The Brown New Deal, Part I

The Green New Deal is dead. Trump called it. Appearing before the UN General Assembly and speaking ad libitum (because the teleprompter had failed while he didn't have a printout of his speech) he called climate change the ”greatest con job ever perpetrated in the world.” He added: "If you don't get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail." There immediately followed an "expert reaction" along the lines of "Mr. Trump is endangering the lives and wellbeing of Americans and people around the world by wrongly denying the realities of climate change." The "experts" in question were, of course, so-called "climate scientists" — people who can't predict the weather two weeks out but claim to be able to predict it two centuries out, since climate is just a fancy word for weather if you zoom out on it.

Which set of liars should you believe, the swindling, bloviating buffoon who is always trying to bluff his way into a profitable "deal" or the self-serving pseudo-scientists with their fake climate pseudo-models, their grant money assured only as long as they keep predicting climate catastrophe and taxpayer-supported green tech as the only way to avoid it?

As goes a popular Russian saying, "If on an elephant's cage it says 'Buffalo', do not trust your eyes." Instead, you should believe me; would I lie to you? Of course not! I am not any sort of "climate scientist" (thank God) but I do know quite a bit of science — enough to tell real science from fake science. It took me a long time to realize that global warming science is fake. (I used to be more gullible when I was younger.)

Also, I have now lived long enough to witness the failure of some of the older catastrophist predictions — enough to teach me to disregard the rest of them, since they are all based on the same technique: climate scientists make computer models which they then arrogantly claim represents not just reality, but the future! The gall! Of course, computer models predict whatever their operators want them to predict. They tweak the parameters until the desired answer pops out. Obviously, a model that predicts the onset of the next ice age isn't helpful for getting government research grants.

Climate change is, of course, real; the Earth's climate, as a statistical generalization of weather, is always fluctuating — predictably over a few days, unpredictably over longer periods. There are some regularities having to do with the Earth's orbit and the cyclical behavior of the Sun, but there is plenty of what is to us complete randomness superimposed on these patterns. That is, there are certainly some large-scale features that are somewhat predictable, but on a time scale that makes such predictions irrelevant on the time scale of human history.

In very rough terms, the Earth is currently approaching the end of an interglacial period (the Earth is in the middle of a sequence of ice ages which started approximately 2.6 million years ago during a period known as the Quaternary glaciation). Since then, it has experienced recurring glacial and interglacial periods, with the last ice age ending around 11,700 years ago. Any millennium now the Northern Hemisphere could start growing an ice cap and Antarctica a wide apron of ice... but don't hold your breath — results may vary. The idea that we — a species of simians running around the planet's surface — could do anything to affect this course of events is, of course, preposterous.

Nevertheless, among these simians there are found some global warming enthusiasts who keep chattering about something they call the "greenhouse effect": certain gases within the Earth's atmosphere, called "greenhouse gases," trap solar radiation, warming the lower atmosphere and the planet's surface. The only significant greenhouse gas is water vapor: clouds serve as a nice warm blanket to keep us from freezing on winter nights while high humidity on hot summer days prevents our sweat from evaporating and this can cause heat stroke.

But global warming enthusiasts instead focus on carbon dioxide, a gas that is present in trace amounts (parts per million) insufficient to make a difference. The biggest reservoir of carbon dioxide on the planet is not the atmosphere but the ocean, carbon dioxide being water-soluble, and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a function of ocean water temperature. The oceans effervesce carbon dioxide as they heat up and readily absorb excess atmospheric carbon dioxide as they cool down, and so maintain a temperature-based balance. Analysis of ancient ice cores has shown that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations trail temperature changes; thus, they cannot have been causing them.

Carbon dioxide is an asphyxiant to us oxygen-breathing life forms (in concentrations above 4%) but is minimally toxic at lower concentrations such as sitting around a campfire. Much more importantly, it is an essential plant food: plants convert carbon dioxide to sugar and cellulose with the help of violet-blue and orange-red light while green light is reflected. Thus, higher carbon dioxide levels are a positive for forestry, agriculture and life on Earth in general while current carbon dioxide levels are too low for optimal plant growth.

The idea that burning fossil fuels will increase long-term atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, in turn increasing global temperatures and causing catastrophic, cataclysmic global warming is... what's that? Oh yes, that would be "pseudo-scientific catastrophist bullshit". The extra carbon dioxide will make plants (and farmers) happy for a while, but then the oceans will absorb the excess. End of story.

The reason that this bit of pseudo-scientific bullshit has been foisted on us is money: officials and corporations in Western countries thought that they could use the global warming ruse for purposes of extortion. They would put the whole world on a carbon dioxide diet, forcing less developed countries, which have no choice but to burn carbon dioxide-spewing fossil fuels, to pay them carbon dioxide taxes while Western green elves would avoid burning fossil fuels by employing very expensive green technology (solar panels and wind generators) which poorer nations would be unable to afford. Such was the plan, but then it turned out that:

1. Solar panels and wind generators are unable to replace fossil fuel-based energy sources because of the problem of intermittency: the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. Whenever the energy contribution of wind and solar approaches 30%, electric grids exhibit a marked tendency to collapse. This problem could be mitigated by storing electricity; alas, no practical solutions exist for doing so at the scale that's required (hundreds of gigawatt-hours). The only solution for compensating for intermittency of wind and solar is... burning fossil fuels —natural gas, specifically, since neither coal plants nor nuclear plants can be ramped up and down fast enough to keep up with passing clouds and wind gusts.

2. Solar panels and wind generators are mostly made in China. They don't last long (a decade or so) and when they fail they become toxic waste. The wreckage from large wind generators is particularly difficult to dispose of. No better solution has been found for their huge fiberglass blades, each as large as the wing of a passenger jet, than to bury them. The situation is no better with solar panels. Hailstorms result in large fields covered with toxic glass shards. The wind generators and the solar panels are only renewable as sources of energy for as long as China is willing to continue making and selling them. Their manufacture involves rare earth elements for which China has a near-monopoly and which are most definitely nonrenewable.

3. The headlong pursuit of "green energy" by the European Union, coupled with its refusal to continue buying pipelined natural gas from Russia and the refusal to continue the nuclear energy program in Germany, has resulted in very high energy prices which, in turn, made European industry noncompetitive. France is continuing with its nuclear program, getting 70% of its electricity from nuclear power plants, but it has lost access to uranium from Niger, its nuclear power plants are getting old and suffering from cracked welds in the piping, and its plans for building new power plants would require unaffordable levels of public spending and haven't been able to pass France's own nuclear regulatory agency's approval process.

4. What made this headlong pursuit of "green energy" possible was, of course, government subsidies. Instead of funneling tax receipts toward public infrastructure, education, health care or other social needs, the money has been spent on useless solar panels and wind generators... until it became clear that the payback on such questionable investments is nonexistent. This made it necessary to redirect this spending toward something else useless, such as the procurement of weapons systems.

5. As a result of this energy crisis, industry after industry — chemicals, fertilizers, cars and machinery, glass and ceramics and just about everything else — is being forced to scale back and to shut down. That way lies mass unemployment and social unrest, rapid deindustrialization and national bankruptcy. Coupled with increased military spending, this makes for a smooth transition to war. More specifically, the transition is to defeat in a war, since a failing industrial economy cannot serve as the basis for victory.

Getting back to Trump's speech at the UN, it would be a mistake to take his words too seriously. The teleprompter didn't work, he didn't have his speech on paper and was just saying whatever came to mind. And what comes to his mind, generally, is whatever he thinks will get him some notoriety and keep the limelight on him for a little longer. By now we should have all realized that he is not a results-oriented person; if he were, then Greenland would be a US possession, Canada would be the 51st state, Panama Canal would be under US control, the Houthis in Yemen would no longer be lobbing hypersonic missiles at Israel, Iran would no longer have a nuclear program, the war in the former Ukraine would have ended a day (or a week, or a month) after his inauguration... Clearly, Trump is going for amusement value, not actual real-world results. A key piece of his strategy is to avoid taking responsibility for his words by reversing his statements almost immediately; thus, at the UN he said that Russia is "a paper tiger" and then hours later he said that it is not.

And so, when Trump said: "If you don't get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail," he was, of course, lying. If "your country" is part of the EU, then there is no getting away from "this green scam": the money has already been misspent and the energy infrastructure has already been compromised. Russia has already given up on the European energy market and has reoriented its energy exports to the east. For the EU, rapid deindustrialization is now inevitable. Trump's statement can thus be shortened to "Your country is going to fail."

But this is not what Europe's leaders wanted to hear. Admitting that Trump is right would be tantamount to volunteering to resign from their positions and that is not what they have in mind. What they have in mind is a new, bigger and better scam, which I will call the Brown New Deal.