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Commentary: Biden, U.N. Elites Spread Climate Disinformation – Michael Shellenberger


These translations are done via Google Translate

By Michael Shellenberger

6 Big Lies Debunked

Myth #1: Climate change is catastrophic

President Joe Biden: We see our mission to avert climate catastrophe.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres: Climate change is a defining issue of our time. It is the central challenge of our century.

Fact: Natural disasters are going down

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Shellenberger: It’s being caused by humans but it’s certainly not the end of the world. Those disasters that everybody talks about are actually going down. The graph below is from the only source of global disaster information in the world, the EM-DAT Center in Belgium. It shows that the number of global weather and climate disasters since the beginning of the century has gone down. How could that possibly be the case? All we’ve heard is the opposite.

Leonardo DiCaprio: We are seeing extreme weather events.

Shellenberger: Disasters are measured as two things, deaths and costs. Natural disasters, in other words, are not extreme weather events. There is evidence that we are seeing some more extreme weather, particularly temperature extremes, heat waves, and precipitation. But a disaster is when it kills somebody and causes economic damage, and those costs are going down.

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Why? Because we’re becoming more resilient. So the number of people that died from natural disasters declined by over 90% around the world during a period when the global population has quadrupled. Around 400 people die in the United States from natural disasters, annually. That’s nowhere close to the 100,000 people who die of drug overdoses nor the 35,000 who die of car accidents.

Myth #2: Climate change is worsening flooding

Biden: Meanwhile, the Niger River in West Africa is swollen because of more intense rainfall that is wreaking havoc on fishing and farming communities in Nigeria. Flooding has recently killed 600 people. The climate crisis is about human security, economic security, environmental security, national security, and the very life of the planet.

Fact: Flooding can be prevented through flood management

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Shellenberger: What explains then these floods that we’re seeing? Basically, all of it can be explained by the fact that more people are living in areas where there’s flooding. So as cities grow, more people are living near flood zones

Floods in Pakistan, and the damage in death from floods in Pakistan, are actually also declining. You have to remember, flood control can prevent floods. That’s why we have these beautiful flood management systems, so we’re not doomed because of greater precipitation to greater flooding.

What about the costs? If you don’t account for more wealth in harm’s way, then it looks like the cost of natural disasters has gone up. But that’s because if you go to Miami Beach today, as opposed to a hundred years ago, there are just a lot more buildings and wealth there. So when a hurricane rips through, there is more economic damage.

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Myth #3: Climate change means we’ll run out of food

Shellenberger: What about food?

Biden: Africa is home to many nations considered most vulnerable to climate change and food insecurity.

Fact: We will grow more food in the future because irrigation, tractors, and fertilizer outweigh slightly warmer temperatures

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Shellenberger: According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the main event in terms of whether or not we’re going to grow enough food in the future is whether or not poor countries have access to irrigation, fertilizer, and tractors. In rainfed systems, where there is no irrigation, they do anticipate a small decline of overall yields from climate change, but they also anticipate much larger increases in yields with technical change, fertilizer, tractors, and pesticides.

Myth #4: Climate change threatens human extinction

DiCaprio: None of this is rhetoric and none of it is hysteria.

Fact: There is no scientific basis for predicting human extinction from climate change

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Shellenberger: Somewhere between one-third to 50% of all human beings in the world think that climate change is going to make humankind extinct. That’s not something that’s in any United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. That’s not a mainstream view. There’s no evidence for that.

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Here’s the most shocking thing, and something you never would find out if you read The New York Times. Global carbon emissions actually slightly declined over the last 10 years. They declined in the United States from 2005 to 2020 by 22%, and 61% of that decline was just by switching from coal to natural gas.

Myth #5: Fires are getting worse

Prince Harry: As we sit here today, our world is on fire again.

Fact: Fires are declining

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Shellenberger: We’ve seen a decline in fires. Fires declined because we had less deforestation than we had in previous decades.

There’s no need for catastrophic high-intensity fires. You just have to maintain the forests. You just have to have a combination of prescribed burns and mechanical thinning of forests. We used to just produce a lot more paper and pulp. Thanks to our iPhones, we don’t need to use newspapers as much anymore. So we have to maintain those forests, and it’s expensive. It requires a lot of people’s effort.

And when we’ve had this incredibly heavy focus on climate change to the exclusion of doing things like maintaining our forests, which the government actually cut the budget for, you end up with these catastrophic fires. It’s just a management issue. This is not like going to Mars or something. This is just maintaining your civilization

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Myth #6: Renewables can replace fossil fuels

Shellenberger: What about renewables?

Guterres: I called for coalitions of support for high-emitting emerging economies to accelerate the transition from coal towards renewables. Wealthier countries and international financial institutions provide financial and technical assistance to help emerging economies speed up their own renewable energy transition.

DiCaprio: The good news is that renewable energy is not only achievable but good economic policy.

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Shellenberger: We’ve been in a huge renewables experiment around the world, particularly here in California, but also in places like Germany, and it’s now clear that they just can’t power our high-energy civilization. You can see that California cities have the most expensive electricity in the country outside of Hawaii, which has to ship fuel to burn in its power plants. We have the most expensive electricity, and that’s because of the heavy use of solar panels and winter turbines. We saw our electricity prices rise seven times more in California than in the rest of the United States over the last decade.

The reason is that solar and wind don’t produce the power when you do need them and then they produce too much power when you don’t need it and so you end up having to pay someone to take the power when you’re not using it and having to run your backup generators. That’s why we were on the cusp of blackouts two weeks ago. The sun starts to decline at the very moment that demand for electricity rises around 5:00 PM.

If you buy a solar panel, it’s cheaper today by 75% to even 90% than it was 10 years. But it makes electricity expensive because when you add all that solar and wind to the grid, it takes more backup power, plants, more wires, and more people to manage that intermittency into the grid.

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The more renewables you have, the more expensive your electricity is. That’s true around the world. California actually used to get more electricity from zero-carbon energy in 2011 than we do today. Why? Because we had a nuclear power plant operating that our previous governor shut down and because we’re in a drought so we don’t have as much hydroelectricity. As a result of this heavy dependence on renewables with a shortage of natural gas, we’re actually going to go and burn more coal this year.

Fundamentally, this is a problem of the dilute nature of sunlight and wind. There’s just not enough energy in those fuels. So you have to spread solar collectors over a much larger amount of land, about 300 to 400 times more land to get the same amount of electricity from a solar farm as from a nuclear power plant

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And we can’t keep importing solar panels from China because they’re made by incarcerated Uyghur Muslims, mostly in concentration camps. For me, this is just a fundamental moral issue. We shouldn’t be importing things from places that are committing what the State Department calls genocide.

Guterres: Many of today’s conflicts are linked to growing climate, chaos, and war. Ukraine has exposed the profound risks of our fossil fuel addiction

Shellenberger: We saw that Europe became overly dependent on Russian natural gas. That’s why they were not able to deter Russia from invading Ukraine. And now Europe is in the worst energy crisis, probably in its history and certainly, in 50 years. Germany is rapidly de-industrializing. Fertilizer production declined 70%. Steel manufacturing declined by about 50%.

The raw materials for renewables are almost all refined in China. Renewables thus require increasing the material intensity of energy. When you move from natural gas and nuclear to solar and wind and batteries you are shifting your dependence from the United States to China. That’s not going to happen.

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