The Spinoff offered Izzy Cook the opportunity to respond to Friday’s interview in which she was laughed at for her hypocrisy.
The journalist could be criticised for her extended laughter, and has been.
Her mother, Rose Cook, asked to respond and wrote that Heather du Plessis-Allan should be ashamed of how she bullied daughter.
IĀ read what she wrote and thought, if anyone should be ashamed its Cook for buying into the greenwash and the anti-farming, anti-progress rhetoric that is long on emotion, short on science, and that is terrifying chidden:
. . .Our young people are genuinely terrified about the world they are inheriting. That is what matters. . .Ā
Yes it matters that young people are terrified not because of climate change but because of the calamitous way it’s portrayed by older people who ought to know better and bring more reason to the debate.
This point was made by PDM and Mike Webber in comments yesterday.
Eco zealots are peddling misinformation and false news about climate change, its impact and what can be done about it.
Bjorn Lomborg writes on 50 years of climate panic:
. . . Almost every climate summit has been branded as the last chance. Setting artificial deadlines to get attention is one of the most common environmental tactics. We have continually been told for the past half-century that time has just about run out. This message is spectacularly wrong and leads to panic and poor policies. . .Ā
In 1972, the world was also rocked by the first global environmental scare, the so-called āLimits to Growthā report. The authors predicted that most natural resources would run out within a few decades while pollution would overpower humanity.
At the time, the future was described byĀ TimeĀ magazine as a desolate world with few gaunt survivors tilling freeway center strips, hoping to raise a subsistence crop.Ā LifeĀ magazine expected āurban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollutionā by the mid-1980s.
They were all wrong because they overlooked the greatest resource of all: human ingenuity. We donāt just use up resources; we innovate smarter ways of making resources more available.
At the same time, technology solves many of the most persistent pollution problems, as did the catalytic converter. This is why air pollution in rich countries has been declining for decades.
Nonetheless, after fifty years of stunningly incorrect predictions, climate campaigners, journalists and politicians still hawk an immediate apocalypse to great acclaim by ignoring adaptation. Headlines that sea level rise couldĀ drownĀ 187 million people by the end of the century are foolish.
They imagine that hundreds of millions of people will remain stationary while the waters lap over their calves, hips, chests and mouths.
More seriously, it absurdly assumes that no nation will build any sea defenses. In the real world, ever-wealthier nations will adapt and protect their citizens better, leading to less flooding, while surprisingly spending an ever-lower share of their GDP on flood and protection costs.
What’s solved past problems and led to better lives and improved life expectancy? It’s not panic, taxing more and doing less. It’s adaptation, research and technology.
Likewise, when activists tell you that climate change will make children face twice as much fire, they rely on computer models that only include temperature and ignore humans. Real societies adapt and reduce fire because fires are costly.
That is why global fire statistics show less burned area over the past 120 years and why a future with adaptation sees less, not more fire.
These unsubstantiated scares have real-world consequences.Ā AnĀ academic studyĀ of young people worldwide found that most suffer from āeco-anxietyā. Two-thirds are scared and sad, while almost half say their worries impact their daily lives.
It is irresponsible to scare youths when the UN Climate PanelĀ findsĀ that even if we do nothing to mitigate climate change, the impact by the end of the century will be a reduction of an average incomeĀ increaseĀ from 450 percent to 438 percent. A problem, but hardly the end of the world.
Moreover, panic is a terrible policy advisor. Activist politicians in the rich world are tinkering around the edges of addressing climate change, showering subsidies over expensive vanity projects such as electric cars, solar and wind, while the UN finds that it canāt identify an actual impact on emissions from the last decade of climate promulgations.
Despite their grandiose statements of saving the world, 78 percent of rich countriesā energy still comes from fossil fuels.
That’s because no-one has yet to come up with affordable, reliable and sustainable alternatives.
And as the Glasgow climate summit has shown (for the 26thĀ time), developing nations ā whose emissions over the rest of this century matter most ā cannot afford to similarly spend trillions on ineffective climate policies as they help their populations escape poverty.
Fifty years of panic clearly havenāt solved climate change. We need a smarter approach that doesnāt scare everyone and focuses on realistic solutions such as adaptation and innovation.
Adaptation wonāt make all of the cost of climate change vanish, but it will reduce it dramatically. And by funding the innovation needed to eventually make clean energy cheaper than fossil fuels, we can allow everyone ā including developing countries ā to sustainably go green.
The eco zealots ignore sustainability which balances environmental action with economic and social concerns.
A home-grown example of that is the calls for halving the dairy herd without taking into account that New Zealand’s milk production has the lowest carbon footprint and that reducing production here would encourage more production in other countries which do it far less efficiently.
It also fails to take into account the disastrous economic and social impact halving the herd would have not least of which would be the jobs lost on farm and in processing and distribution and in the businesses which service and supply farms and processors.
Nor do they have feasible and sustainable uses for the land which would no longer be used for grazing cows.
Some could be used to grow crops, but is that really a greener option when you take into account the fertiliser, sprays and diesel that requires? Where would we find markets when New Zealand’s natural advantage is for growing grass not the crops which many other countries do more efficiently? What else could we do to replace the foreign exchange lost from the milk we’re no long producing?
Calls to halve the dairy herd are, like so many other of the eco-zealots climate change policies, would leave us colder, hungrier and poorer.
That’s because climate change is used by the eco zealots as an anti-capitalist Trojan horse.
Their real agenda isn’t a greener planet it’s a red world.
That’s what should be terrifying all of us.
But we don’t have to be terrified.
Scaremongering won’t solve problems. That will happen with sensible, science-based solutions that address environmental issues without the economic and social sabotage the eco-zealots’ wish-list would inflict on us.
Posted by homepaddock 
Homepaddock 