If you’re like me, you’re being inundated with all kinds of climate change stories on every website you visit.
I checked the weather, and the website told me that the current of the Atlantic Ocean would stop because of climate change. I turned on “60 Minutes” and I learned that climate change was the cause of the drop in the Lake Mead reservoir, not the fact that California purchases green power from Arizona and Nevada, so the Hoover Dam runs a lot more. I also didn’t learn that California has vetoed every attempt at building a desalinization plant on the coast that would help a lot of the water issues the desert southwest has. I also saw “60 Minutes” ignored the record snowfall from last winter that melted and started to help fill the gap in the reservoir. When I open the Wall Street Journal website, the headlines every day scream something new about climate change.
America has never moved ahead and raised standards of living without cheap energy. We had coal and a lot of forests, but discovering oil on our continent gave America the momentum to become the nation it is. Without it, we wouldn’t have been able to do the things we have done. We still need oil, natural gas, and all the other fossil fuels today to propel society forward. But, we can do other things, too.
So far, the climate change fanatics only offer up expensive energy ideas that solve nothing.
The first question I ask any climate change fanatic is, what sort of data will change your mind? If this is all science, then a change in data should change the conclusion. Except, there’s no dataset that will change anyone’s mind. That’s when you know it isn’t about climate but about something else. Climate has become a cult.
The second question is, even if we’re seeing hotter temperatures, is it harmful for us? In many cases, we will be able to grow more crops. It could be beneficial. It’s also easier to deal with warmer temperatures than cooler ones. Sure, 115 in Phoenix isn’t fun, but compare that to minus-15 in northern Minnesota with a wind chill that takes it to minus-50. Try both and see what you think.
Is the change in temperature outside of the normal bell curve? Statistically, what we’re seeing could be pretty meaningless. This is especially true when we think about the length of time the physical world has been here combined with how long we have kept any records, let alone accurate records.
All of us tend to use recency bias when looking at the weather. If it’s been hot, we tend to think it’s always been hot no matter what it was like six months before, or six years before. The same happens with hurricanes, tornadoes, and cold. Back in the 1990s, there was a heatwave that killed a lot of people, and in the 1970s we were worrying about the next ice age.
The third question I ask is, what are we going to do about it, if anything? The answer is always focused on the demand for energy. Virtually every solution means doing without. Turn your thermostat up in the summer and turn it down in the winter. Drive less. Limits. If they talk about increasing the supply of energy, it’s always solar or wind, which we know doesn’t work. Besides, those sources are very expensive and would break the budgets of poor and middle-class people. If you advocate for nuclear power, you might as well be the Devil walking into a Vespers service at a church.
The answer to any climate chatter is this: We have to power an on-demand information economy with the cheapest and greenest energy sources possible. How do we do that? Nuclear power has to be the center of the solution to provide the power to run our lives. When we use alternative energy sources like solar, they should be used in targeted, small decentralized applications. We don’t answer with restrictions and more controls. We answer by creating more abundance.
