What Climate Change Alarmists Get Wrong

This is a monologue from my radio show. Listen live from noon to 3 PM here.

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I'll tell you exactly what I think. I believe mankind contributes to climate change. I do. There are 7 billion of us on the planet. We are a symbiotic unit with the planet. I think we contribute to climate change. I also think the sun contributes to climate change. I think climate change is a natural thing. I think climate change will happen with or without us. The climate is always changing. It was changing before mankind was around on the planet. It'll change long after we're all in heaven, if there's a new heaven and a new earth. On the new earth, there will also be climate change. There's winter, there's summer, there's spring, there's fall. There's always going to be climate change. It is a naturally occurring thing. It gets hotter over time and cools down over time.

There have been little ice ages. There have been big ice ages. There have been times where it's hotter than now. There are times where it's cooler than now. I do think mankind contributes. I also think we are the most adaptable species to ever be set foot on the planet. And we have scientists documented in the 1970s and '80s who were saying we were all going to die within the 30 years, civilization was going to collapse. Paul Ehrlich has insisted that everything, all mineral resources were going to go away. I'm old enough to remember the 1980s, the lectures about how we would have no more fossil fuels by the mid '90s, that all the oil reserves would be gone at least by the year 2000. We actually have more oil in this country now than we've had in the past, production-wise.

And all the nightmare scenarios, they get a lot of attention in the media and I don't know that the media has ever realized how much it's helped discredit any sort of claims towards now. Are we're going to have more [inaudible 00:01:52]? Maybe so. I'm a little bit put off by the use of models. Let's rely on computer models and things like that. I don't find that that's really helpful, but we can adapt. I think the environmentalists out there demanding that we now shut down all of the grow houses for marijuana because the carbon footprint and you people mining for Bitcoin, shame on you, you're destroying the planet. No, I think people are totally adaptable. And I think that the solutions, if we're in some verge of manmade climate change and global warming, I think the solutions will come from innovation in the private sector. They always do. In fact, if anything, I think that's why we need a more robust private sector.

And that's why I think things like in the infrastructure bill, where the government is trying to pick the winners and losers, the government rarely ever gets this stuff right. Let it sort itself out in the private sector. Look at Apple. Apple has committed itself to a green future and it wants to be 100% carbon neutral, if not carbon negative, and it's doing it, it's doing it. It's buying offsets. It's installing solar panels, it's relying on windmills. It's recycling the snot out of stuff. It's doing everything possible to become carbon neutral. Private sector companies are stepping up and doing that. More of that, please. If they want to be incentivized to do it, incentivize them to do it, but the idea that the government needs to force us out of our fossil fuel cars, you know what? Find a better alternative. If you want to get me out of my gas-guzzling GMC Denali.

You want to get me out of my beautiful, lovely, wonderful, man is it wonderful Denali, offer me something better. Don't force me into something inferior. The way great progress has come to this country overwhelmingly tended to be through the development of something better. An alternative that got to be lower in price and scale and we moved into it. And frankly, an electric vehicle is not better than a fossil fuel-burning vehicle. Look at the hostility to nuclear power around the world from environmentalists. You want to solve the global warming problem that the left says we have? Every country in the planet needs a nuclear power plant. Every state in our union needs a nuclear power plant. Do you know the only active nuclear power construction in North America is in the State of Georgia?

They're building a plant called Plant Vogtle. It is complete with massive cost overruns. It is well over budget. The cost of which will undoubtedly be passed along to rate payers and it's a good thing. Why? Because the United States and Canada have become so hostile to nuclear power, that if you want the reservoir of knowledge on how to build a nuclear power plant, you've got to go to China and Russia. It's a national security issue, not just an environmental issue. And a nuclear power plant is going to be producing clean burning power... Clean burning power. Clean power for the next hundred years. But the environmentalists don't like it. And they, through the media, have generated a fear campaign about nuclear power. They highlight the worst. They highlight Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl. They don't highlight all the countries on the planet that have used, reliably, nuclear power for quite some time.

If we're going to change the dynamic, let the private sector do it through innovation, not through the government picking winners and losers with tax credits, tax deductions and incentives. We are an adaptable people. There's no reason for the freak out. There is absolutely no reason for the freak out. Yet the media has decided everything must be freaked out about, whether it is COVID, whether it is the environment, you name it. Everything must be a moral panic in the media to get you to care. And at some point, people just stop caring about everything and become apathetic and indifferent to everything because they can't decide what they really should care about and not care about when the media tells them everything is a hill to die on and everything is a catastrophe. Everything is a disaster. Pick and choose. If it's all a disaster, none of it is.

Let the private sector sort this out and stop with the hysteria. All of the people now who are saying we've got 10 years left? I remember when they were saying we had 10 years left 20 years ago.