A Key Chart on Economic Climate Change

I’ve always hedged my bets on the whole “climate change” thing.  Yes, I’ve thought the mania overdone, the journalism lazily ideological, and the expert prescriptions ludicrously socialist, but at the end of the day, I’d acknowledge that concern was at least reasonable.  The time for hedging is over.

One cause of this shift in attitude has been the parade of examples of gaslighting and delusion — from transgender activism to Russia-gate and beyond.  It’s almost as if progressives observed that they got the world to buy into the “climate change” story, so they wanted to see what else they could assert into reality.

The cold-snap in Texas, when the wind turbines froze, was of course a more-direct wakeup call.  As Rael Jean Isaac writes on Frontpagemag:

Why does the media (and entire global warming establishment) find it so important to blame global warming for the current cold spell? Why is it so important to exonerate green power for the debacle in Texas? The inhabitants of this country, from kindergarten on, are being indoctrinated to believe in the supposed existential crisis of a warming planet. Evidence that cooling means warming has to be quickly marshaled lest the public come to credit its lying eyes and, a terrifying prospect, start to question the unfalsifiable dogma it has been told is “rock solid science.” It might even ridicule the now decades old claims by climate scientists, like David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia that snow would all but vanish in a few years.

If the public could be reassured that the cold spell was merely another manifestation of global warming, believers in the prevailing doomsday scenarios would have their faith reinforced and possible doubters derailed before their doubts crystallized.

Run the other examples in reverse:  What other political and policy issues might people start to wonder about if they begin to question the climate orthodoxy?

But there’s a still-more-acute bit of evidence.  At the same time that our nation has been grappling with a pandemic-driven depression, the doddering old fool in the White House was making moves against fracking and an oil pipeline that contributed to American energy independence and prosperity as well as to a change in global geopolitics that was producing peace where nobody has thought it possible for decades.  Why would a supposed president shut that down — and with scarcely any public debate or consultation of the people — even as we’re getting stark evidence that the “green” alternatives could let us down just when we need their energy most?

I mean, for a while,  the heroes on the then-hit-show The Walking Dead were able to live a somewhat normal life thanks to solar panels in a model community… so there was that.  But let’s just say that cold snaps and cloudy days, accompanied by foreign-fuel-funded terrorism, are a bit more likely than a zombie apocalypse.

While pondering these matters, I came across this set of charts in a presentation by the U.S. Energy Information Administration:

USEIA-AnnualEnergyOutlook2021-EnergySources

 

Note the title.  It’s all about natural gas.  If the natural gas industry can be made to stagnate for a decade and a half (the “reference case”), government policy can push “renewables” to dominance around 2030 and ensure steady growth thereafter.  On the other hand, if natural gas continues the growth of the last decade for another decade, renewables will never take over.  BUT if natural gas can be made to tank — if it is basically shut down to the extent coal has been — everybody involved with renewables will get filthy rich.

It’s that plain in the charts, and it’s that simple conceptually.  Our state and federal governments are using their regulatory and policing power to shut down an industry sector to make themselves and their fashionably green friends rich and powerful at the expense of our rights, our prosperity, and increasingly our lives.

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