The United Nations-backed International Panel on Climate Change is faced with a “climate crisis” and the conditions of a “burning earth” environmentalists, academics and many politicians who have advocated for the imposition of more expensive energy policies, forcing the American people.
But last month, the IPCC quietly decided that those worst-case scenarios were “unlikely” – meaning impossible.
The most famous of them – the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5, or “RCP 8.5” – put a hellish world of 12 billion people in the year 2100.
Projections assume that the world will burn more coal than it currently does, despite potential technological improvements such as zero-emission nuclear power plants.
RCP 8.5 was intended to represent the worst case scenario of climate change.
But disaster is for sale, so environmentalists and politicians embrace it to make all kinds of crazy claims.
They relied on academics whose jobs depended on using RCP 8.5 and other extreme scenarios to predict everything from the demise of French wine and the end of pasta to aliens destroying the world. (No, really.)
These claims were a joke, but the money flowing to green groups and politicians to promote themselves and their preferred “solutions” was very real.
It didn’t help that environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Council raised hundreds of millions of dollars to stop the ban on natural gas for heating and cooking.
And, ironically, the economic and environmental damage from the actions we have taken to “save” us from climate change has been catastrophic.
It is true that hundreds of billions, if not trillions, have been wasted all over the world.
In New York, these policies included former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s ban on emissions, which would bring lower natural gas prices to all New Yorkers and economic growth, creating thousands of high-paying jobs.
It also included shutting down all fossil fuel power generators in the Province and promoting a dream electricity system of wind, solar and batteries, as well as “green” hydrogen powered “zero emission generators”.
Except that such generators do not exist.
Cuomo’s green push has forced the shutdown of the Indian Point nuclear plant, which supplied a quarter of New York City’s electricity, and made electricity customers pay billions of dollars for expensive, unreliable offshore wind turbines that will destroy some of the East Coast’s most productive fisheries.
New York is adopting California’s Advanced Clean Car II standards, which would require more than 40% of the state’s new vehicles sold in New York to be electric vehicles starting this fall, and 100% by 2035. (An executive order from President Donald Trump stopped that shock.)
The batteries that EVs use require large amounts of minerals, which has a negative impact on the environment.
RCP 8.5 mandated all New Yorkers to pay a carbon tax through the state’s membership in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which taxes all fossil fuels based on their carbon content.
And if it weren’t for the re-election campaign of Gov. Kathy Hochul, who realized political responsibility, she would have already included another carbon tax as part of the country’s disastrous 2019 Climate Leadership and Public Protection Act.
In New York City, the RCP 8.5 tax bill includes Local Ordinance 97, a costly mandate to remove gas and oil-fired boilers from local buildings, and replace them with electric heat pumps.
The result will be even higher rents as landlords struggle to make ends meet.
Nothing these powers will have very little effect on the world’s climate.
New York’s annual contribution to carbon emissions is small, estimated at 200 million metric tons by 2023 – the equivalent of just two days of carbon emissions.
So much for New York saving the planet.
The IPCC has now dropped its extreme cases – but expects environmentalists and many left-wing politicians to continue to cite them, to advance their favored policies.
As the saying goes, “follow the money.”
Jonathan Lesser is a Senior Fellow with the National Center for Energy Analysis.
