CarrZee: It’s basically arguing the world should not bother trying to stop runaway climate change …while setting out how climate change is beginning to run very quickly indeed …wow.
Wildfires and Progressive Climate-Change Deniers
wsj.com/articles/canada-wildfires-smoke-east-coast-climate-emissions-forest-management-1838d4c5
Progressives are proclaiming that the smoky skies engulfing the eastern U.S. fromCanadian wildfires are another sign that the climate apocalypse is nigh. Instead, they’re areminder that government policies to mitigate the impact of natural disasters matter morethan those to reduce CO2 emissions.
Much of the East Coast has been under air-quality alerts since Friday. Smoke was sothick Wednesday that the Federal Aviation Administration halted flights at New York City’sLaGuardia airport. As of Tuesday, there were 415 active wildfires across Canada with 238burning out of control. No doubt drought and a warm start to the summer havecontributed, but the bigger culprit is poor forest management that has let fuel accumulateover decades.
This hardly gets a mention in media reports, nor from anti-fossil fuel politicians. “Since theParis Accords, the 4 major U.S. banks—including 2 with HQs here in the city with theworst tonight—have lent over $1 trillion for new fossil fuel supply projects,” New York Citycomptroller Brad Lander tweeted Tuesday. “Tonight’s a smoke signal that it’s time forthem to stop.” Maybe the smoke clouded his judgment.
The reality is that even if U.S. banks stopped financing fossil-fuel projects today, globalCO2 emissions would rise for decades owing to growing coal production in India andChina. Another inconvenient truth is that government policies to reduce CO2 emissionswill be swamped by wildfire emissions.
University of California researchers last year calculated that wildfire emissions in 2020were two times higher than the state’s greenhouse gas reductions from 2003 to 2019.California wildfires in 2020 were the state’s second largest source of CO2 emissions aftertransportation and generated double the greenhouse gases of all the state’s power plants.
Another study this spring in the journal Science estimated that burning boreal forests inNorth America and Eurasia in 2021 released 1.76 billion tons of CO2, nearly twice asmuch as global aviation that year. That’s also more than four times New York State’sannual emissions and about three times as much as the Inflation Reduction Act’sprojected reductions in 2030.
Government land management policies that prevent wildfires from spreading out ofcontrol, such as prescribed burns, would reduce CO2 emissions more than offshore windor electric-vehicle mandates. Alas, this doesn’t fit with the climate left’s book ofRevelation.
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Appeared in the June 8, 2023, print edition as ‘Wildfires and Progressive ClimateDeniers’.
