Biden’s Climate Plans Deserve To Be Mocked

By Dr. Jay Lehr & Tom Harris February 2nd, 2021

 SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Reading President Joe Biden’s climate change Executive Order may cause nausea, clinical depression, and thoughts of immediate suicide. Part 1 of a 3-part series.

President Joe Biden tells us that New York City will be ten feet underwater by this year’s Earth Day, April 22, when he will host an international Leaders’ Climate Summit to address the crisis. The cause of the catastrophe, said Biden, are over-excited Trump supporters who are breathing too quickly for the good of the planet.

Biden hasn’t really said this, of course (although he is holding a nonsensical climate summit on Earth Day), but he might as well have since the points he made in his press conference on January 27th are almost as ridiculous. Indeed, the issues the rookie president raised when telling reporters, “Today is ‘Climate Day’ at the White House” are so absurd that he may have actually done us a favor.

In “The art of always being right – 38 ways to win when you were defeated,” the sarcastic yet illuminating treatise by 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, is listed as method #23, “Make him exaggerate:”

“Contradiction and contention irritate a man into exaggerating his statement. By contradicting your opponent, you may drive him into extending [his case] beyond its proper limits…”

Happily, we don’t actually need to trick Joe into exaggerating; he has unwittingly done it for us, overstating his case so severely that his points are easy to defeat and will eventually make great fodder for politically-incorrect comedians (see “George Carlin on The Environment”). Were it not for the fact that he’s actually basing American government policy on these absurd beliefs, then the only appropriate reaction to Biden’s biggest blunders would simply be laughter.

So, let’s cite and then analyze some of the statements made by Biden during Wednesday’s press conference in which he signed the ludicrous “Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad.”

Biden: “Today is ‘Climate Day’ at the White House and — which means that today is ‘Jobs Day’ at the White House. We’re talking about American innovation, American products, American labor.”

Reality: What he is really talking about is eliminating jobs. The number of jobs lost in the fossil fuel sector will dwarf those that will be gained in totally uneconomic efforts to make unreliable wind and solar or battery operations work beneficially for the American public.

Various studies have shown that jobs lost in the economy outside of the so-called green energy field will greatly exceed those created in the wind, solar and other renewable energy sectors. The 2015 report “Looking for green jobs: the impact of green growth on employment,” issued by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (London School of Economics and Political Science) and the Seoul-based intergovernmental organization Global Green Growth Institute, admitted that a study by Böhringer et al. (2012) demonstrated that regarding the outcome of the Ontario government’s former feed-in tariff (FiT) policy, which transferred funds from electricity consumers to renewable energy companies to stimulate renewable energy production:

“They find that although the policy is successful at increasing employment in the green sectors of the economy, the policy is also likely to increase the rate of unemployment in the province and to reduce overall labor force participation.

“…each new job created by the policy in green sectors of the economy is likely to cause the loss of nearly two jobs in other sectors of the economy. Electricity prices go up, real wages are reduced, labor supply is discouraged, and jobs are lost to other provinces. They, therefore, conclude that policies designed to promote renewable energy should be promoted only for the sake of their environmental impacts, not for their labor market effects.”

Studies in Europe have shown similar outcomes. Indeed, even then Ontario auditor general Jim McCarter pointed out in his 2011 report:

“A 2009 study conducted in Spain found that for each job created through renewable energy programs, about two jobs were lost in other sectors of the economy.”

So, Biden’s Wednesday announcement was really “Job-killing Day at the White House.” 

Biden: “It’s a future of enormous hope and opportunity. It’s about coming to the moment to deal with this maximum threat that we — that’s now facing us — climate change — with a greater sense of urgency. In my view, we’ve already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis, and we can’t wait any longer. We see it with our own eyes, we feel it, we know it in our bones, and it’s time to act.”

Reality: The climate scare is the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people and the world. The real threat is world domination by socialists and communists who want to enslave the world by controlling our carbon dioxide emissions and our major energy sources. Man’s impact on the thermostat of planet Earth is zero. While many scientists believe it is not exactly zero, they have been unable to come up with a number closer than three zeros to the decimal’s right in the annual impact of mankind. If Biden thinks that he feels tiny fractions of a degree temperature change in his “bones,” then we can recommend some good psychologists specializing in hypochondria. 

Biden: “…the attitude of the American people toward greater impetus on focusing on climate change and doing something about it has increased across the board — Democrat, Republican, Independent.”

Reality: This is completely false. NO SURVEY SHOWS THIS RESULT. The United Nations’ “My World” global survey shows that Biden is completely out of touch with average people on climate change. After 9.7 million people from 194 countries had been polled, “action was taken on climate change” rated dead last out of the 16 suggested priorities for the U.N. For most of the world, and especially those in developing nations, the message is clear: In comparison with access to reliable energy, better health care, government honesty, a good education, etc., climate change is not important. It’s time for governments to stop wasting billions of dollars trying to stop the climate from changing. The world has real problems to solve.

Among normal people, when they think about climate change at all, it is usually just a shrug—”whatever, man’—or the butt of jokes. We all love to get a laugh out of late-night talk show hosts blaming everything bad in the world on global warming. Joe may very well have a future in stand-up comedy if he survives four years in the White House.

Biden: “…I’m signing today an executive order to supercharge our administration’s ambitious plan to confront the existential threat of climate change. And it is an existential threat.” 

Reality: No informed observer would consider that the slightly more than one-degree Celsius average warming the Earth has experienced since 1880 is a threat at all, let alone an existential one. In fact, warming has been beneficial since, before 1880, we were in a climatically-miserable time period known as the Little Ice Age. Joe’s new order will do nothing but flush vast amounts of taxpayers’ hard-earned income down the proverbial toilet. 

Biden: “Last year, wildfires burned more than 5,000 acres in the West… More intense and powerful hurricanes and tropical storms pummeled states across the Gulf Coast and along the East Coast… Historic floods, severe droughts have ravaged the Midwest… And the Defense Department reported that climate change is a direct threat to more than two-thirds of the military’s operational critical installations.”

Reality: In his January 29^th interview on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, James Taylor, President of the Arlington Heights-based Heartland Institute, explained the problems with blaming these events on global warming:

“NASA satellites have been able to measure the amount of land burned by wildfires… what they find is that…over the past 20 to 30 years the area that’s been burned by wildfires has declined by 25%…wildfires have always occurred; they always will occur…[But] objective scientific evidence shows that wildfires are becoming less frequent and severe, as the earth modestly warms.”

The real cause of wildfires is described in this article by climatologist Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris.

Taylor continued:

“Tornadoes, the same thing. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration…their data show that tornadoes have again become less frequent and less severe… 

“Regarding hurricanes, we have hurricane data that shows that the [global] accumulated cyclonic energy, total global energy from hurricanes, we’ve been able to measure that for the past 40 – 50 years and what we see is no increase whatsoever… The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself reports that they have low confidence in any links between climate change and hurricanes.”

Blaming wildfires, floods, and droughts on climate change has been proven false repeatedly. The Biden administration and its allies’ attempt to rule the nation and the world by fear is the real agenda.

… next week, part 2 of “Biden’s climate plans deserve to be mocked.” 

About the Author: Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris 

Dr. Jay Lehr is Senior Policy Analyst with the International Climate Science Coalition and former Science Director of The Heartland Institute. He is an internationally renowned scientist, author and speaker who has testified before Congress on dozens of occasions on environmental issues and consulted with nearly every agency of the national government, as well as many foreign countries. After graduating from Princeton University at the age of 20 with a degree in Geological Engineering, he went on to receive the nation’s first Ph.D. in Groundwater Hydrology from the University of Arizona. He later became executive director of the National Association of Groundwater Scientists and Engineers. Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition, and a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute. He has 40 years experience as a mechanical engineer/project manager, science and technology communications professional, technical trainer and S&T advisor to a former Opposition Senior Environment Critic in Canada’s Parliament.