The Climate Delusion

By: Judd Garrett

Objectivity is the Objective

February 20, 2023

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Last week, the ninth dead whale washed up on New York and New Jersey beaches in the last two months. Scientists suspect that the sonar used in creating offshore wind farms is disorienting the whales, causing them to beach themselves. And, nothing is being done to stop this. Environmentalists used to care about saving the whales, but not anymore. They are now willing to sacrifice pretty much anything on the altar of climate change.

Joe Biden has gone all-in to stop climate change. On his first day in office, he shut down the Keystone XL Pipeline to reduce our production of fossil fuels which sent gas prices through the roof. He then signed an agreement to bring the United States back into the Paris Climate Accords which are heavily tilted against wealthy countries and favor poor countries. The United States will shoulder the bulk of the sacrifice and expense of these accords because we are the wealthiest country on the planet. But surprisingly, China has been exempted from the protocols because they are deemed a poor country, even though it is the second wealthiest country in the world, so China will be allowed to continue to spew as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as it wants for the next 20 to 30 years while it overtakes the United States as the wealthiest country on the planet.

Ironically, while America is bearing the brunt of combating climate change because we are the wealthiest country in the world, within the United States, it will be the exact opposite, the poor and middle class will be sacrificing the most as we implement the climate change agenda. Our government is pushing electric cars, solar and wind farms, and even banning gas-burning stoves. Energy prices will skyrocket when we transition away from cheap and plentiful fossil fuels. Eventually, the government will implement an energy tax, a carbon tax. Systems will be put in place to limit on how much carbon we can use. Credit card companies will have mechanisms on their cards that can tally how much carbon we buy and stop purchases when we have reached a certain limit. The government will monitor our electric cars, recording how much we drive, and when we exceed our limit, we will be taxed extra or simply cut off from driving.

The rich will be able to buy carbon credits, so millionaires and billionaires will not have to alter their lifestyles in any way. They will continue to live in the 21st century while we will be forced back into the 19th century. As we see time and again, the biggest climate activists, John Kerry, Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Taylor Swift, can live their lives as if there is not a climate crisis as they virtuously give speeches on the evils of climate change. They all own 10,000+ square-foot mansions, vacation on carbon-spewing yachts, and fly around the world in private jets, creating a carbon footprint that is 50 times that of the average American.

Bill Gates recently argued that he should be allowed to continue to fly on private planes because he buys “the gold standard of Climeworks to do direct air capture that far exceeds my family's carbon footprint." This is just another example of how the rich buy their way out of the rules they impose on everyone else. If Gates cared about stopping climate change, then he would do both; he would buy the gold standard of Climeworks air capture AND also stop flying private. Maybe if Gates and others stopped flying private and riding on yachts, we wouldn’t have to impose such draconian carbon restrictions on poor people in America. The top 20 billionaires in the world have a carbon footprint of 8,190 tons, 82 times the average American’s carbon footprint of 5 tons, but the average American is the one who will sacrifice the most on the altar of climate change.

Leading German scientist, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said this week that we [the world] need to establish a "planetary guardrail" which limits every person to three tons of CO2 emissions per year and those who exceed their limit should be forced to pay.

Climate activist, Greta Thunberg, believes the answer to climate change is less complicated than that. In her new book, entitled The Climate Book she wrote that “the solution to this [climate] crisis is not exactly rocket science. What we have to do is to halt the emission of greenhouse gasses”. That’s it. Just stop emitting greenhouse gases. It is that easy. Let’s revert society to pre-industrial times. But are greenhouse gases really a problem?

According to climate activists, the two most dangerous greenhouse gases that humans are responsible for emitting into the atmosphere are Carbon Dioxide and Methane gas. How much of these gases are we actually emitting? In 1900, almost 2 billion metric tons of CO2 were released due to fossil fuel usage. According to NASA, by 2014, that number had increased to 35 billion metric tons. That’s a lot of tonnage. That comes out to 35 trillion or 35,000,000,000,000 kgs of CO2. No wonder our planet is burning up. We are selfishly releasing 35 trillion kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere with no conscience. How can anybody question climate change when we are emitting that much CO2 into the atmosphere?

Let’s put that number into perspective. Our atmosphere has a total mass of 5.15 quintillion or 5,150,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms of gas. 1 quintillion is a number with eighteen zeros and six commas. That’s how big our atmosphere is. And the climate change activists get up in arms over 35,000,000,000,000 kg which only has twelve zeros and four commas. So, the amount of CO2 that we emit into the atmosphere every year is only 0.00068% of all the gas in our atmosphere.

Carbon Dioxide itself is only a trace gas, comprising only 0.0417% of the Earth’s atmosphere, totaling 2.148 quadrillion or 2,148,000,000,000,000 kilograms. So, the 35 trillion kgs of CO2 that we release into the atmosphere is only 1.63% of all the total CO2 already in the atmosphere. It is not enough to even move the needle. The percentages of gases in the atmosphere stay the same. The CO2 we release into the atmosphere is a trace amount of a trace gas, and we are supposed to believe that it is doing irreparable damage to the climate and is an existential threat to life on Earth. It is like adding four gallons of water to an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

So, they scare us with the incredibly large number of 35 trillion kilograms of CO2, but they purposely do not provide the proper perspective for us to determine if that number is a lot or a little because they are only concerned about propping up the climate change delusion. They are doing the same thing with Methane gas claiming that cow burps and flatulence are driving global warming. Methane is even more of a trace gas than Carbon Dioxide. It makes up only 0.00018% of the Earth’s atmosphere for a total of 9,270,000,000,000 or 9.27 trillion kilograms.

There are 94 million cows in the United States that release on average 100 kgs of Methane gas per year which totals 9.4 billion or 9,400,000,000 kg of Methane. When you run the numbers, you see that the amount of Methane cows produce is only 0.1014% of all the Methane already in the atmosphere. So, like with CO2, the Methane that is released from cows is only a trace amount of a trace gas, which also is too small to move the needle.

It is all proportional. Humans believe we are much bigger, much more important, and much more impactful than we really are. It’s a delusion of grandeur. The biggest pollutants in the world 50 years from now will be the decaying materials from the millions of wind turbine and solar panel parts in landfills that will be leeching chemicals into the groundwater.

Is it just a coincidence that the world has doubled and tripled down on green energy on the heels of major innovations in fracking which can extract a virtual bottomless pit of natural gas from the Earth’s crust? In the last 10-15 years, we have discovered ways to tap into hundreds of years of supply of cheap and plentiful energy, and we are turning our back on it. It seems that the more our technology advances to extract fossil fuels out of the ground inexpensively and plentifully, the more we vilify fossil fuels in favor of the less abundant, more expensive “green energy”. It is estimated the cost to combat this so-called climate crisis could be as high as $50 trillion over the next 20 years. Maybe those in power who are championing the climate change crusade, merely do not want cheap plentiful energy because the cheaper and more plentiful energy is, the less their profit margins will be.

I’m not a climate scientist and don’t claim to be one. But I do know how to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and find percentages. And this is just me looking at the numbers, finding the percentages, and asking questions. The so-called greenhouse gases, Carbon Dioxide and Methane are trace gases; they are fractions of fractions of one percent of all the gases in our atmosphere, and the amount of these gases that we emit is also a trace amount, fractions of these trace gases. How could these gases which are so minuscule of a percent be so dangerous? How does adding a trace amount of a trace gas create an existential threat to our planet? Maybe there are legitimate answers to these questions. If there are, I would like to hear them. I’m not a climate scientist, but as Bob Dylan once sang, “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”