Below is my column as submitted to the Sturbridge Times Town & Country Living Magazine for the March, 2019 issue.
We’ll Need a Lot of Green
For This Deal
By Richard Morchoe
The young
congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez popularly known as AOC has made quite a
splash in the new Congress. She and others aligned with her have come up
with a set of proposals called The Green New Deal.
Her program
could be termed secular millenarian as she wants to stop the world from ending
while solving all our problems from healthcare to unemployment.
How bad is the
situation? According to AOC: “...we're like, 'The world is going to end in 12
years if we don't address climate change...?"
That her words display the usual illiteracy of generations after mine
(“we’re like” might mean “we think” or “we believe,” but who knows?) should be
expected.
To be brutally bipartisan, the President will often use similarly
ridiculous locutions.
But, we digress. The question is, who believes the dire
prediction and the necessity of her program? The agenda she is proposing
consists of the following:
- Upgrade all
existing buildings
- 100% clean power
- Support family
farms
- Universal access
to healthy food
- Zero-emission
vehicle infrastructure
- Remove greenhouse
gasses from the atmosphere
- Eliminate unfair
competition
- Affordable access
to electricity
- Create
high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing wages
- Guaranteeing a
job with a family sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid
vacations and retirement
There was one part not mentioned above that I was completely behind.
A line on her website called for supporting "economic security to all those
who are unable or unwilling to work." The Congresswoman had me at
“unwilling.” As soon as the bill was
signed, your columnist would be in sloth mode for good. Unfortunately,
when people noticed that, her team did not so much walk as run it back.
It is an ambitious agenda that will take more than 12 years. If
one truly believes we have only that dozen, the reasonable course of action
would be to borrow as much money as possible for the short duration left and
party like it’s 2031 (i.e. 12 years hence).
The question is, is she right? Are we really on the way to the
end of existence? We referred the question to our official think tank,
The Long Hill Institute for the Study of Climate Change (LHIftSoCC for short).
After a brief deliberation, followed by a well-earned siesta, they
announced a finding as follows, “Heck if we know.”
Clearly, this was not satisfactory and it was necessary to insist on
some elaboration. The institute told us that almost everyone who opines
about climate change is utilizing “argument from authority.” What that
means is that just about all the partisans of human caused climate change are
using the writings or publications of experts. The opponents do the same
thing.
The appeal to experts depends on both the intelligence and honesty of
the savants if it is to be trusted. AOC got the 12-year number from the UN
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which the Guardian called the world’s
leading climate scientists. Their names and credentials were not listed,
but we can give them the benefit of the doubt and agree they are not dropouts
from East Overshoe Junior College.
I
was then stung by an accusation from the Long Hill Institute that I too used
argument from authority. Of course, they were correct. Your columnist has
little access to the scholarly data and his ability to understand it limited in
the sense of being non-existent.
Because
the coverage of climate change is so one sided in the mainstream media, one has
to search to find people who disagree with the accepted narrative. Some
of them are a bit sketchy with dubious credentials. Thus, we have Richard Lindzen. Lindzen is a distinguished senior fellow in the Center
for the Study of Science. He is also emeritus professor of meteorology at MIT,
where he was the Alfred P. Sloan Professor, beginning in 1983. Prior to that he
was the Robert P. Burden Professor of Dynamic Meteorology at Harvard
University.
He has other achievements, but once you know he taught at a diploma mill
like MIT, who cares?
Lindzen
is attacked by the proponents of the idea of human caused climate change mercilessly
for disagreeing. No matter, he is fun to listen to. When he gets into the science, he loses me
the same way his opponents do.
What’s
your average walking around citizen to do, or rather believe?
Again,
I must emphasize the science escapes me, but as mentioned above, it also does
not adhere to almost everyone else. I do suspect those who must use ad
hominems and call their opponents names such as “deniers.”
The
former Boston Globe writer Ellen Goodman started the ball rolling in 2007:
“Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust
deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and
future.”
In
that Globe column, there was no science from the lady. She, like the rest
of us, utilized the work of others.
Goodman did make one statement that did seem original, “The
certainty of the human role is now somewhere over 90 percent. Which is about as
certain as scientists ever get.”
That is a bit embarrassing. Scientists agree on the certainty of
scientific laws 100%, always. They don’t meet at conferences and say, “ya
know, I’m gonna give the law of gravity a 75% today and if I’m feeling real
good, a 90% tomorrow.” Now being a generous soul, I’m not going to call
Ellen out as a denier.
Again, let me emphasize that I am not a denier, I’m a don’t knower.
I trust Professor Lindzen more than others, but it is only a hunch. As to climate change itself, I should be
shocked if it did not happen, just the causes might be in question.
There is an area of the environment where I feel confidence in my
opinion. As a beekeeper, I’ve seen the struggle to keep our little
friends become more difficult every year.
The link between the Monsanto pesticide glysophate and declining bee
health is convincing, but here I am still taking my stand based on science
promulgated by others, with the addition of personal experience.
So, I have to cut AOC some slack, though her program is impossible.
Your columnist, is however brave enough to offer AOC a bet in a sly way
and is willing to wager a significant sum that we will not be dead due to
environmental causes by the end of 12 years.
If I win she has to pay. If I lose, she won’t be around to
collect.
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