Another climate lawfare caper, supposedly by youths (who pays the legal costs?), bites the dust. Governments can’t control the climate, but may pretend they can. Next!
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The Alaska Supreme Court on Friday upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by 16 young Alaskans who claimed long-term effects of climate change will devastate Alaska and interfere with their individual constitutional rights, reports AP via the Daily Mail.
The lawsuit against the state of Alaska claimed the state´s legislative and executive branches had not taken steps to lower greenhouse gas emissions.
The lower court dismissed the case in 2018, saying these questions were better left to other branches of government.
“The young Alaskans appeal, raising compelling concerns about climate change, resource development, and Alaska´s future. But we conclude that the superior court correctly dismissed their lawsuit,” the Alaska Supreme Court said in its split decision.
During oral arguments before the high court in 2019, the state of Alaska urged the court to affirm the lower court´s rejection of the claim. Assistant Attorney General Anna Jay at the time said the climate change issues raised by the plaintiffs musts be addressed by the political branches of government.
“With today´s decision, a majority of the Alaska Supreme Court betrayed their duty to safeguard the constitutional rights of these youth and serve as a check on the conduct of the state, “Andrew Welle, a lawyer for the young people, said in a statement after the court´s opinion was released.
More snow is less snow, and snowstorms are bombs caused by climate change. But this can be stopped by replacing fossil fuels with solar panels. Climate change can be linked to this nor’easter – MarketWatch “When climate warms, snow and … Continue reading →
We know how utterly biased the BBC are when it comes to climate change, and how left wing they are.
They put the two together in this article which is nothing more than a piece of political propaganda:
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, it was the city’s black neighbourhoods that bore the brunt of the storm. Twelve years later, it was the black districts of Houston that took the full force of Hurricane Harvey. In both cases, natural disasters compounded issues in neighbourhoods that were already stretched.
Climate change and racism are two of the biggest challenges of the 21st Century. They are also strongly intertwined. There is a stark divide between who has caused climate change and who is suffering its effects. People of colour across the Global South are those who will be most affected by the climate crisis, even though their carbon footprints are generally very low. Similar racial divides exist within nations too, due to profound structural inequalities laid down by a long legacy of unequal power relationships.
I won’t bore you with the rest of what follows. It is the usual load of tedious wokeness, with little basis in fact, and is simply the extremist viewpoint of the author.
It is based on the false assumption that both the Global South as a whole and minorities in western countries are adversely affected by the West’s industrialisation. To quote anthropologist Jason Hickel::
“The nations of the Global North have effectively colonised the atmospheric commons. They’ve enriched themselves as a result, but with devastating consequences for the rest of the world and for all of life on Earth.”
We have of course been down this road before. By every metric the third world is immeasurably better off now than before the industrial revolution. This is no coincidence, it is a direct result of economic growth and technological development, all enabled by fossil fuels.
But poorer communities are always more vulnerable to the vagaries of weather, or indeed any natural calamity. The answer to that is not the abolition of fossil fuels, but to make those communities wealthier to enable them to be more resilient.
And, of course, that is exactly what has been going on in the last few decades. Thanks to economic development in the West, the third world economy has also been growing, benefitting from trade and western technology and expertise, not from aid.
The BBC article uses Zambia as a specific example:
“Zambia has been experiencing the negative impact of climate variability and change for the last three decades,” says Zambian climate scientist Mulako Kabisa. “The biggest impact has been increased temperature and reduced rainfall, resulting in climate shocks that include droughts and floods.”
These changes in rainfall and temperature have resulted in crop failure, livestock deaths and reduced the country’s GDP, she adds. “Droughts in particular have led to livelihood loss for the smallholder-dominated agricultural sector, because production is dependent on availability of adequate rain.”
While specific events are often tricky to attribute directly to climate change, the IPCC has observed all these impacts in Southern Africa already. Worse is likely to come. “Local evidence and simulated projections all indicate that rainfall will be more variable,” says Kabisa. “The production season will shift and drought incidents will be more frequent.”
These experiences of climate breakdown generally don’t make the news. In an overview of the most under-reported humanitarian crises of 2021, Zambia came in at number one.
For the Zambian climate activist Veronica Mulenga, the justice implications are clear. “The climate crisis affects some parts of the planet more than others,” she says. “Historical and present-day injustices have both left black, indigenous and people-of-colour communities exposed to far greater environmental health hazards than white communities. Those most affected by climate change are black and poor communities. As a continent we are one of the hardest hit by the impacts of climate change and we are left behind as the world progresses toward a low-carbon economy. Without taking into account those most affected, climate solutions will turn into climate exclusion.”
This exclusion extends to international negotiations, where Mulenga says her country has been marginalised. “African voices are not well represented in climate summits, leaving climate justice out of the equation,” says Mulenga. “At COP26 a lack of vaccines and funding available for African countries prevented many delegates and activists from taking part in the negotiations, including myself. Racism and white supremacy have long excluded African voices from environmental policy.”
This sort of amateurish language belongs in a student common room, not in a supposedly objective, informative BBC report.
But where are the facts to back up these juvenile claims? Far from being hard done by, Zambians are twice as well off as they were just a couple of decades ago:
In particular, agricultural output, while showing the effects of drought in the last couple of years, has been rapidly expanding since the 1990s. The final year in the series, which is 2019, still saw the third highest output on record.
Dips in output, as seen lately, have happened before, and have nothing to do with climate change.
As for climate change induced droughts, the World Bank Portal clearly shows there has been no long terms in rainfall for Zambia, though the 1960s and 70s were a much wetter period:
Of course, the BBC won’t tell you that, because it would spoil their climate narrative.
FOOTNOTE
If you think this lot is eerily familiar, you would be right!
The author, Jeremy Williams, published a book last year, called Climate Change Is Racist. I reviewed it at the time here, and it was as childishly absurd as this BBC piece is.
According to his Amazon blurb, Williams is is a writer and campaigner for environmental and social justice. He writes at The Earthbound Report (twice recognised as Britain’s leading green blog) and is editor of the Extinction Rebellion book Time to Act.
He has every right to promulgate his opinions, but why is the BBC giving oodles of publicity to a self-confessed eco-activist, without even any attempt to challenge what he says or publish alternate views?
This is a hugely important and very timely book. At a time when thinkers in the developed world are split between environmental catastrophism and unbridled techno-optimism, here is a firmly grounded analysis of the present day, informed by the previous history that got us here, and the likely short-term future. This history includes many failed predictions of the future which are quickly forgotten, as exemplified by population explosion fears on the one hand and unlimited nuclear power on the other just 50 years ago.
Most of what we hear and read about today by way of prognostications and nostrums for the future will simply not come to pass. The complexity and inertia of the systems of the modern world – energy acquisition and use, food production, materials requirements for contemporary living – place strong constraints on the pace of change in any preferred direction. This is true even if all the world leaders should agree to move in any particular direction, say on a net-zero global economy by 2050, with a global command economy.
Vaclav Smil is an internationally acclaimed scholar, and has been working on energy, food and materials for decades: he has an encyclopaedic knowledge and penetrating insight. When one talks about decarbonisation, what to make of the following facts about everyday life? A medium sized (125gm) tomato put on an English table out of season has involved the consumption of 75mL of oil to get there, not much short of its own volume! The same ratio applies to a chicken (up to 1L of oil per kg of meat) and bread (0.6L of oil per kg of loaf). The four materials pillars of modern living are ammonia (half the world is fed on foods that have had the benefit of artificial fertiliser), plastics, steel and cement: the annual production of these are 150 million, 370 million, 1.8 billion and 4.5 billion tonnes respectively. Note that silicon comes a long way down at 10 thousand tonnes per year!
The key sentence from the introduction is:
The gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast, but in a democratic society no contest of ideas or proposals can proceed in rational ways without all sides sharing at least a modicum of relevant information about the real world, rather than trotting out their biases and advancing claims disconnected from physical possibilities.”
The author is at pains to point out that he is not a pessimist or an optimist, he is a scientist: there is no agenda in understanding how the real-world works.
The seven chapters explain energy, food production, materials, globalization, risks, the environment and the future. Each and every chapter serves as a reality check on public discourse, and anyone armed with the contents of this book will be able to detect arrant nonsense dressed up as gospel by the ‘experts’.
Globalization is not inevitable, but has led to greater efficiencies, but also greater risks – 70% of rubber gloves in the world were made in one factory in China. COVID-19 will have long-term effects on humanity, not available to the futurists of the past, and onshoring jobs from offshore may proceed in the cause of greater resilience.
Our perception of risks had always been very irrational. We are many times more likely to die in a road accident or a fall at home than in a terrorist incident.
On matters of the environment, there is no free lunch in human living, but a reduction in the vast levels of food waste, and a more modest diet in the developed world for example could do more good than rapid decarbonization. Meanwhile the UN rightly prioritised the elimination of human poverty and hunger over environmental protection in their ordering of the sustainable development goals. In fact, it is wealthy countries who are repairing the environment.
The future will be neither a nirvana nor a hell on earth, but an evolution of the past, a combination of our best endeavours hindered by obstacles and aided by serendipity.
What is also of great concern is the extent to which knowledgeable people are meretricious (my word) in misleading the less knowledgeable. Why are the extreme scenarios (for good or evil) focussed on to the extent that they become taken up as the mostly likely future? This is particularly bad in the case of climate science studies and the way the results are portrayed in the media.
This book is a very strong antidote of realism against both the relentless pessimism and the blithe optimism of our day.
Iowa Climate Science Education 