Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

People are blaming heat deaths, fires, & electric shortages on the climate

But their causes are bad forest management & lack of energy & A/C, not marginal changes to temps.

Here's why those who say civilization is unsustainable are making it so

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/the-real-rea…

Journalists, experts, and elected officials are today blaming heat wave deaths, forest fires, and electricity shortages in New York, California, and Texas on climate change

But the underlying cause of those events is lack of air conditioning, lack of electricity, and the failure to properly manage forests, not marginal changes to temperatures.

It’s true that there have been more heat waves in the United States since 1960, and that higher temperatures dry out the dead wood in forests, contributing to a greater area burned by forest fires.

“Climate dries the [wood] fuels out and extends the fire season from 4-6 months to nearly year-round,” US Forest Service scientist Malcolm North explained to me last summer.

But what determines whether people die in heat waves is whether or not they have air conditioning, not whether temperatures rose to 111° instead of 109°.

Proof of that comes from the fact that heat-related deaths declined in the US by 50% to 75% since 1960 thanks entirely to air conditioning, even as heat waves grew in frequency and length.

What determines whether a fire in a forest is high-intensity or low-intensity is the amount of wood fuel. Climate change is “not the cause of the intensity of the [mountain forest] fires,” said North. “The cause of that is fire suppression and the existing debt of wood fuel”

And what determines whether or not there is enough electricity is whether there are sufficient “baseload,” reliable power plants and fuels, not marginally higher use of air conditioners.

The people who manage electricity grids knew perfectly well that it could be hot last summer, hot this summer, and that a cold snap like the one that occurred in Texas in February was likely, since worse cold snaps had occurred in the past.

The main reason there aren’t enough reliable power plants is because progressive activists, scientists, and journalists successfully persuaded policymakers to shut them down, not build them, or not operate them.

And the reason California failed to manage its forests is because, for decades, its leaders underinvested in fire prevention, including by diverting money that the state’s electric utilities could & should have spent on clearing the area around electrical lines, to renewables.

In the fall of 2019, President Donald Trump was widely ridiculed for claiming that the high-intensity fires that were burning through California’s forests could be prevented by “raking” the forest floor.

Many scientists, journalists, and politicians said Trump was engaged in science denial, consistent with his previously stated skepticism of climate change.

But Trump was right that better forest management would have prevented California’s high-intensity fires. Proof came last summer when a high-intensity fire arrived at a well-managed forest.

Instead of continuing to burn the tree crowns, the fire dropped to the forest floor. The reason was because woody debris on the forest floor had been mechanically cleared (“raked”) or burned off, and so the fire didn’t burn as hot or high.

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

In 2019 and 2020, as California Governor Gavin Newsom was attacking Trump and Republicans as climate deniers, he was actually cutting the budget for forest fire prevention. The result was a halving of the area treated for fire by Cal-Fire.

capradio.org/articles/2021/…

It’s hard not to conclude Newsom was stoking partisanship & alarmism to distract from his actions. After all, it worked. Where journalists had previously acknowledged poor forest management as the cause of high-intensity fires, last summer they inaccurately blamed the climate.

A similar dynamic has been underway on air conditioning. Hundreds of people have died in North America over the last few days from lack of air conditioning.

But for years activist analysts, scientists, and journalists have claimed we have *too much* of it. “The World Wants Air-Conditioning,” warned the New York Times in 2018, “That Could Warm the World.”

nytimes.com/2018/05/15/cli…

Earlier this year, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) published a report arguing that “skyrocketing cooling demand in India may also worsen the country’s health risks from dangerous air pollution, extreme heat, and climate change.”

nrdc.org/experts/vijay-…

At no point in its report did NRDC mention the inconvenient fact that air conditioning had slashed heat-related deaths in the US and other nations, and that it would also do so in India.

The main way @NRDC and others seek to slow the spread and use of air conditioning is by making electricity more expensive, either directly, through energy taxes or carbon taxes, or indirectly, through regulations or subsidies for the use of renewables.

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

There is resistance. In 2015, an Indian economist generated headlines after calling for more air conditioning, a view which is considered radical in India, where environmentalists hold great sway.

“AC is not a luxury in Kolkata,” said Dr. Joyashree Roy, who was lead author of a 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. “People suffer from heat stress. The only solution is to air condition workplaces.”

timesofindia.indiatimes.com/good-governanc…

But environmentalists and journalists pushed back. “Installing air conditioning to combat climate change is bizarre,” said one activist. Others, funded by rich nation donors, insisted that India’s heat deaths meant India should rely even more upon weather-dependent renewables.

Today, New York, California, & Texas stand as warnings. Those states invested hundreds of billions of ratepayer, investor, and taxpayer money into weather dependent renewables, and under-invested, or closed outright, reliable sources of energy, like nuclear and natural gas plants

The result, from California to Germany to Texas, was significant increases to consumer electricity prices. And higher electricity prices mean, especially in a poor nation like India, less air conditioning.

And weather-dependent energy sources proved uniquely ill-suited to power societies during extreme weather events, as New York City’s current electricity shortage, last summer’s blackouts in California, and this year’s cold snap in Texas, dramatically illustrated.

Last year, California’s renewables could not produce sufficient power during hours of peak demand, 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., because that’s when the sun sets. And the heat wave was in part a result of lack of wind.

The California grid operator warned public regulators that solar panels and wind turbines wouldn’t be enough, but they ignored him, resulting in blackouts.

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

It was a similar story in Texas in February. Nuclear plants produced 73% & wind turbines produced 2% of their potential output during the worst hour of shortage. Batteries and so-called “peaker plants,” like diesel generators, could not substitute for reliable baseload plants.

The reason for the electricity shortage in New York wasn’t unanticipated demand but rather the planned shortage of supply. @NRDC @AOC successfully opposed the construction and operation of new nuclear plants, and demanded the premature closure of an existing one, Indian Point.

To a large extent, the apocalyptic claims made about the climate reflect ignorance of the infrastructure that protects us, from flood control to power plants to forest management. We take civilization for granted until it fails, as it is increasingly starting to do.

It is notable that many of the same journalists, scientists, and activists who blame climate change for natural disasters also oppose the systems, technologies, and practices required to adapt to them. Many even oppose economic growth itself.

Is it a coincidence that the same people who blame heat wave deaths on climate change oppose air conditioning? Is it a coincidence that the same people who blame forest fires on climate change cut the budget for forest management?

Is it a coincidence that the people who deny the need for cheap and reliable energy sources, and better forest management, accuse those who disagree of denying climate change?

While we like to imagine that we, and others, are motivated by reason and scientific evidence, decades of psychological experiments show that our reasoning is motivated by preexisting and largely unconscious belief systems.

Today, the dominant belief system of educated elites in developed nations is apocalyptic environmentalism, which holds that modern human civilization is unsustainable and will come to a fiery end unless we harmonize with nature.

Apocalyptic environmentalists may be right that human civilization is unsustainable. But if they are, it won’t be because we can’t generate cheap and reliable electricity, manage our forests, or adapt to climate change.

Rather, if human civilization turns out to be unsustainable, it will be because apocalyptic environmentalists didn’t want it to be.

/END