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If We’re Lucky, This Innovation Will Nuke Climate Change Scaremongering
The Federalist ^ | 06/11/2018 | David Harsanyi

Posted on 06/11/2018 11:00:35 AM PDT by SeekAndFind

A team of scientists at Harvard University and a company called Carbon Engineering announced this week that they’ve figured out a low-cost, industrial-scale method of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Needless to say, it sounds like an exciting technology, which would, as The Atlantics Robinson Meyer notes, “transform how humanity thinks about the problem of climate change.”

To be fair, though, plenty of humans have argued that innovation, rather than widespread state-compelled behavior modification or top-down economic regimes like the ones the Left has proposed over the years, would eventually deal with climate change. This conviction was based on the historic propensity of those human beings to hatch advances in efficiency and technology when left to their own devices. They always do.

If the industrial-scale de-carbonization stabilizes temperatures — and it now seems inevitable that it’ll be a big part of the solution — the Malthusian notions that dominate the modern Left will once again lose out to capitalistic innovation. This was inevitable when Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon were betting on resource scarcity, Al Gore was producing chilling Oscar-winning science-fiction films, and contemporary Chicken Littles were telling us the human race was doomed.

“This opens up the possibility that we could stabilize the climate for affordable amounts of money without changing the entire energy system or changing everyone’s behavior,” Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, told The Atlantic.

That’s fantastic news, because, despite decades of sensational predictions and “education” on the topic, our behavior hasn’t really changed. Americans simply weren’t prepared to surrender their prosperity, freedom, comfort, cars, red meat, travel, air conditioners, etc. to global warming fears, no matter what they told pollsters. Nor would anyone else, for that matter.

It now seems likely that we’re going to be able to reach environmentalists’ carbon-cutting goals at a fraction of the price. The paper claims that companies will be able to remove a metric ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for as little as $94. The cost of averting less than one degree of warming by 2100, according to some, would have cost around $2 trillion every year for a century — which doesn’t include the economic toll it would extract from the world’s economy.

In the near future, in addition to continued gains in efficiency, your community may have a choice between paying for giant, expensive fields of intermittently useful windmills and solar panels or a plant that cleans the air by converting hydrocarbon into liquid fuel. I wonder which one rational people will choose.

For many environmentalists, all this will be welcome news. I doubt it will be for the politically motivated climate warriors, whose aim has always been social engineering in the cause of curbing capitalistic excesses. Even if decarbonization is successful, they will demand we continue to mandate inefficient renewable energies. They will demand tax dollars be used to prop up the clean-energy industry. They will continue to demand we ban fracking. They will continue to propose creating fabricated markets that artificially spike the cost of fossil fuels to pay for supposed negative externalities.

But, as a political matter, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to sell those policies when they can no longer claim the apocalypse is nigh.

After all, we’ve been told for a long time that the Earth was on the precipice of disaster. Every year was our very last chance to save it. It wasn’t enough to merely concede that warming was probably happening, but a person had to adopt whatever policy proposals Democrats were pushing in toto. Tradeoffs didn’t exist in this world. Future innovations didn’t exist. Only the apocalypse beckoned.

The entire climate-change debate had been predicated on the idea that only dramatic intrusions into energy consumption and regulating citizens’ contemporary habits — not only by wealthy nations but also emerging countries whose people were finally benefiting from cheap energy — would stop us from heading towards the abyss. You could be poorer, less free, and do almost nothing to change the trajectory of warming.

We can’t have complete certitude about the future, of course, but you’re not a techno-utopian to trust that humans typically find ways to adapt. You’re not Pollyannaish to point out that, by nearly every quantifiable measure, the state of humanity has improved over the years we were busy panicking about global warming — people are safer, live longer, and are freer. They’ve cut poverty, illiteracy, infant mortality, and so on.

Plenty of those gains rely on the availability of cheap, dependable energy — as does our own growth and wealth. That is why rejecting the climate change panic-mongers might have been one of the smartest things American voters have done over the past two decades.

David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Science; Society; Weather
KEYWORDS: carbon; climatechange; fakescience; globalwarming
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To: SeekAndFind

What happens when one of these do gooders kill all the plants in the name of CO2 control?


21 posted on 06/11/2018 11:37:24 AM PDT by phs3
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To: SeekAndFind

You want a simple and inexpensive method?

PLANT A TREE!


22 posted on 06/11/2018 11:38:15 AM PDT by sevlex
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To: Sparticus
"Oh, great! They’re going to cause another ice age!"

____________

Yes, and wait until they plug up all the cows.

23 posted on 06/11/2018 11:38:52 AM PDT by a little elbow grease (Zip ties and duct tape are far more productive than pussy hats and #metoo tweets)
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To: Redleg Duke
An old Biology professor told us that mature forests (even rain forests) are CO2 neutral.

If you wish to sequester CO2, plant corn (think how fast and large it grows in a single season).

This was before ethanol gas so it was assumed the corn would be consumed by humans and animals effectively storing it in biomass.

24 posted on 06/11/2018 11:40:46 AM PDT by Aevery_Freeman (Idiocracy is Prophecy!)
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To: SeekAndFind

So these scientists at Hahvahd are coming up with means to eliminate, or scrub CO2 from the air. They of course will expect to get paid to do so. THEN these geniuses will come up with a way to feed CO2 to each, and every tree, or bush on the planet via some pill that dissolves in water, or something, and expect to be paid for that as well.

Apparently in the minds of the left it’s all in effort to create jobs (for them).


25 posted on 06/11/2018 11:42:56 AM PDT by rockinqsranch (Conservatives seek the truth. Democrats seek the power to dictate what truth is.)
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To: SeekAndFind

Gonna be a lot of upset trees.

Maybe it’s time to hug one.


26 posted on 06/11/2018 11:46:59 AM PDT by moovova
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To: SeekAndFind

I already wrote up my thesis for saving mother erf. Only problem is new economies evolving from this which would destroy liberal theology. The only other problem is nuking Gaza and the new UN from orbit, just to be sure.


27 posted on 06/11/2018 11:48:47 AM PDT by EQAndyBuzz (Proud member of the DWN party. (Deplorable Wing Nut))
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To: SeekAndFind

Why hasn’t Congress passed a law to limit the CO2 and other greenhouse gas emitted from Kilauea (sarc?)


28 posted on 06/11/2018 11:51:20 AM PDT by calico_thompson (Vanity sarcasm)
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To: SeekAndFind

The availability of such a device might quell the climate change fear mongering.

The worst case is they actually use the machine to pull out too much carbon dioxide, resulting in starvation as crops fail.


29 posted on 06/11/2018 12:01:05 PM PDT by DannyTN
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To: Redleg Duke

Perfect sir!

KYPD


30 posted on 06/11/2018 12:08:20 PM PDT by petro45acp (So why wasn't anyone there willing, able, and equipped to protect those people?)
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To: SeekAndFind

If carbon can really cheaply be pulled out of the atmosphere who knows what lies in the future? Pehaps total weed control as the CO2 that weeds need to live goes away and that pesky “green revolution” which is due in part to the rising level of CO2 in the air can be finally shut down. Be careful what you wish for. It may come to pass and have lots of attendant changes you hadn’t counted on.


31 posted on 06/11/2018 12:12:39 PM PDT by arthurus (/)
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To: SeekAndFind

The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer notes,

...

It looked like a scam when that article was posted and it still looks like a scam.


32 posted on 06/11/2018 12:17:10 PM PDT by Moonman62 (Give a man a fish and he'll be a Democrat. Teach a man to fish and he'll be a responsible citizen.)
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To: SeekAndFind

Throw billions trying to make this work and one Volcano eruption all resets it back to where it was.
Politicians are idiots.


33 posted on 06/11/2018 12:22:11 PM PDT by Zathras
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To: SeekAndFind
This opens up the possibility that we could stabilize the climate for affordable amounts of money without changing the entire energy system or changing everyone’s behavior...

I don't think this is going to make the leftists happy, though, since they will have to come up with another reason to control everything we do.

Let's say this works and they were right all along. What happens when the temps start falling on their own? I hope they've saved up all the CO2 so they can warm things up.

34 posted on 06/11/2018 12:27:59 PM PDT by Right Wing Assault (Kill: google,TWITR,FACEBK,WaPo,Hollywd,CNN,NFL,BLM,CAIR,Antifa,SPLC,ESPN,NPR,NBA)
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To: SeekAndFind

Why hasn’t Congress passed a law to limit the CO2 and other greenhouse gas emitted from Kilauea (sarc?)


35 posted on 06/11/2018 12:29:03 PM PDT by calico_thompson (Vanity sarcasm)
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To: SeekAndFind

Not a chance this would stop the fearmongering or the proposed “solutions”. It is the latter.....the massive socialism with a convenient green wrapper that is what they really wanted all along.

Ever notice that in the 60s it was the population bomb/depletion of resources and in the 70s it was the coming ice age before it became global warming and then climate change that was the big fear.....and every single time the “solution” was the same - global socialism.


36 posted on 06/11/2018 12:51:02 PM PDT by FLT-bird (..)
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To: SeekAndFind
You can't cure a hoax by giving in to it. CO2 (carbon) is not a threat in any way.

No smoking hot spot David Evans - THE AUSTRALIAN July 18, 2008

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. So we know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming. If we had found the greenhouse signature then I would be an alarmist again.


37 posted on 06/11/2018 1:00:11 PM PDT by TigersEye (This is the age of the death of reason.)
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To: All

Everyone should buy one of the new, improved Brawndo CO2 scrubbers.. Now with TWICE the electrolytes.


38 posted on 06/11/2018 1:33:23 PM PDT by LegendHasIt
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To: catnipman
" how many billons of trillions of dollars will it take to “capture” enough CO2 to reduce the atmospheric levels by even 1 part per million"

Not really. The REAL question is "What do you do with it once you capture it?" The process leaves you with a HUGE volume of CO2 gas. Now what? It ALWAYS takes more energy to turn it into fuel than you get out of burning the fuel.

39 posted on 06/11/2018 2:21:04 PM PDT by norwaypinesavage (The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones.)
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To: SeekAndFind
CO2 in the atmosphere does not cause climate change. CO2 levels were at 7000 ppm in the Cretacean Period and down to 200 ppm in the Permian Era. Life flourished during each. It is at 370ppm now, and Al Gore's acolytes are pretending that a jump to 400 would be catastrophe. It's nonsense.

(I lean towards the theory that Air Pressure is the bigger factor... PV=nRT, the Ideal Gas Law.)

40 posted on 06/11/2018 2:23:56 PM PDT by Teacher317 (We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men)
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