I certainly appreciate your detailed exposure of one of the horrific travesties of the western world's insane energy policies; the misery and death these policies inflict on the energy impoverished people in this world. Truly, I can think of little I find more reprehensible than seeing those living with energy affluence, hypocritically denying the poor, access to the same standard of living they enjoy.
And yes, that we pay airheads to write stories of moral we are in protecting them from climate change by doing so needs to be forcefully pointed out at every opportunity. If we can't cut their salaries, try at least to inflict shame.
Again , thanks for writing these meaningful words.
I subscribed to the economist since the 90s as it was a tonic instead of vapid Time/Newsweek/Macleans garbage but I cancelled it a few years ago because of this exact nonsense. It’s pure narrative control now, so far it has fallen.
Nothing has changed, unhinged statements that climate change is making all extremes worse even though we know this is not true, Roger Pielkie on his Honest Broker Substack has made a habit of posting the actual IPCC WG1 data that shows there is no crisis, no detectable change outside normal variation.
It’s there to read and yet every day the same nonsense repeated over and over.
I’m glad that developing world leaders are telling our idiots to pound sand.
One day there will need to be Climate Change POLICY crimes against humanity trials held in the poorest African country. I want to see Klaus Schwab and John Kerry end their days sentenced to pull a plow as subsistence farmers.
This is just the latest example of why I dropped The Economist from my subscriptions about ten years ago after years of reading. Shameless Malthusian bulls***! Between the socialists and keynsians, there is nothing else in the magazine except advertisements.
Ah, The Economist. It is just another once respected industry magazine that has been thrown on the ecomanisc blaze that warms the hands of the enlightened. If only guilt ridden, white corporatists weren't scared shi less enough to still subscribe, the world would be a tiny bit better for it....less wasted paper you understand..
You really should address this completely innaccurate line from the Economist, "the increasing frequency and intensity of droughts, floods, storms, and heatwaves brought on by global warming is killing people—a tragedy that will get worse as the planet bakes." Just check Roger Pielke or Matthew Wielicke's Substacks. That statement is demonstrably and completely untrue. And they have the data to back that up. Otherwise, job well done as usual!
You should conduct a poll: Which prestigious financial journal is most committed to "green" initiatives: Bloomberg, Financial Times, or The Economist? My vote is the FT, but your mileage may vary.
The Economist touts Establishment Doctrine for the Ruling Class and their World Tyranny plans. And it is obvious if you read their plans published by the UN, WEF, World Bank etc, what they really want is wealth transfer from the Western Middle Class to the Developing Nations. Spread the poverty equally rather than uplift the poor out of poverty. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Climate Change. That is just their latest excuse to impoverish the Western Middle Class, whom they fear. They figure impoverished Serfs are the easiest to control and force into servitude. Relying on their handouts to survive, from their PPPs - Private-Public Partnerships, which is just their euphemism for Fascism = the merging of state & corporate power.
So realizing that this is really all about Wealth Transfer. So avg UK is ~$50k/yr GDP (PPP)/capita. Avg World is ~$20k/yr. So for their "Great Leveling" would mean a 2.5X reduction in avg income for British.
How about applying that same formula to the $trillionaires and $billions for whom the Economist is their propaganda rag? Let's have a great leveling for then. Require them to have their wealth reduced by say $1B/$50k is 20,000X disparity. Obviously that is a far, far more significant differential in income & consequently CO2 emissions. Especially since most of these ultra-rich acquired their wealth through Kleptocracy, Inheritance, Insider Trading, Legalized Gambling/Casino Capitalism, Speculation, War/Plandemic/Vaccine/Renewable Energy/Carbon Trading/Private Money Creation outright scams. I doubt one in ten of them acquired their wealth honestly, through Elon Musk type creativity, and actually building things, things that increase the overall wealth of civilization.
"At the extremes, the increasing frequency and intensity of droughts, floods, storms, and heatwaves brought on by global warming is killing people..."
I can't recall the source (Schellenberger's book?), but I remember seeing a stat that the number deaths due to natural disasters (droughts, floods, storms, heatwaves) has dropped steadily since the beginning of the 20th century and is at an all time low.
The energy position we find ourselves in has become one of competing interest, national security, economy security an hegemony. And the results is a cluster fuck of decision make that a lot of time seems to contradict each other & retards progress. If one would like to dive deeper into this a good source would be The Power Hungry Podcast-shout out to Robert Bryce if you haven't sign up for his substack-episode feat. Kathryn Porter. The episode is full of information on the electrical grid & the U.K. government interventions in the electrical market, which gotten so bad that it has it increased liquidity for the pound because of all the payment, & subsidies.
This is not a one off vas amounts of developed governments have enacted several programs, schemes, & plans like this. Democracy tends to allow this short things to manifested. Everyone is fights for the slice of government pie while failing to take the negative externalities on it's citizens into account. The increase energy poverty in Germany in U.K.-which has led to direct deaths-it a physical representation of this issue. Not to mention the overall increase poverty levels. Yet in developing countries they are prioritizing the citizens over direct specials interest and even though there are negative externalities associated with this too, the benefits far out way them. Look at the life exceptions in these countries, wealth accumulations, and freedom indexes, all going north.
I believe an unfortunate consequence of “the information age” is that humans have not evolved in step with their ability to understand information. We read data, we interpret and extrapolate trends, but we fail to extend those interpretations to the broader context of “what does this all mean?”
Society’s desire for “instant information” so that they can make “instant decisions” has swung the pendulum of common sense a bit too far to the left (no pun intended). Politics have exacerbated that problem – elected officials, feeling pressure to solve real problems (drugs, crime, e.g.) deflect to imagined problems to obfuscate their incompetence.
Judith Curry, the world famous “climate denier” (and among the most insightful scientists I’ve ever read) said it best: “The urgency is the stupidest part of the whole thing – that we need to act now with all these made-up targets. The transition risk is far greater than any conceivable climate or weather risk.”
I tell folks with whom I’m discussing climate and fossil fuels, if you want equity in the board room, you have to practice equity in the world. Current energy policies that suggest fossil fuels be “abandoned” are an inequitable abomination.
... and since the industrial revolution, the US population has expanded into the most catastrophe-exposed parts of the country, including the Southeast (FL, LA, and TX account for 2/3 of insured catastrophe losses over time) and the Chaparral of California, which has always been prone to long periods of drought and wildfire.
In 1900, the population of Los Angeles -- which was a desert -- was less than 1 million people. Mulholland brought water to the area from the Owens Valley and now LA is a lush, green desert. And they wonder why there is wildfire risk. It has very little to do with climate.
Thank your for your excellent analysis and demonstration of the energy gap that exists between sheltered "world leaders", their supporters, and the majority of the world's population.
I have a friend from South Sudan, who tells me "People in South Sudan don't give a damn about climate change." They want cars, air conditioning, computers, tractors, trucks, bulldozers, and all the things everyone in the developed world has now. I have worked in Ethiopia, Kyrgyzstan, Albania, Chile, Dominican Republic and Colombia, and I never met anyone who gives a damn about climate change and most view it as some sort of confused first world problem that has no effect on them. In Ethiopia the two things I was asked for the most, were flashlights and pencils. The Ethiopian kids (who are lucky enough) at school have to share pencils and paper. When visiting Haiti I was told it was cheaper to hire a couple of hundred men with shovels and picks than to use a bulldozer to build a road. But I doubt anyone who reads the Economist has ever tried to build a road, much less use a shovel. They have no grasp of the real world that the other 97% lives in. They have never lived where modern infrastructure does not exist.
The corruption of climate science by the MSM has resulted in politicians and many uninformed citizens to conclude that if we just stop using fossil fuels there will no longer be droughts, major hurricanes, wildfires and other dangerous weather phenomena. A casual review of weather history (done extremely well by Tony Heller) shows that these weather phenomena have been common well before the Industrial Revolution. It is possible that higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere may contribute to more severe events, but the order of magnitude according to many scientific studies is 3-5%. So the question becomes, are we better spending finite resources building resilient infrastructure (including power supply) or spending these resources on renewable energy systems that are less efficient and which will clearly result in an unreliable electric grid?
A further complication is the question of the temperature record. While government agencies such as NOAA definitively state that “last year was the hottest ever,” a rigorous study of the temperature record makes it clear that we don’t really know this to be a fact. The historical temperature record has been significantly adjusted by NOAA, cooling the past record from original readings and possibly not sufficiently adjusting the current record for urban development. In fact, roughly 50% of all US temperature readings today are computer estimates based on what the models say the temperature should be.
Fabulous read, thank you
I certainly appreciate your detailed exposure of one of the horrific travesties of the western world's insane energy policies; the misery and death these policies inflict on the energy impoverished people in this world. Truly, I can think of little I find more reprehensible than seeing those living with energy affluence, hypocritically denying the poor, access to the same standard of living they enjoy.
And yes, that we pay airheads to write stories of moral we are in protecting them from climate change by doing so needs to be forcefully pointed out at every opportunity. If we can't cut their salaries, try at least to inflict shame.
Again , thanks for writing these meaningful words.
I miss the Economist. It was great once.
I subscribed to the economist since the 90s as it was a tonic instead of vapid Time/Newsweek/Macleans garbage but I cancelled it a few years ago because of this exact nonsense. It’s pure narrative control now, so far it has fallen.
Nothing has changed, unhinged statements that climate change is making all extremes worse even though we know this is not true, Roger Pielkie on his Honest Broker Substack has made a habit of posting the actual IPCC WG1 data that shows there is no crisis, no detectable change outside normal variation.
It’s there to read and yet every day the same nonsense repeated over and over.
I’m glad that developing world leaders are telling our idiots to pound sand.
One day there will need to be Climate Change POLICY crimes against humanity trials held in the poorest African country. I want to see Klaus Schwab and John Kerry end their days sentenced to pull a plow as subsistence farmers.
That is climate justice.
This is just the latest example of why I dropped The Economist from my subscriptions about ten years ago after years of reading. Shameless Malthusian bulls***! Between the socialists and keynsians, there is nothing else in the magazine except advertisements.
Ah, The Economist. It is just another once respected industry magazine that has been thrown on the ecomanisc blaze that warms the hands of the enlightened. If only guilt ridden, white corporatists weren't scared shi less enough to still subscribe, the world would be a tiny bit better for it....less wasted paper you understand..
You really should address this completely innaccurate line from the Economist, "the increasing frequency and intensity of droughts, floods, storms, and heatwaves brought on by global warming is killing people—a tragedy that will get worse as the planet bakes." Just check Roger Pielke or Matthew Wielicke's Substacks. That statement is demonstrably and completely untrue. And they have the data to back that up. Otherwise, job well done as usual!
You should conduct a poll: Which prestigious financial journal is most committed to "green" initiatives: Bloomberg, Financial Times, or The Economist? My vote is the FT, but your mileage may vary.
The Economist touts Establishment Doctrine for the Ruling Class and their World Tyranny plans. And it is obvious if you read their plans published by the UN, WEF, World Bank etc, what they really want is wealth transfer from the Western Middle Class to the Developing Nations. Spread the poverty equally rather than uplift the poor out of poverty. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Climate Change. That is just their latest excuse to impoverish the Western Middle Class, whom they fear. They figure impoverished Serfs are the easiest to control and force into servitude. Relying on their handouts to survive, from their PPPs - Private-Public Partnerships, which is just their euphemism for Fascism = the merging of state & corporate power.
So realizing that this is really all about Wealth Transfer. So avg UK is ~$50k/yr GDP (PPP)/capita. Avg World is ~$20k/yr. So for their "Great Leveling" would mean a 2.5X reduction in avg income for British.
How about applying that same formula to the $trillionaires and $billions for whom the Economist is their propaganda rag? Let's have a great leveling for then. Require them to have their wealth reduced by say $1B/$50k is 20,000X disparity. Obviously that is a far, far more significant differential in income & consequently CO2 emissions. Especially since most of these ultra-rich acquired their wealth through Kleptocracy, Inheritance, Insider Trading, Legalized Gambling/Casino Capitalism, Speculation, War/Plandemic/Vaccine/Renewable Energy/Carbon Trading/Private Money Creation outright scams. I doubt one in ten of them acquired their wealth honestly, through Elon Musk type creativity, and actually building things, things that increase the overall wealth of civilization.
"At the extremes, the increasing frequency and intensity of droughts, floods, storms, and heatwaves brought on by global warming is killing people..."
I can't recall the source (Schellenberger's book?), but I remember seeing a stat that the number deaths due to natural disasters (droughts, floods, storms, heatwaves) has dropped steadily since the beginning of the 20th century and is at an all time low.
So the very first paragraph is an outright lie.
The energy position we find ourselves in has become one of competing interest, national security, economy security an hegemony. And the results is a cluster fuck of decision make that a lot of time seems to contradict each other & retards progress. If one would like to dive deeper into this a good source would be The Power Hungry Podcast-shout out to Robert Bryce if you haven't sign up for his substack-episode feat. Kathryn Porter. The episode is full of information on the electrical grid & the U.K. government interventions in the electrical market, which gotten so bad that it has it increased liquidity for the pound because of all the payment, & subsidies.
This is not a one off vas amounts of developed governments have enacted several programs, schemes, & plans like this. Democracy tends to allow this short things to manifested. Everyone is fights for the slice of government pie while failing to take the negative externalities on it's citizens into account. The increase energy poverty in Germany in U.K.-which has led to direct deaths-it a physical representation of this issue. Not to mention the overall increase poverty levels. Yet in developing countries they are prioritizing the citizens over direct specials interest and even though there are negative externalities associated with this too, the benefits far out way them. Look at the life exceptions in these countries, wealth accumulations, and freedom indexes, all going north.
Really great piece. The Economist article quoted at the beginning is pretty shocking.
Your usual excellent commentary, thank you.
I believe an unfortunate consequence of “the information age” is that humans have not evolved in step with their ability to understand information. We read data, we interpret and extrapolate trends, but we fail to extend those interpretations to the broader context of “what does this all mean?”
Society’s desire for “instant information” so that they can make “instant decisions” has swung the pendulum of common sense a bit too far to the left (no pun intended). Politics have exacerbated that problem – elected officials, feeling pressure to solve real problems (drugs, crime, e.g.) deflect to imagined problems to obfuscate their incompetence.
Judith Curry, the world famous “climate denier” (and among the most insightful scientists I’ve ever read) said it best: “The urgency is the stupidest part of the whole thing – that we need to act now with all these made-up targets. The transition risk is far greater than any conceivable climate or weather risk.”
I tell folks with whom I’m discussing climate and fossil fuels, if you want equity in the board room, you have to practice equity in the world. Current energy policies that suggest fossil fuels be “abandoned” are an inequitable abomination.
Keep up the good work, sir! I love your posts.
... and since the industrial revolution, the US population has expanded into the most catastrophe-exposed parts of the country, including the Southeast (FL, LA, and TX account for 2/3 of insured catastrophe losses over time) and the Chaparral of California, which has always been prone to long periods of drought and wildfire.
In 1900, the population of Los Angeles -- which was a desert -- was less than 1 million people. Mulholland brought water to the area from the Owens Valley and now LA is a lush, green desert. And they wonder why there is wildfire risk. It has very little to do with climate.
Thank your for your excellent analysis and demonstration of the energy gap that exists between sheltered "world leaders", their supporters, and the majority of the world's population.
I have a friend from South Sudan, who tells me "People in South Sudan don't give a damn about climate change." They want cars, air conditioning, computers, tractors, trucks, bulldozers, and all the things everyone in the developed world has now. I have worked in Ethiopia, Kyrgyzstan, Albania, Chile, Dominican Republic and Colombia, and I never met anyone who gives a damn about climate change and most view it as some sort of confused first world problem that has no effect on them. In Ethiopia the two things I was asked for the most, were flashlights and pencils. The Ethiopian kids (who are lucky enough) at school have to share pencils and paper. When visiting Haiti I was told it was cheaper to hire a couple of hundred men with shovels and picks than to use a bulldozer to build a road. But I doubt anyone who reads the Economist has ever tried to build a road, much less use a shovel. They have no grasp of the real world that the other 97% lives in. They have never lived where modern infrastructure does not exist.
The corruption of climate science by the MSM has resulted in politicians and many uninformed citizens to conclude that if we just stop using fossil fuels there will no longer be droughts, major hurricanes, wildfires and other dangerous weather phenomena. A casual review of weather history (done extremely well by Tony Heller) shows that these weather phenomena have been common well before the Industrial Revolution. It is possible that higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere may contribute to more severe events, but the order of magnitude according to many scientific studies is 3-5%. So the question becomes, are we better spending finite resources building resilient infrastructure (including power supply) or spending these resources on renewable energy systems that are less efficient and which will clearly result in an unreliable electric grid?
A further complication is the question of the temperature record. While government agencies such as NOAA definitively state that “last year was the hottest ever,” a rigorous study of the temperature record makes it clear that we don’t really know this to be a fact. The historical temperature record has been significantly adjusted by NOAA, cooling the past record from original readings and possibly not sufficiently adjusting the current record for urban development. In fact, roughly 50% of all US temperature readings today are computer estimates based on what the models say the temperature should be.