Decades of being wrong about everything has not stopped the Climate Cult across the Pond from seeking solutions to the non-problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The Brits are determined to fix what’s not broken, so they want to plant 11 million trees. But they worry that might make matters worse.
I know, trees are the gods of mitigation. They absorb CO2, storing it in the ground while releasing oxygen. That’s why the English love the idea. But like most ideas regarding CO2 it’s wrong-headed. Yes, more trees are good for lots of reasons, but every action comes with a cost. Covering the landscape with trees means you can’t use it for anything else.
For it to work you’d have to give up those other things altogether or scale them back significantly. What sort of things?
The report adds that carpeting upland pastures with trees would reduce the UK’s ability to produce meat – which may lead to increasing imports from places that produce beef by felling rainforests.
It also makes a similar point on industry. There’s no point closing dirty UK factories, the authors say, if we’re then going to import goods from places with worse emissions.
If you’ve forgotten the biggest down-side for the US regarding the Paris Climate Accord was that America had to do all the heavy lifting while many foreign nations who happen to be our enemies could do the opposite. Countries like China which are building plants to burn dirty coal at an alarming pace could continue to do so. Producing massive amounts of energy for manufacturing things like weapons, warships, or anything else, while we dialed back on affordable abundant energy.
Trump didn’t back out because he wants to see the earth burn (that’s not happening anyway) he backed out because it was bad for America. Bad for trade, competition, jobs, wages, lifestyles, even national defense.
Bad.
Most of these tradeoffs to appease the climate cult are no different. Impacts on various industries either have to be met from foreign sources. This diverts jobs, wages, and even tax revenues offshore to countries who will pollute like mad your stupid ideas about the planet be damned. And offshoring is bad unless you do it to appease the climate cult. Until it’s not.
Wind and solar farms use up land as well as planting trees. That means fewer cattle and fewer farms. Less land area to plant. Which means even the vegans are offshoring their food production. A diversion that will result in foreigners clearing and working more land which puts just as much CO2 back into the atmosphere at a higher rate of pollution, most likely.
It’s why I keep saying we should be working our mineral (oil, coal, and gas) resources like mad. The US will do more to control pollution, contamination, and emissions (if that really matters to you) than almost any other nation from whom we’d have to acquire these resources if we didn’t mine them ourselves. We can sell the excess to them, reducing their pollution and emissions. Keep jobs and wages here, grow our economy, and (yes) increase tax revenues.
It’s a huge win for everyone, except the socialists who introduced the climate cult, not to save the planet but to destroy capitalism. This is why they would rather divert production of almost anything to dirty, polluting nations if it gets them the centrally planned American paradise for which they’ve been longing.
The UK is no different, they’re just further down the slope.
| BBC