Obama is gone. The “green queen” Angela Merkel is struggling over coal. Britain is brexiting the green EU. Japan is silent, while China and India burn coal like crazy. Russia never did care. And so it goes.
All in all the international climate alarm movement looks to be somewhere between stalling and collapsing. There is still a lot of political noise but the big guns are mostly silent as 2017 draws to a close.
What is really important is that most of this big ticket movement away from alarmism is coming directly from the voters. America, Britain and Germany have all swung away from the left. Only France is still going green, where they appear increasingly isolated.
Mind you there is still alarmist action in the smaller countries like Canada, and the evergreen EU is trying to act, but it is slow going at best. Conversely, smaller countries like Poland are pushing hard for sanity. There is definitely no present consensus favoring climate alarmism among the nations of the world.
As a result the UN’s campaign to take vast sums away from the developed world, in the name of climate control, looks to be heading straight for a wall. So is the very idea of climate control via world domination.
Some of all this must be the Trump effect, but it is also people waking up to the reality of green pain with no gain. This is certainly true in Britain and Germany where energy costs have exploded. France’s heavy use of nuclear power has delayed these unwanted green policy shocks somewhat, but now they are going after cars, which means directly hitting voters.
It is important not to be misled by the political noise of far away promises, like phasing out coal or internal combustion cars by 2040. There are still a lot of green voters so they will always get distant political promises, but maybe little else. Distant promises are not action.
Of course there is still a lot to be done to rein in destructive climate alarmism. But the point is that right now that alarmism has very little steam on the international stage. Now is the time to take positive steps toward sane energy policies. Some countries are already doing this, especially America and the UK, but it is just a small start at this point.
Ending absurd subsidies for renewable energy is very important. So is deregulation, plus abandoning incredibly expensive nutty green causes like decarbonization. The big green hole we now need to climb out of is pretty deep, so we must start climbing seriously.
We also need to return climate science to rationality. This means funding real science, not computer driven scares. Climate change is a natural process that we do not understand and cannot control. So the grand challenge is to finally figure out how it works, not to fabricate coming catastrophes, which is all that a lot of today’s research amounts to.
Let’s get to work while the tide of rationality is with us.
[Originally Published at CFACT]
David Wojick is a former consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science.
