By Nancy Thorner -
The Heartland Institute, as a prelude and counter to the Biden/Harris administration's celebration of Earth Day on Thursday, April 22, 2021, presented its own Zoom event on Tuesday, April 20, 2021, titled, " The Real Crisis: Biden and the Left's Radical Climate Policies."
Part 1 – Scientific Facts Expose Biden’s Radical Climate Policies was posted on Wednesday, May 05, 2021 at Illinois Review. Featured were panel members Steve Milloy, Founder and Publisher of Junk Science, and James Taylor, President of The Heartland Institute.
Part 2 features Gregory Wrightstone, Executive Director, CO2 Coalition, and Myron Ebell, CEI's Center for Energy and Environment
Gregory Wrightstone. Wrightstone's Inconvenient Facts, published in 2017, is still a best seller on Amazon.
Mr. Wrightstone provides a look into the many benefits to the earth's ecosystems and humanity due to the combination of modest warming and increased CO2.
As Wrightstone informed: "Looking back over the last several 1000 years, back to the rise of the first great empires and civilizations, we see that there have been three other warm periods very similar to what we're in right now. All were warmer than today."
"We know from things like the Vikings growing barley on Greenland and the Romans growing citrus in the north of England."
“Before climate science became politicized, these other warm periods were known as climate optima. They were called this for very good reasons, because both earth's ecosystems and humanity benefited.”
Warm is good, cold is bad, very bad
Wrightstone's greatest untold story about the late 20th and early 21st century dovetails with what James Taylor spoke about in Part 1; notably, the greening of the earth. According to NASA, up to 50% of the earth is greening (what they call it when there is increasing vegetation). Less than 4% of the earth is browning or losing vegetation. That's a pretty good tradeoff.
As Wrghtstone related, "We don't see this increase of vegetation just in the tropical and subtropical area of the world but also in polar regions and in many of the arid regions around the world, including Australia, India China, and Africa."
“Probably the starkest example we see is in the southern Sahara, an area known as the Sahel. At 700,000 square kilometers, the former Sharo desert is now turning into lush grassland, trees are growing, and people are moving back into this area. Not having lived there for 1000 years, they are now planting and growing crops, a great benefit to those people. This is being seen worldwide.”
"And it's not just any vegetation. It's all vegetation types from forests to croplands, according to a Boston University study. This has been going on for 30, 40, 50 years. History tells us that warm is good, cold is bad, very bad."
Predicted tragedies of man-made global warming
Gregory Wrightstone goes on to describe some of the biggest predicted tragedies.
1) "One of the biggest predicted tragedy that is going to happen is famine associated with man-made global warming. But when we look at the actual data, we find that the United States and globally, crops are being grown and are breaking records year after year. Part of that is due to mechanization and improved farming practices, but it's also being turbocharged by changing climate. Warmer temperatures mean the growing seasons are lengthened. Killing frosts stop earlier in the spring and arrive later in the fall. That leads to longer growing seasons, more plantings, and more to be harvested, also turbocharged by the increase in C02 that's fueling plant growth."
A slide showing a chart of U.S. corn bushels per acre green yield coinciding so closely with carbon dioxide emissions that it was stunning. As CO2 rises, so do crop yields.
2) “We're also being told that heat waves are increasing and that they'll increase in the future. But data tells us something different. Data from both EPA and NOAA show that heat waves have been in a long-term decline for at least the last 90 years."
3) "Another great tragedy that's predicted by the Global Warming enthusiasts is the dangerous rise in sea levels. Again, data tells us something completely different. A landmark study (Jevrejeva at al. 24) looked at over 1000 tide gauges. These gauges are the best long-term measurements of sea levels. According to the study, sea level began rising in the mid-1800's. It's continued at the same rate since then with no acceleration in the rise due to any increase in CO2. Since the beginning of the 20th century, we've seen an 1/8-inch rise in global sea levels. Nothing alarming here."
4) "In 2005, the U.N. issued a report claiming there would be 50 million refugees by 2010. One of the most at risk were island nations. Pointed to are the Maldives. It's an archipelago of 25 coral islands in the Arabian Sea. Predicted was that the Maldives would long ago be under water. What's now going on in the Maldives? There are 17 resort complexes being constructed. This is tens of millions of dollars of investments by equity companies, all of which are insured by insurance companies. Both equity and insurance companies avoid risk like the plague. If they had envisioned that actual sea level was going to be rising at the levels that were predicted, they wouldn't be investing tens of millions of dollars in these high-risk areas."
In conclusion
By nearly every metric, the earth's systems are prospering and humanity benefiting from rising temperature and increasing CO2. And humanity is benefiting from a combination of rising temperature and increasing CO2.
While the Biden administration says that their plan is a solution to the climate crisis, Wrightstone calls it a solution in search of a problem.
Myron Ebell , CEI's Center for Energy and Environment
As the final panel member, Myron Bell went back to some of the things Steve Milloy spoke about in Part 1, but from a slightly different perspective.
His topic: "The Biden/Harris Road to Climate Nirvana and the Potholes Along the Way (leading where?)”
Ebell questioned: "How is the Biden administration and its supporters in Congress going to get to climate nirvana?
Ebell then indicated three main routes (leading where?):
- “Paris Climate Treaty”
- Regulatory Rampage
- “American Jobs Plan”
As to the Paris Climate Treaty, what Bell called the Regulatory Rampage of going back to the Obama administration regulations, the Biden administration is reviving them and expanding them with this odd climate/infrastructure/tax package the Biden/Harris administration calls the American Jobs Plan."
Ebell's remarks centered first on the third listed route to Climate Nirvana, the American Jobs Plan, which was described as a tax and spend plan for which Ebell questioned, "Where will the money come from?"
As Myron Ebell explained: "The most recent jobs plan consists of taxing and spending over $2 trillion dollars of new taxes over 15 years, which will take money out of the economy. It varies according to what kind of tax it is. But let's say if you take $1.2 billion or $1.5 billion out of the economy, the tax slide is clearly going to slow down the economy. The plan would also spend most of the one-time funding over 8 years.''
"The so-called $2 trillion infrastructure package has little to do with climate and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The largest single item is expanding federal payment to home and community healthcare, $400 billion dollars."
As for infrastructure: Road and bridges, $115 billion; Public transit, $85; Railways, $80; Airports, $25, and Road safety, $20.
Ebell revealed what AOC's Chief of Staff told the Washington Post a couple of years ago: "The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, it originally wasn't a climate thing at all. We really think of it as how do we change the entire economy. So that's what we're looking at with the mini-green new deal President Biden and his administration are proposing."
Highlights of regulatory rampage
Ebell went on to mention some highlights of the regulatory rampage. This is where Ebell thinks the Biden administration can get some things done, if successful in getting through the courts in 3 or 5 years.
The key one is replacing the Trump Cafe Rule, which itself was a replacement of the Obama cafe rule, to give back CA its waiver under the Clean Air Act.
Then there are various greenhouse gas rules for utilities, for power plants, as well as other green industries like cement, steel and refining.
“The jobs plan contains something that, if enacted, will give the administration and the EPA essentially control over the entire economy. It is called clean electricity standard, which would mandate, as proposed, that all our electricity in the country be produced without producing carbon dioxide emissions by 2055.”
In a chart showing the annual total CO2 emissions by world region, noted was that Chinese emissions are now larger than U.S. and European Union emissions combined.
Said Ebell: “While President Biden is undertaking a multi-trillion-dollar-attempt to reduce U.S. emissions, it will be incredibly expensive, but it won't reduce emissions very much.”
Ebell's Conclusion
“While we hamstring our economy, destroy our energy independence, destroy our oil and gas and coal industries, which has made us the world's largest energy producer, while we do all those things, China is continuing at a very fast clip to build new coal-fired power plants. India is also building a lot of new coal fired plants, because they still have hundreds of millions of people who do not have access to adequate or any electricity.”
Myron Ebell believes: "President Biden is going to try to use the Paris Climate Treaty as the basis for claiming that without a national debate, without ratification by the Senate, and without Congress voting on it, he (Biden) can create a target for reducing emissions and get it through the courts. The courts will then say "yes", because we've signed on to the Paris Climate Treaty. Even though the Senate hasn't ratified it, you can go ahead and do all these things as this is your authority."
“Obama nationally determined contribution at the time of the Paris Treaty was signed in 2015 was to reduce emissions 26 to 28% below 2005 levels by 2025.”
At the Biden/Harris Earth Day event on Thursday, April 22, 2021, Biden increased this nation's pledge to sl ash greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.
"While China and India are pursuing realistic policies to benefit their people, which is odd for a Communist country like China, the American Republic is going to embark on a course of energy poverty and economic devastation based on no mandate from the people or from Congress."
“It is the administration going it alone, saying we don't really need you. We can wave our magic wand and completely transform the economy, the goal of the Green New Deal.”
Questions and answers start at the 30-minute mark of Heartland’s Zoom event of Tuesday, April 20, 2021:
