Friday Afternoon Notes

Podcast livestream, death of the climate cult, and more!

Editor’s note: Many thanks to all the new subscribers joining up today on Ammo Grrrll’s announcement that she’ll be joining Political Questions starting next week. I’ll have more to say next Friday ahead of her first piece here, but henceforth Thursday and Friday shall be the Max Cossack/Ammo Grrrll two-day block here. Now back to the news.

—Steve

• For the second week in a row, the hosts of the Three Whisky Happy Hour podcast have actually been able to fix up a firm time to record more than two hours in advance, which means I can announce the YouTube livestream ahead of time. We’ll be recording tonight at 8 pm PACIFIC time—I know, that makes it rather late for listeners in the later time zones, but you’ll be able to watch it over the weekend on YouTube if you like taking it with video instead of just audio. You can subscribe to our You Tube channel at: @3WHHPodcast (For last week’s episode, you need to click on the “Live” tab to access it.) Do join us if you can, and at that hour you can have whisky guilt-free! I know we will.

How about these for 3WHH Podcast swag?

• How can you tell that the climate cult is over? When even the lefty climatistas at The Guardian figure out that “carbon offsets”—the favorite guilt-reducer of private-flying hypocrites like Al Gore and Leonardo Di Caprio—is a total fraud:

The failure of carbon offsets to cut planet-heating pollution is “not due to a few bad apples”, a review paper has found, but down to deep-seated systemic problems that incremental change will not solve.

Research over two decades has found “intractable” problems that have made carbon credits in most big programmes poor quality, according to the study. While the industry and diplomats have made efforts to improve the system, it found much-awaited rules agreed at a UN climate summit last year “did not substantially address the quality problem”.

“We must stop expecting carbon offsetting to work at scale,” said Stephen Lezak, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Smith School and co-author of the study, in Annual Reviews. “We have assessed 25 years of evidence and almost everything up until this point has failed.” . . .

A meta-analysis published in Nature Communications last year found that less than 16% of the carbon credits investigated showed real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Who could have predicted this? Actually everybody—like me back in 2011. (Also this cheeky piece wondering why the Confederacy didn’t avoid the Civil War by offering “slavery offsets.”)

• Further to the point, the sensible progressive Ruy Tiexeria (“sensible progressive” is not an oxymoron in Ruy’s case) is out this week with a piece on his “Liberal Patriot” Substack on “The Climate Movement Is Circling the Drain.”

These are dark days for the climate movement. Indeed, the whole movement is failing apart in front of our eyes. . . Reality has begun to sink in for political leaders around the world. Not only is net-zero by 2050 not going to happen but their constituents have a remarkable lack of interest in seeing this goal attained. In the United States, voters view climate change as a third tier issue, vastly prioritize the cost and reliability of energy over its effect on the climate and, if action on climate change it to be taken, are primarily concerned with the effect of such actions on consumer costs and economic growth. . .

Put it all together and you can see why the climate movement is circling the drain. Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, they have thrown everything they had toward raising the salience of the issue. They have had enormous amounts of money behind them, astonishing buy-in from elites, and a cooperative media ecosystem that mandates use of the term “climate crisis,” pumps up every alarmist study and attributes every unusual weather event to climate change. What more could they ask?

And yet…most voters, especially working-class voters, just don’t care. Or at least not enough to disregard their frontline concerns about costs, economic growth, and consumer choice. Roger Pielke Jr.’s “iron law of climate policy”—that when policies focused on economic concerns confront policies focused on emissions reductions, it is economic concerns that will win out every time—remains undefeated.

Once again, I can declare that I’ve been ahead of the curve on this for a long time. Such as this piece from back in March, “The Nadir of the Climate Change Movement.”

It is possible that the Trump Administration is going to deal the death blows to the long-running climate change hysteria and government hostility to fossil fuels, not just in the United States but around the globe. . . I doubt the climatistas know what’s about to hit them. Unlike the defensive crouch of previous Republican administrations (including Trump I to some extent), the new Trump team is going straight at the heart of the entire climate change framework.