Richard Jones

Part 2: What must we do? 

In the service of a multi-billion pound industry

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In my introduction last month, I explained that I accepted the premises of climatists (a term that I will adopt, coined by people responding to being called denialists) when I set down to write about the project of saving the world from climate emergency being hijacked by commercial interests–but that my acceptance of those premises was shattered as I prepared to write.

To be clear, I accepted the climate emergency agenda in these terms:

1. Global climate is warming.

2. This is due primarily to human input, specifically the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide due to burning fossil fuels. (I never took seriously other inputs such as methane.)

3. Without drastic changes to the human input, global warming will continue with catastrophic consequences.

While writing, I became agnostic on those claims. Since then, I have come close to rejecting them. However, for the purpose of this article, I write as if they are valid. (“For the sake of the argument”, if you please.) I hope this works for the reader. It works for me, because it was in that frame of mind that I conceived the idea of describing how utterly fraudulent and venal are the solutions promoted for citizens, but mainly because to refute a solution it helps to provisionally endorse the problem.

The human input to the climate emergency is supposedly carbon dioxide. Methane gets a mention, for a laugh, but mostly it’s CO₂. CO₂ is one of the things, like water, that has a cycle in the biosphere. It is produced by respiration, consumed in photosynthesis, absorbed and released by oceans, brick, mortar, etc. (The mortar is just re-absorbing CO₂ released during production of the lime ingredient, from limestone.)

If global climate is warming due to human input, the input is primarily CO₂ derived from burning fossil fuels, and this is the focus for most of the doctrine on what has to be done. Even the commercial media tend to get the methane question right, using it for entertainment and joking about cow farts. Methane is the simplest hydrocarbon, one carbon and four hydrogen atoms. The doctrine that it is a much more powerful ‘greenhouse gas’ than carbon dioxide is just a tease from compulsive manipulators. They still talk about ‘carbon’ meaning carbon dioxide.

What is to be done?  

There are two scripts for climate change action. One is for individuals. As it is essential marketing, with no bearing on climate, I can look at it here before examining the evidence for a climate emergency. The other script, for governments (and alliances, international organisations, etc.) is better considered after attempting to assess the claims about climate change.

Putting aside bit parts like methane and nitrous oxide, we are exhorted to reduce our CO₂ contribution in two ways: direct, by burning less fossil fuel, and indirect, by using less energy derived industrially from fossil fuels.

There are two kinds of reductions to burning less. There are the trivial ones, and then the ones that are accompanied by an—increase—in industrial input.

Politicians favour the trivial ones, as mindless exhortation is cheaper and easier than actually doing their job, which if they believe in the climate emergency would mean taking emergency action in areas such as power generation and expanding and modernising public transport. China, one of those rare countries with responsible government, is doing those things.

One apparently substantial reduction is the use of electric vehicles. As climatist propaganda routinely adds a mix of generalised environmentalism, it is reasonable to point out that lithium batteries pose a serious pollution threat. However the main issue is that batteries are temporary storage, not a primary energy source. Most of them are recharged from the grid, with the energy coming from fossil fuels. Some people charge their cars at home from rooftop solar panels. That small real reduction has to be weighed against the energy input to producing the batteries, charging stations, and solar installations. I wouldn’t attempt to construct the balance sheet, but it is plain that if there is a net reduction in CO₂ output, it is a tiny proportion of total CO₂ output, the majority of which is from power stations instead of vehicles.

An attempt at a cleaner solution is the hydrogen powered vehicle. The problem with this is that to burn hydrogen in air, making water A(steam) to power a car means first making hydrogen from water, using more energy than the mechanical energy available from burning the hydrogen. To distract from the resulting need to burn fossil fuels, the idea is marketed in conjunction with “green hydrogen”. This is hydrogen made using energy from a renewable energy source. The benefit is illusory. The renewable energy source, if it were not used to make hydrogen, could be delivering energy for factories or homes in place of a fossil fuel power station. The reduction in CO₂ is 100% due to the renewable energy source. None of it is from the hydrogen powered vehicle. The same can be said of electric cars: even the person using their solar installation, instead of charging the vehicle, could be supplying energy to the grid in place of fossil fuel burning at a power station. The CO₂ reduction is due to the rooftop solar bank, not the electric car.

Nuclear Winter

While I have said that I had accepted uncritically the existence of a climate emergency, I should add that I always had misgivings as to whether the emergency was actually global warming rather than ice age. The US has been continually tightening the nooses around China and Russia, with enough nuclear warheads that a fraction of them detonating would plunge us into a long nuclear winter. This climate emergency has never been more acute than now, with the US moving from recklessly risking nuclear catastrophe through its proxy war in Ukraine, to apparently trying to bait Russia to use ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons.

I don’t believe for a moment that either side actually intends nuclear escalation, but with this kind of brinkmanship the risks must be greater than ever. Failsafe is a fiction. We know of one instance when catastrophe was averted by an American missile crew arresting their commander when he ordered them to fire. There may have been other near misses.