So suppose you run a big oil company. You are about to have to deal with a massive and powerful federal bureaucracy that can destroy your business in a hundred different ways, and all the new people at the top will look upon you and your carbon emissions as the very embodiment of evil. How are you going to respond?

The good news is that reality has nothing to do with this. The only question is how to fool the dopes. Don’t worry, it’s not too hard, because nothing here makes any sense, nor does it need to. Over at gigantic oil company BP, they think they have it figured out. Their answer is, buy up a few tens of thousands of acres of trees, and then just declare that your carbon emissions have been “offset” right down to zero. From yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

BP PLC has bought a controlling stake in the largest U.S. producer of carbon offsets, doubling down on a bet that preserving forests will be key to companies meeting their carbon-reduction goals. The oil giant in late 2019 made a $5 million venture investment in Pennsylvania’s Finite Carbon, which helps landowners sell their forests as carbon sinks. . . . “Finite Carbon has the potential to build a global platform for managing and financing natural climate solutions,” said David Eyton, BP’s executive vice president of innovation and engineering. BP itself has been one of the world’s biggest buyers of forest carbon-offset credits, a type of climate-change currency. The company has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on offsets to comply with California regulators. 

But wait a minute, weren’t the trees already there, and weren’t they going to be there whether or not you bought them and declared them to be “carbon credits”? Of course they were. But notice, as the WSJ points out, the “California regulators” are already accepting this game as the way to comply with carbon emission reduction requirements. And BP has gone along to the tune of “hundreds of millions of dollars” of expense. If it works to sidetrack the zealots in California, surely this will work with the incoming Biden administration people as well.

An oil company needs to spend hundreds of millions of dollars doing nothing to keep up the totally fake climate pretense, but if you are China, all it takes is a few completely empty words. As covered in my post last Saturday, China is in the midst of a massive surge of building new coal power plants, with 249 GW of such plants under development — constituting more than the entire current existing fleet of coal power plants in the U.S. (which is 246 GW). It turns out that on the very evening of the day I wrote that post, the UN held a virtual “Climate Ambition Summit,” and none other than President Xi of China showed up to speak. So Xi, with 249 GW of coal plants under development, tell us your “climate ambition.” China’s official news agency Xinhua published the text of Xi’s remarks. Excerpt:

We aim to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. . . . Today, I wish to announce some further commitments for 2030: China will lower its carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by over 65 percent from the 2005 level,” he explained, “increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 25 percent, increase the forest stock volume by 6 billion cubic meters from the 2005 level, and bring its total installed capacity of wind and solar power to over 1.2 billion kilowatts.

We “aim” to “peak” CO2 emissions by 2030. In other words, we’ll increase them as much as we want for the next ten years, and after that, we’ll try, but no commitments. And then, we’ll lower CO2 emissions “per unit of GDP,” which is another way of saying that we will increase emissions, just not by as much as we otherwise might have. At Not A Lot Of People Know That, Paul Homewood has some apt comments:

[Xi] was of course careful not to promise any cut in emissions before 2030, nor give any sort of timetable of specific cuts thereafter. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Sleepy Joe and the EU will have fallen hook, line and sinker for his trickery. . . . [Also] energy usage per unit of GDP always falls sharply as economies mature, growing particularly into low energy intensive sectors, such as services and technology. [Therefore] it was [already] clear in 2015 that this was one commitment that would easily be reached with little effort.

But today’s prize for climate reality-denial in the impending Biden era goes to yet another contestant — a guy named Steve Rendle, who is the President of VF Corporation, an apparel company best known for the North Face brand of outdoor wear. It seems that North Face got an order for a few hundred jackets from a Houston-based company called Innovex, which is in the business of oil and gas services. North Face turned down the order, giving as the stated reason that “North Face will not sell [Innovex] jackets because [you] are an oil and gas services company.” Apparently, the association with the evil oil and gas industry was just too much for the environmentally-correct people at North Face to stomach.

Here is a picture of a typical North Face jacket:

What does Rendle think his jackets are made of? Valerie Richardson at the Washington Times notes:

[T]he vast majority of The North Face hoodies, coats, gloves, snow pants and other apparel, as well as tents and backpacks, are made with nylon, polyester and polyurethane — all of which come from petroleum. Fleece jackets are also polyester. . . . With the exception of gasoline stations, there may be no industry in the world more dependent on fossil fuels than outdoor recreation, and yet The North Face is hardly alone. Patagonia for years has supported anti-fracking causes despite its heavy reliance on petroleum products for its apparel.

Don’t worry, nothing about the new “climate” religion has anything to do with reality. That is, except for the trillions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to be spent on windmills and solar panels, and the crippling of the U.S. economy to meet carbon emission reduction targets.