Don Surber
Bill Gates throws in the towel on climate change
In 1973, Meathead told Archie the world would freeze to death. In 2001, Al Gore told the media the world would go up in flames. Both Meathead and Al Gore were pushing the end of capitalism and the industrial age. Both men were wrong.
The stupidity continues because there’s gold in them thar lies.
But the mines are tapping out.
Bill Gates caused a little stir by calling for a new approach to using the ecology to end capitalism. He wrote, “Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”
Gates is not a genius. He is stating the obvious. He also called for diverting climate change money to other liberal causes. He does this one step ahead of the law of con men eventually being caught.
Climate change alarmism is dying because none of Al Gore’s over-the-top predictions came true. Polar bears are thriving. It still snows. People aren’t starving.
In fact, obesity rates in the world have tripled in the past 32 years, rising from 4.8% for men in 1990 to 14% in 2022. Among women it rose from 8.8% in 1990 to 18.5% in 2022.
The world is not merely surviving, it is thriving. Carbon dioxide makes plants grow. It is a great time to be alive.
His new approach is to stop making predictions. Think long-term. Replace Eve of Destruction with In the Year 2525. That way, no one can ever prove you wrong.
By the way, both songs suck.
Gates pulling back from climate alarmism because the failure of its predictions have discredited it. As Nobel physicist Richard Feynman said, “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
The public knows this intuitively.
Failing to fool the public twice now, the ecological liars are re-inventing themselves again. Gates said, “Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been. Understanding this will let us focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people.”
The opposite is true.
He illustrated his missive with a chart that showed people in high-income countries use 55kWh of electricity a year, on average.
People in the lowest income countries average 1.1kWh a year.
These climate change communists have it backward. Plug it in, plug it in. The way out of poverty is spelled E-L-E-C-T-R-I-C-I-T-Y.
He wrote, “Unfortunately, in this case, what’s good for prosperity is bad for the environment. Although wind and solar have gotten cheaper and better, we don’t yet have all the tools we need to meet the growing demand for energy without increasing carbon emissions.”
Well, actually we do have the tools, which he admitted to later, saying, “We need to keep reducing the cost of clean energy that’s available around the clock, including new nuclear fission and fusion facilities. More than half of today’s emissions from electricity could only be eliminated using these so-called firm sources, but they have a Green Premium of well over 50%. I’m hopeful that we can get rid of the Green Premium with fission; a next-generation nuclear power plant is under construction in Wyoming. And fusion, which promises to give us an inexhaustible supply of cheap clean electricity, has moved from science fiction to near-commercial.”
Nuke ’em, Danno.
Ecologists killed nuke energy with The China Syndrome propaganda movie. This is a great reversal. A reader pointed out that Gates suddenly embraced nuke energy when he realized A.I. will require tons of electricity. Self-interest awakens you quicker than a cold shower.
The New York Times noted his missive “arrives a week before world leaders gather in Belém, Brazil, for the United Nations annual climate summit, known this year as COP30. Mr. Gates, who turned 70 on Tuesday and has attended the event in previous years, will not be participating. He declined to comment about his memo.
“Over the past decade, Mr. Gates has spent large sums of his personal fortune pushing for policies that would reduce the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet. He has invested in companies working on clean energy and efforts to help poor communities adapt to rising seas, more extreme heat, fires and drought and intensifying storms and floods.”
Pushing for policies is a polite way of saying lobbying.
Upgrade to paid
Adaptation makes more sense than ditching gasoline cars for electric vehicles or replacing perfectly good nuclear power plants with windmills. Mankind adapts. It always has and always will. That is why man landed on the moon and not, say, dolphins or seagulls. If that sounds preposterous, take a good look at human beings. There is no reason we can do all the things we do.
Make no mistake, Gates is waving the white flag. NYT reported, “In the memo, Mr. Gates argued that the world should invest in efforts to lower the cost of clean energy and find ways to make manufacturing, agriculture and transportation less polluting.
“But the memo also sought to redirect efforts away from the campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and instead focus on other ways to improve human lives and reduce suffering.”
The best way to do that is clean water, better sewage, cheap electricity and more carbon dioxide so that plants will grow. 440 parts per million? Kick that sucker up to 1,000. I like greenhouse peppers.
Poet Robert Frost wrote, “Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.”
I say both sides are wrong because it is world without end, baby. |
