Who Doesn’t Enjoy a Good Hoax?

                                   As China eats our lunch in the MASSIVE global market for alternative energy

Who Doesn’t Enjoy a Good Hoax?

Even if it slowly kills you…

“It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Climate change, no matter what happens, you’re involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people. But of course, their countries’ fortunes, and given those same countries, no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.” 

Donald Trump addressing the UN General Assembly on September 23rd.

Climate change alone, if unchecked, will cost the nation far more than the massive trillion-dollar tax cuts to the rich, but those at the bottom of the economic ladder will suffer the most. It is puzzling how massive flooding in some parts of the US, heavy drought and searing temperatures in others, all exemplified by our horrific tropical storms, storm surges and killer wildfires (the latter take millions and millions of oxygen-producing forest land away from us every year). There is no good economic reason to delete vetted government-sponsored climate studies from federal websites or to impose utterly absurd fabrications on a gullible public as nature’s power conclusively proves that climate change is the largest driver of risk on Earth.

Drought drives human migration and wars over remaining arable land. But disease-carrying insects, massive schools of fish migrate too, as coral beds and vast stretches of ocean-growing plant life and massive tracts of forests vaporize, making life on Earth increasingly challenging. Heat alone is rising fast, killing millions of people every year. Nature does not concern herself with political speeches or popular mythology attempting to deny or marginalize the impact of serious climatic “natural disasters.” It seems that even Donald Trump’s boombox voice gets a big ho-hum from nature… because nature is governed by the laws of physics with little reference to any resulting death or destruction.

Yet as the above quote from Trump’s UN speech so illustrates, bald-faced lying continues to fly in the face of tangible reality. As alternative energy has replaced coal as the global energy leader, as even fossil fuel giants are cutting their spends on oil exploration or upgrading and expanding their refining capacities, Donald Trump’s “factual” assertions confirm that the United States remains a major outlier in energy policies, although there is a significant rightwing movement in Europe who find it cheaper to lie to the public than implement the climate change containment target levels they pledged just a few short years ago. As China deploys more solar and wind power than any other nation on the planet, dominates the EV market with little in the way of competition from the US and is responsible for 74% of the global investment in alternative energy (EVs, solar/wind generators, batteries and infrastructure), Donald Trump babbles lies, like this part of his UN speech:

“Energy is another area where the United States is now thriving like never before. We’re getting rid of the falsely named renewables. By the way, they’re a joke. They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They’re not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great. The wind doesn’t blow, those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad, so expensive to operate, and they have to be rebuilt all the time, they start to rust and rot. Most expensive energy ever conceived, and it’s actually energy—you’re supposed to make money with energy, not lose money, you lose money the governments have to subsidize, you can’t put them out without massive subsidies.

“And most of them are built in China, and I give China a lot of credit. They build them, but they have very few wind farms. So why is it that they build them and they send them all over the world, but they barely use them? You know, they use coal, they use gas, they use almost anything, but they don’t like wind, but they sure as hell like selling the windmills.” And despite mini-Trump, Texas Governor Greg “I can’t sustain our own power grid” Abbott’s trashing of alternative energy, without massive new alternative energy power generation, sometimes reaching 60% of all the grid power in the state, Texas would have become a land of flashlights and Generac back-up power a long time ago.

And while we are quite used to seeing California companies relocating to Texas for lower taxes and lax business regulation – though some companies are coming back because Texas does not have the research and engineering base available in California – Caroline Petrow-Cohen, writing for the October 14th Los Angeles Times, notes another reason: opportunity illustrated by the massive demand in Texas for green energy. “A San José-based tech company that sells roof shingles with built-in solar panels is the latest to announce plans to leave the Golden State for Texas… GAF Energy will relocate its headquarters to Georgetown, Texas, on Dec. 13, the company announced in a notification document filed with state officials. The company said its decision was motivated by better market opportunities in Texas, rather than an unfavorable business environment in California.”

Outside of the United States, there is now a global acceptance that humanity has now passed that magical global tipping point where slowing climate change is no longer enough; we are at the point where we have to remove greenhouse gasses as well. Think of this one example: as light, icy patches reflect sunlight away, dark patches that are growing as ice melts attract heat, creating a vicious cycle of self-perpetuating release of once frozen methane (24 times denser that carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere. It gets worse now even if we do nothing.

Still, the US government perpetuates myths about the “hoax” of global climate change, as LA Times correspondent, Hayley Smith, wrote on September 3rd: “Dozens of the world’s leading climate researchers on Tuesday [9/2] publicly rebuked a hastily assembled report from the Trump administration that questions the severity of global warming — marking one of the strongest repudiations yet of the president’s efforts to downplay climate change… In a withering 459-page document , more than 85 scientists denounced the Department of Energy’s July report as biased, error-ridden and unfit for guiding policy… The report ‘fails to adequately represent the current scientific understanding of climate change,’ they wrote. The authors include veterans in atmospheric science, physics, ecology, forecast modeling and several other fields at universities, think tanks and research institutions in the United States and abroad.

“Titled ‘A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,’ the [Trump administration] report was written by five researchers selected by U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright. It was published after the White House dismissed more than 400 scientists working on the sixth National Climate Assessment and shut down the website that housed the previous assessments… The Environmental Protection Agency leaned on the Energy Department report in its hotly contested proposal to repeal the endangerment finding, a landmark 2009 determination affirming that planet-warming greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health and the environment. The finding is the basis of many federal climate efforts.

“Among its controversial conclusions, the Energy Department report determines that carbon dioxide-induced warming ‘might be less damaging economically than commonly believed,’ and that ‘aggressive mitigation policies’ — such as those designed to curb the use of fossil fuels — ‘could prove more detrimental than beneficial.’” Though this Trump effort to repeal the laws of physics failed at every level, there remains a huge MAGA contingent that believes every climate change lie emitted by this toxic administration.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am utterly terrified at this Trumpian effort hypnotically to lead us, lemming like, off a fatal climate change cliff of increasingly frequent, decimating “natural” disasters.