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HOW CALIFORNIA’S ENVIRONMENTALISM INCREASED CARBON EMISSIONS
Frontpage Mag ^
| 01/24/2019
| Daniel Greenfield
Posted on 01/24/2019 9:13:07 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Jerry Brown, Californias outgoing governor, wants environmentalism to be his legacy. Its certainly a better legacy than the 3 people murdered in his final month in office by illegal alien criminals whom his sanctuary state law protected from ICE detainers. But Browns environmental legacy is equally terrible.
Governor Brown earned the nickname Governor Moonbeam for his soliloquies about Spaceship Earth.
"My own belief is that California has a unique place on the planet. It's been a place of dreams. We can pursue a path of benign energy," he rhapsodized, early in his political career.
Browns environmental fanaticism has wrecked Californias agriculture and helped cause a drought by diverting water supplies and failing to make any serious provisions for water preservation and reclamation. As a pseudoscientific notion about carbon causing global warming took hold, he vowed a carbon crackdown. California, he ordered last year, would go carbon neutral by 2045.
Doing so would require eliminating Californias oil and gas, outlawing cars, plastic cups and whats left of its manufacturing and agriculture. Electricity would become unaffordable to all except the very wealthy.
And it wouldnt matter because Browns forest fires and droughts would raise carbon numbers more than all the cars on all the freeways or the air conditioning in the homes of the people he had targeted.
The Department of the Interior estimated that the 2018 wildfire season produced 68 million tons of carbon dioxide. This number equates to about 15 percent of all California emissions, and it is on par with the annual emissions produced by generating enough electricity to power the entire state for a year, the press release noted.
The environment, as usual, pollutes itself far more than the entire human race ever could. But the fires that devastated California had a little help from environmentalists and their tree-hugging cult.
"There's too much dead and dying timber in the forest, which fuels these catastrophic fires. Proper management of our forests, to include small prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, and other techniques, will improve forest health and reduce the risk of wildfires, while also helping curb the carbon emissions," Secretary Zinke had warned.
The sanctity of the tree is a fundamental tenet of the environmentalist creed. Saving the planet, they believed, required fighting loggers who wanted to chop down the trees and harm the environment. But trees, like every other lifeform, will either have their numbers managed naturally or by humanity. When people dont harvest trees, forest fires naturally burn through and stimulate new forest growth.
Californias efforts to protect trees led to massive forest fires that claimed the lives of men, women and children, that destroyed thousands of homes, and also burned countless numbers of trees.
While natural wildfires regenerate forests, the lack of forestry management caused a rebound effect leading to severe fires that not only destroyed massive numbers of trees, but limited tree regrowth.
Environmentalism has its roots in a romanticist cult that arose in opposition to industrialization which refuses to understand that the environment operates in cycles, rather than existing in a fixed utopian state until human industry disrupts its natural functioning. Political influence has vested the cult with the trappings of pseudoscience fed by researchers willing to say anything for government grants.
Placing ideology ahead of science proved as debilitating to Californias environment as it did in the USSR.
Californias Air Resources Board however remains committed to ignoring the impact of its policies in much the same way that Soviet officials ignored their impact of their environmental catastrophes.
The ARB has chosen to score only carbon emissions produced by industry and direct human activities, not those produced by environmental policies. That allows the ARB to claim victory over carbon while ignoring the actual amounts of carbon emissions in California.
ARBs spokesman insisted that it can only regulate what can be controlled.
The wildfires turned so historically devastating as a result of Californias environmental regulations. Brown and his environmental allies however blamed the wildfires on climate change. But if global warming really caused the wildfires, then why not count the carbon emissions from the fires?
The answer is that the environmentalist policies are a political hoax. And imaginary carbon targets have to be met through fake numbers for fighting a fake problem by ignoring environmental catastrophes.
California wont actually reduce its carbon emissions. Instead it will go on raising electricity rates, gas prices and outlawing basic necessities, such as plastic bags, while declaring victory over carbon. The actual emission numbers will be buried in a wave of carbon trading scams, in which African countries will be paid to reduce their industrial output to atone for Californias industrial sins.
Carbon trading, when legitimate, impoverishes the Third World, eliminating jobs and industry, causing famines and crushing social mobility, putting money in the bank accounts of governments and not in the hands of the people, but mostly its a scam that cant be meaningfully verified or confirmed. There will be more carbon than ever and Californians will be taxed more than ever, while the profits will go to, the green tycoons handling the carbon transactions while donating to Democrats, and to African warlords.
And when environmentalists admit the existence of the carbon spike, they falsely blame it on industry.
The Peoples Climate Movement claimed that a national 3.4% carbon rise proved "we cant trust unregulated market forces to save us from climate change". Its solution is "federal, state, and local level" government intervention and a "Green New Deal".
But its federal, state and local level government intervention that caused rising carbon numbers. Market forces would have prevented the wildfires and lowered those dreaded carbon emissions.
And not just in California.
National Geographic reported that climate researchers found that the western drought had led to an extra 100 megatons in carbon emissions or the equivalent of adding 1.4 million cars every year.
California had become more dependent on hydroelectric power, which is far more reliable than the trendy, but erratic solar and wind, and is loathed by environmentalists. As the artificial drought worsened, California had to revert back to fossil fuels, raising carbon numbers.
The artificial droughts, caused by the diversion of water for environmental purposes and a failure to construct dams and harvest water resources, had reduced the use of hydroelectric power. Instead of building dams and reservoirs, Brown, Obama and other Democrats, had exploited the crisis to impose drastic rationing and increase environmentalist spending. But water mismanagement for environmental reasons led to higher fossil fuel use and higher rates of carbon emissions.
And theres no sign that this cycle of environmental catastrophes caused by environmental regulations is about to change. California wildfires are projected to increase as the environmental cult continues obstructing realistic forestry management and viable timber industries. And the failure to maintain and expand water resources will go on causing droughts. These will increase carbon emission rates.
Environmentalists have made fossil fuels into carbon villains, but the latest national numbers show that even as coal plants closed, carbon rose anyway because of a cold winter, leading people in New England to heat their homes. Even as the war on coal was working, emissions from residential and commercial buildings
for heating and cooking) increased by 10% in 2018 to their highest level since 2004.
Once again, the environment had defeated the environmentalists.
Environmentalists spend a great deal of time claiming to study the human impact on the environment, but have a very poor grasp of how the environment works on its own terms, and how it impacts people.
Obama and Browns carbon cutting goals are impossible, not just because they would destroy the income and quality of life of ordinary Americans, but because their tactics obstruct their goals.
Environmentalists cant fix the environment because they dont understand how it works. Environmental policies cause environmental catastrophes making environmentalists the biggest threat to the environment.
TOPICS: Culture/Society; News/Current Events; US: California
KEYWORDS: california; carbonemissions; environmentalism
To: SeekAndFind
Unintended consequences....
Isn’t there some sort of universal law about that?
2
posted on
01/24/2019 9:30:23 AM PST
by
alloysteel
(Man does not live by bread alone. He needs chocolate cake too.)
To: SeekAndFind
Yup! Their minds are made up, don’t confuse them with the facts!
3
posted on
01/24/2019 9:30:35 AM PST
by
vette6387
(Fire Mueller)
To: SeekAndFind
Where’s LHO/JER when the country really needed them?
4
posted on
01/24/2019 9:35:33 AM PST
by
Carriage Hill
(A society grows great when old men plant trees, in whose shade they know they will never sit.)
To: SeekAndFind
5
posted on
01/24/2019 9:39:05 AM PST
by
Inyo-Mono
To: alloysteel
“Unintended consequences....”
Sadly too many people on our side STILL give the left credit for ‘good intentions’, preventing Global Warming, in this case.
That is not the case here and has NEVER been the case with them. Their goal is to BRING THIS COUNTRY DOWN to a much lower standard of living - basically have everyone live in small apartments (with nosy neighbors, by the way), where they can walk to the train station. The houses we have would be razed and the land converted back to what it was in Elizabeth Warren days.
But how to do that? People would obviously resist if you did it top-down, as the Canadians did with their Eskimos when they forced them into a bunch of new towns set up across the Arctic (wrecking their lives, by the way). It worked there because there were so few and it was done in the name of providing ‘social services’ to them, which was impossible when they were spread out.
But try that top-down approach here, and it would have to be at gun point, and people will fight back. So no hope.
On to Plan B. Convince people that they sacrifice their lifestyle and wealth just a bit in order to ‘Save the Planet’. Instead of gasoline cars, they will use electric. Instead of coal, it will be wind and solar. And then, while people are joyfully saving the planet, TEAR DOWN the fossil fuel infrastructure...and only then start turning the screws to achieve their ultimate goal.
Obviously it’s not going great now, especially given Fracking, but that is what they want, and it is up to us to either accept it, or blissfully keep assigning ‘good intentions’ to them.
6
posted on
01/24/2019 9:49:06 AM PST
by
BobL
(I eat at McDonald's and shop at Walmart - I just don't tell anyone.)
To: SeekAndFind
they should be sued for increasing CO2 (not that man’s CO2 is causing climate4 change, but since these scam artists want to play this game- sue them on their own terms!)- but they will weasel their way out by claiming ‘if we hadn’t enacted strict enviro laws it would have been much worse”
7
posted on
01/24/2019 10:04:45 AM PST
by
Bob434
To: SeekAndFind
The Illegals aren’t driving Teslas.
They are driving old beat up Cars and Pickup Trucks, the latter that have a higher GVW and are allowed to pollute more than regular Passenger Vehicles.
8
posted on
01/24/2019 10:09:25 AM PST
by
Kickass Conservative
(Democracy, two Wolves and one Sheep deciding what's for Dinner.)
To: alloysteel
"Isnt there some sort of universal law about that?"
It's called "Murphey's Law".
9
posted on
01/24/2019 11:29:39 AM PST
by
fella
("As it was before Noah so shall it be again,")
To: SeekAndFind; daisy mae for the usa; AdvisorB; wizardoz; free-in-nyc; Vendome; Georgia Girl 2; ...
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
About Daniel Greenfield
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Louis Foxwell
10
posted on
01/24/2019 12:58:30 PM PST
by
Louis Foxwell
(The denial of the authority of God is the central plank of the Progressive movement.)
To: vette6387
Yup! Their minds are made up, dont confuse them with the facts!
><
It’s extremely frustrating and maddening that they can’t be reasoned with.
To the Left, the Truth is whatever they want it to be.
11
posted on
01/24/2019 1:01:33 PM PST
by
laplata
(The Left/Progressives have diseased minds.)
To: SeekAndFind
12
posted on
01/24/2019 1:05:11 PM PST
by
CottonBall
(We are not represented, we are ruled.)
To: SeekAndFind
And damnocrats keep getting elected.
Bother a bum, go to jail.
13
posted on
01/24/2019 6:07:32 PM PST
by
onedoug
To: BobL
Of course there is a third option. Stop the logging for a couple of decades, then light a match and burn the rural areas to the ground. No more conservatives in California as they dont live in the cities.
Instant Socialism forever...
14
posted on
01/25/2019 7:22:44 PM PST
by
American in Israel
(A wise man's heart directs him to the right, but the foolish mans heart directs him toward the left.)
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