By Larry Behrens

Give the devil his due: Senator Bernie Sanders never misses an opportunity to remind Americans about our planet’s supposed peril. In a 2023 MSNBC op-ed, he whined: “The climate crisis is not just an environmental issue. It is a matter of justice, of health, of economics, and of national security.” According to Sanders, climate change is a moral and existential threat demanding sweeping government intervention and dramatic changes in personal behavior.

Except, of course, when it comes to how he lives his own life.

Sanders’ recent “Fighting Oligarchy” tour paints a very different picture. While crisscrossing the country decrying the evils of capitalism, Sanders traveled by—you guessed it—private jet. According to a new analysis from Power The Future, the senator’s 16-stop tour spewed an estimated 62.15 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

To put in context, that’s more than the average American produces in five years.

In fact, Sanders’ emissions from just one tour equal the annual emissions from 15 gasoline-powered cars. It’s the carbon equivalent to driving a gas-powered SUV 150,000 miles, or more than 6 times around the Earth at the equator. And this from a man who wants to regulate what kind of stove you use in your kitchen.

When questioned about the blatant hypocrisy, Sanders didn’t offer contrition. He doubled down. “You think I’m gonna be sitting on a waiting line at United… while 30,000 people are waiting?” he snapped at Bret Baier.

This isn’t the first time Sanders’ climate preaching has clashed with his jet-setting lifestyle. During the 2020 Democratic primary, his campaign shelled out over $1.2 million on private jet travel. Then, as now, the justification was the same: it’s okay when Bernie does it because his cause is righteous.

Let’s call this what it is: Mile High Marxism. Sanders flies high above the rest of us, belching carbon into the atmosphere while demanding working families pay more for energy and drive electric vehicles. He insists there’s a climate emergency but behaves like there’s no emergency at all.

The green movement is filled with elites just like Sanders—people who use the language of crisis to amass power while living above the consequences of their policies. They want to ban gas cars, restrict domestic energy production, and ration electricity, but they’ll never give up their jets, SUVs, or lakefront mansions. It’s not about saving the planet. It’s about control.

Consider this: if the planet were truly teetering on the edge of climate catastrophe, would the loudest alarmists be the least willing to change their own behavior? If climate change were the existential threat they claim, wouldn’t they at least attempt to lead by example? Instead, we get moral lectures from the tarmac.

In Bernie Sanders’ perfect world, Americans brace for rising utility bills, submit to EV mandates, and prepare for lifestyle sacrifices in the name of “climate justice.” But the hypocrisy is impossible to ignore. Jet fuel for Bernie. Unreliable solar panels for you. We get limits, they get luxury.

Perhaps the clearest signal of the climate emergency’s last gasps is how those who scream the loudest behave when the cameras are off. Sanders and his ilk want us to panic, comply, and pay up. But their actions—lavish travel, carbon excess, and indulgent living—reveal that even they don’t believe their own doomsday rhetoric.

When Bernie Sanders burns more fuel in one tour than a family does in half a decade, he’s not just undermining his credibility—he’s exposing the entire charade. It’s almost as amusing as a multimillionaire “socialist.”

So, the next time you hear Sanders railing about climate justice, remember this: the Mile High Marxist says the world is ending, but he’s still flying first class into the apocalypse. And that tells you everything you need to know.

Larry Behrens is an energy expert and the Communications Director for Power The Future. He has appeared on Fox News, ZeroHedge, and NewsMax speaking in defense of American energy workers. You can follow him on X/Twitter @larrybehrens

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.

From ClimateREALISM

By Linnea Lueken

AfricaNews (AN), in collaboration with the Associated Press, recently posted an article claiming that recent drought in Nigeria is due to climate change. This is unlikely to be the full story. Although data is sparse for the region, human activities are just as likely to be contributing to desertification as cycles of drought are.

The article, “Nigerian farmers struggle as climate change dries up water sources,” claims that climate change is the cause of recent drought in Nigeria, leading to crop declines. Surface water is becoming scarce during the dry seasons, so some farmers are forced to dig wells to irrigate their crops. AN writes that “[r]iverbeds have started to run dry,” and so the blame “is pointed firmly at climate change, with conservationists warning that food could become scarce if measures are not urgently put in place to help the farmers irrigate their land.”

While it is true that Nigeria has been suffering from extended drought, particularly in the northern part of the country, it is not clear that this is all or even mostly because of any human-caused climate change due to changing temperatures. Natural drought, combined with human error in land and water management, seems to be the more likely culprit.

According to the article, over 80 percent of Nigeria’s farmers are smallholder farmers, and they make up 90 percent of the nation’s crop production. The article points at maize (corn) as a sample crop that is suffering due to the water shortage, it “saw a decline in cultivated land from 6.2 million hectares in 2021 to 5.8 million hectares in 2022.”

Crop production data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) show that Nigeria’s corn production has been increasing over time. It actually shot upwards the most in recent decades, after remaining relatively flat through the 1980s. Between just 1990 and 2023, Nigerian corn production increased 91 percent, while yields increased 71 percent. (See figure below)

The dip in 2023 is attributed to recent drought related losses, but all crops everywhere in the world has good and bad seasons—sometimes multiple very bad seasons.

Nigeria is already a largely arid or semiarid country, and corn is a water hungry crop. More corn production necessarily means more water use. The population of Nigeria is also rocketing upwards, including and especially the number of not just humans but thirsty cattle, especially around the Lake Chad region, which AN notes has seen “dramatic” shrinkage. The lake, according to AN, shrunk 90 percent over the last few decades.

What AN neglects to mention, is that since the 1970s, the rivers that feed Lake Chad have also been dammed and diverted by other countries, causing a decrease in the amount of water that can enter the basin. AN mentions that there has been significant loss of trees in the state of Sokoto, which “contributes to rising temperatures,” but neglects to say why those trees were lost. The framing of the story makes it seem like those trees are gone due to climate related desertification, but this is not the case. These trees were cleared for rapidly expanding agriculture. The reason this is significant, is that deforestation is known to reduce precipitation and greatly reduces the ability for soil to hold moisture.

Any drought or decrease in precipitation, under these conditions, would certainly lead to widespread water shortages, especially for an increasing population. Drought has always been an issue for West Africa, and particularly for northern Nigeria, which has seen repeated devastating droughts over the last century, including in the 1910s, 1940s, 1970s, 1990s, and recent years.

Still, Nigeria’s GDP has been rising even amid all of these issues, growing at about 3 percent per year. Their economy is heavily reliant on oil exports – which ironically, climate alarmists would see destroyed to purportedly “save” Nigeria from climate change.

Nigeria’s weather conditions are unlikely to be unprecedented, but mismanagement of the land amid a booming population can quickly destabilize what resources the nation has. Climate change does not have to play a major role for water shortages to occur. AfricaNews seems to have missed the most likely direct causes of water problems in Nigeria, which are resource management related.

Essay by Eric Worrall

Perhaps because there is no damage?

Climate Change Is Affecting the Economy. But Proving So Is a Challenge.

Several studies have attempted to model the effects of climate change on the economy, with varying results. But one fact remains certain: The costs of climate change will hit emerging markets and developing countries the hardest.

Article by Alice C. Hill and Priyanka Mahat
May 13, 2025 3:01 pm (EST)

Alice Hill is the David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. Priyanka Mahat is a research associate for climate change policy.

Estimating the economic damage from worsening weather extremes is wickedly hard. By comparison, assessing the price of cutting the pollution that causes climate change is “simple stuff” [PDF], according to William Nordhaus, who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics for his climate modeling. The challenge of modelling climate loss has not kept economists from trying. Their current efforts, however, almost certainly underestimate the costs, even as emerging studies show the price is increasing. With atmospheric carbon likely at its highest level in three million years, it is important to understand the significant limitations of current damage estimates.

…

One thing that models do agree upon is that the costs of climate change will hit emerging markets and developing countries the hardest. In fact, while earlier models simply relied on global averages—largely based on developed country data—to estimate damages, recent studies have used spatially disaggregated regional and developing country data that reveal disproportionately larger losses in poorer countries. Those nations are often in areas already hard hit by climate-worsened extremes, and they lack the economic means to invest in adaptation to lessen the damage.

Current economic models can inform understanding of climate change. The likely failure of those models to appreciate the magnitude of future loss, however, raises the specter of a too narrow focus on the cost of stopping the harmful pollution without properly valuing the catastrophic losses that could lie ahead.

…

Read more: https://www.cfr.org/article/climate-change-affecting-economy-proving-so-challenge

Interesting, given the uncertainty, that none of the models suggest climate change will yield a net benefit, given serious studies suggest there will be tangible benefits.

The claim economic models can inform understanding of climate change seems a bit dubious, given the wild variation of estimated damage. Clearly the models are highly sensitive to initial assumptions, which strongly suggests the models are also vulnerable to errors – the slightest mistake in one of those starting assumptions amplifies into wildly varying estimates.

As for the claim developing countries are particularly vulnerable, the solution is simple – help them develop. Not that they need much help, across Africa, South America and Asia, formerly poor nations are throwing off the fog of Western do-gooder lies, and developing their own capitalist economies and fossil fuel resources as fast as they can dig new wells. They’ve seen what we have in the West, and they want some of that rich lifestyle goodness for themselves. Just getting out of their way would help.