Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

There are still people who say nuclear energy has no future but China just announced it will spend nearly a half trillion dollars building 150 new reactors over the next 15 years. That’s more than the rest of the world has built over the last 35 years. bloomberg.com/news/features/…

Nuclear is much, much more important than climate change, as I argue in a major new piece for @unherd

- Emissions in Europe & US in 2020 were 26% and 22% below 1990 levels

- Global emissions will peak soon

- Global temps won't likely hit 3°C

unherd.com/2021/11/climat…

Events of the last few days have spectacularly confirmed that

- nations pursue nuclear primarily for non-climate reasons (e.g., reliability, security of supply)

- nations do not decide their energy policy at UN meetings

- under-investing in reliable energy is deadly

While Biden & other world leaders gab, Xi and Putin are taking advantage of the energy crisis to push nuclear & natural gas

Those two energies are the keys to reducing carbon emissions, but the best case for them is made on the grounds of national/energy security & the economy

No global problem has ever been more exaggerated than climate change. As it has gone from being an obscure scientific question to a theme in popular culture, we’ve lost all sense of perspective.

unherd.com/2021/11/climat…

Most nations’ emissions will be bigger this year than last, due to post-Covid economic growth. But global emissions are still likely to peak within the next decade.
The result will be a smaller increase in global average temperatures than almost anyone predicted 5 years years ago

The best science now predicts that temperatures are likely to rise just 2.5-3°C above pre-industrial levels. It’s not ideal, but it’s a far cry from the hysterical & apocalyptic predictions of 6°C made a decade ago. A 3°C increase is hardly an existential threat to humanity.

Not that you’d know it, if you had half an eye on the headlines this summer. The floods, fires and heatwaves that plagued the world were, for many observers, proof that the impacts of climate change have already become catastrophic.

In Europe, more than 150 people died in flooding. In the United States, wildfire season started earlier and lasted longer, razing hundreds of thousands of acres. Around the world, hundreds died from heatwaves.

But again, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the facts: there has been a 92% decline in the per decade death toll from natural disasters since its peak in the 1920s. In that decade, 5.4 million people died from natural disasters. In the 2010s, just 0.4 million did.

Globally, the five-year period ending in 2020 had the fewest natural disaster deaths of any five-year period since 1900. And this decline occurred during a period when the global population nearly quadrupled & temps rose more than 1°C degree centigrade above pre-industrial levels

What determines whether people die in heat waves is not whether temperatures rose to 110°C — or even 115°C — instead of 109°C. It is whether or not they have air conditioning. Heat-related deaths have halved in the US since 1960 — even as the population expanded & heat waves grew

Though climate alarmists steadfastly ignore it, our capacity to adapt is extraordinary. We are very good at protecting people from natural disasters — and getting better. To take just one example, France in 2006 had 4,000 fewer deaths from a heat wave than anticipated. Why?

Improved health care, an early-warning system and greater public consciousness in response to a deadly heat wave three years earlier. And Bangladesh saw deaths from natural disasters decline massively thanks to low-cost weather surveillance and warning systems and storm shelters.

Dutch experts are working with Bangladesh to prepare for rising sea levels. The Netherlands, of course, became a wealthy nation despite one-third of its landmass being below sea level — sometimes by a full seven meters — as a result of the gradual sinking of its landscapes.

IPCC estimates sea levels will rise between 0.66 meters by 2100 (medium scenario) & 0.83 meters (high-end). Still, even if these predictions prove to be significant underestimates, the slow pace of sea level rise will likely allow societies ample time for adaptation.

Where the secondary effects of climate change do cause catastrophe, it’s often due to failures on the part of authorities. The extent of the devastation wrought by wildfires on the West Coast of America was, for instance, preventable.

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

California has mismanaged its forests for decades — including by diverting money that the state’s electric utilities could and should have spent on clearing dead wood.

capradio.org/articles/2021/…

Given how good we are at mitigating the effects of natural disasters, it’s ironic that so many climate alarmists focus on them. It’s perhaps because the world’s most visually dramatic, fascinating events — fires, floods, storms — make their cause stick in the minds of voters.

If it were acknowledged that heat deaths were due to lack of A/C & fires due to wood fuel alarmist journalists, scientists and activists would be deprived of the “news hooks” they need to scare people, raise money and advocate climate policies.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/the-reason-t…

Elites have used climate change to justify efforts to control energy policies for decades. Climate alarmists have successfully redirected funding from the World Bank and similar institutions away from economic development & toward charitable endeavours that don’t power growth.

This is part of a common pattern: the people who claim to be most alarmed about climate change are the ones blocking its only viable solutions, natural gas and nuclear. This year’s increase in coal production is a case in point.

China has been widely criticised for waiving environmental and safety regulations on its mining recently, in a mad rush to meet winter heating demands. But less attention has been paid to the fact that increased demand is due to climate activists’ efforts to divest from oil & gas

Lack of natural gas is what led directly to China, Europe, North America, and the rest of Asia having to burn more coal. Had climate activists not forced divestment from oil and gas drilling, would not be experiencing the worst energy crisis in 50 years.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/how-climate-…

Meanwhile, the organisations claiming that climate change dooms poor Africans to war, drought & poverty — including the WWF, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations — are the ones seeking to deny Africans natural gas plants, dams, & funding for fertiliser, roads, tractors

The truth is that prosperity and environmental progress go hand in hand. Reductions in carbon emissions came from fracking and off-shore natural gas drilling; both lowered electricity prices, too.

Technological innovation like this lowers energy prices, which reduces natural resource use, moving humans from wood to coal to natural gas to uranium.

So it’s better to see growth — such a bogeyman to Team Green — as a solution, rather than a problem.

The UN’s own Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) concludes that future food production, especially in poor African nations, will depend more on access to technology, irrigation and infrastructure than on climate chang

Humans today produce enough food for ten billion people, a 25% surplus. And even the FAO suggests that we’ll produce even more, under a wide range of climate change scenarios.

Indeed, the best available economic modelling finds that, by 2100, the global economy will be three to six times larger than it is today, and that the costs of adapting to a high (4°C) temperature rise would reduce gross domestic product by just 4.5%.

aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…

Consider the other threats. In 2019 a “city-killer” asteroid passed by — just one-fifth of the distance between Earth and the Moon — and in 2020 and 2021, four million people died from coronavirus, bringing the global economy to a halt.

While nations take reasonable actions to detect and avoid asteroids, super-volcanoes, and deadly flus, they generally don’t take radical actions — for the simple reason that doing so would make societies poorer and less capable of confronting all major challenges.

Richer nations are more resilient, which is part of the reason why disasters have declined. When a hurricane hits Florida, it might kill no one, but when that same storm hits Haiti, thousands can die instantly through drowning — and thousands more subsequently from cholera.

The richer the world gets, the better it will cope, then. But the climate alarmists have taken against economic growth. According to their holy scripture, the industrial revolution, powered by fossil fuels, was our fall — and the consequence is, according to the UN, “extinction”

The only alternative is puritan: don’t eat meat & don’t fly. There are even indulgences, for the wealthy who feel guilty, in the form of carbon offsets.

This is the heart of the matter: climate alarmism is powerful because it is a religion for supposedly secular people.

Apocalyptic environmentalism provides some of the same benefits as traditional faiths. It offers a purpose — to save the world from climate change — and a story that casts alarmists as heroes. And it provides a way for them to find meaning in their lives.

Naturally, as a religion, climate change has a fraudulent aspect. Some offsets pay rich landowners not to cut down trees they could not profitably cut down anyway. Exposed, the climate religion seeks to censor.

The American government’s Forest Service has repeatedly silenced one of California’s most published and respected scientists, Malcolm North, who stressed to me and other reporters that the cause of high-intensity forest fires is not climate change, but rather wood fuel.

The Center for American Progress, which raises tens of millions from natural gas, renewable energy, and financial interests, has been pressuring Facebook to censor critics of renewable energy.

And much of it is working, at least among progressives. Few have a realistic understanding of climate change. Few consider whether, at its current rates, it might be less dangerous than efforts to mitigate it.

/END

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/democrats-mo…

Correction: 110°F, not C! 😅