The German Autobahn is about to become the Auto Ban
I’ve been in this business a long time – 30 years, in fact. And in the course of that span of time, I’ve seen a lot of stories, some true, a lot untrue. And I’ve seen a lot of hysteria and agenda journalism manufactured and packaged as news. It has developed my one superhero skill of skepticism and cynicism whenever anything is reported as potentially catastrophic. Case and point? Climate change.
Now don’t get me wrong. I firmly believe the climate is changing. Here’s another tenet in which I firmly believe. The climate is supposed to change. It always has. It’s never been static for any length of time, and I would propose that if the climate ever stopped changing, that’s the definition of living on a dead planet.
Most U.S. media attention over the last couple of weeks, if you use the Sunday news shows as a gauge, has been spent on one of three stories – the Donald Trump show trial in Manhattan getting underway, abortion court decisions in Arizona and ballot initiatives in Florida, and how this will allegedly be the single biggest issue people focus on in November, and the war against Israel by Hamas, Iran, and the anti-Semites that are making up an increasing percentage of the Democratic Party.
Lost in the shuffle is not just Sunny Hostin on The View claiming that the solar eclipse last week was caused by climate change, but a handful of other data points you should know about how unserious the climate change hysteria people all over the world actually are.
A week ago in London, Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, channeled his inner Greta Thunberg by claiming we only have two years left before it’s too late to save the planet.
“We still have a chance to make greenhouse gas emissions tumble, with a new generation of national climate plans. But we need these stronger plans, now”
Keep in mind that Al Gore, the godfather of climate change hysteria, said in January of 2006 that we only had 10 years left. Stiell’s predicted doom would end up being a decade after Gore’s end date. John Kerry thinks everything ends in 2030. The aforementioned Swedish climate activist/anti-Semite got caught glomming back in 2018 onto a Harvard think piece saying humanity would be all but extinct in 2023. Stiell is certainly not the first to put a doomsday countdown on humanity if we don’t end all fossil fuel use.
In Germany, Volker Wissing, their Transport Minister, came out with a warning that doesn’t just send a shock wave to everyone around Europe, but to my wife, daughter, and the rest of their Girl Scout troop taking their final group trip together this summer to Germany.
“Germany’s transport minister has warned that driving will have to be banned at the weekends unless the country’s net zero laws are changed.
Volker Wissing’s FDP party wants the law amended so the polluting transport sector can miss carbon emissions reduction targets, as long as Germany as a whole reaches them.
But the change is opposed by the Greens, who are part of the three-way coalition with the pro-business FDP and the Social Democrats (SPD), led by Olaf Scholz, the chancellor.
Negotiations over the law have dragged on since September last year. In a bid to heap pressure on his coalition partners to amend the law, Mr Wissing said that he would have to enforce a ban on weekend driving to abide by the law unless it was changed before mid-July.
The Greens accused Mr. Wissing of stirring up unfounded fears at a time when German enthusiasm for climate-friendly legislation is at a low ebb during the cost-of-living crisis.”
Can you imagine Germans being told they can’t drive the Autobahn on weekends unless they get to net zero? Me, neither.
Now if you believe that there’s such an existential threat to the global climate that Germans can’t drive their BMW i8 on a weekend drive from Frankfurt to Stuttgart on the A6, let’s say you accomplish your auto ban on the autobahn. Do you think that’s going to offset what’s going on in China and India?
India has an electricity demand, and the way to meet that demand is for more power production, using gas and coal-fired power plants.
“India has asked companies to operate underutilised gas-based power plants in May and June, and extend operations of imported coal-based plants until Oct. 15 to meet anticipated high demand for electricity, according to two government orders.
The South Asian nation registered an 8% rise in electricity consumption in the financial year that ended last month, and demand is expected to rise in the hot summer months.”
Why such a need for more power production? Economic growth and activity. Their industrial output just grew at its fastest rate over a four-month period in February.
What about China, the other country featuring a population of over a billion people? Well, they’re vastly expanding power plant production, too.
In my head, I’m seeing the old school scales, with no German cars screaming down the highway on weekends on one side, and a dozen new power plants in the last year between two countries all burning fossil fuel so that we can have all the clothes, electronics, and EV batteries to make us feel good about our role in addressing climate change. It’s just nonsense.
According to the data, and the hysteria of the climate high priests like former Vice President Gore and Secretary of State John Kerry, despite their attempts to drive us back into the Stone Age, carbon is in the air more than ever before. Remember what that was supposed to do to the ice caps at the North and South Pole?
Gore predicted that due to excessive global warming, the poles could become ice-free within five years. He made that prediction in 2009. With all this extra carbon in the air, how are the poles doing today?
Up north, as of January 2024, according to The European Commission’s Copernicus Programme, the Greenland Ice Sheet is actually within .5% of its 30-year average over the span of 1991-2020. It’s doing just fine. The polar bears are not drowning.
Down south, The Antarctic Ice Sheet is actually the coldest and thickest it’s been in the last 5,000 years. That’s not me talking, that’s the American Meteorological Society.
I live in Southern California, a desert that usually doesn’t get a lot of annual rainfall. We were told definitively for the last several years that we’re in a forever drought due to climate change, and we couldn’t water our lawns, had to reduce our water consumption, put flow restrictors on our showerheads, and turn in our water-guzzling neighbors. Two years ago, we had an abundance of rain and snow, more than the seasonal average. Not enough, said everyone in state government from Gavin Newsom on down. One year does not get us out of a drought. Then last year happened, which was an exceedingly abundant year of rain and snow. The reservoirs weren’t just full, they were dumping off into rivers, which dumped into the oceans, because we had more water than we could store. Still not enough, said the experts, because the forever drought was more than a two-year anomaly.
We’re finishing up this rain season in two months, and all of the reservoirs are again at capacity, and the snowpack is over 115%, in April. The drought that we were supposed to experience because of climate change resulted in exactly the opposite conditions, with the experts naturally blaming the overage on the very same climate change.
I just want to drive my car where I want, when I want, without morons chaining themselves to the center divider, and enjoy my green lawn when I return home and put the car in my driveway. Is that too much to ask in Joe Biden’s America?
