Tom Evslin: US national climate advisor Gina McCarthy misses the cost of climate hysteria

This commentary is by Tom Evslin of Stowe, an entrepreneur, author and former Douglas administration official. It is republished from the Fractals of Change blog.

Gina McCarthy is a former EPA Administrator and the outgoing US National Climate Advisor. Her article lauds projected increases in electric vehicle sales and wind power in the United States and the subsidies the Biden administration has gotten through Congress towards those goals. She ignores, of course, rising energy costs caused by the Biden Administration war on drilling and pipelines. In a narrow sense, she is right that the US economy is still doing very well.

Public domain

Gina McCarthy, national climate advisor for President Biden

But then there are our friends in Europe. See the headline and the associated story. Many factories there cannot afford to operate given their current energy costs. Production is shifting from Europe, often to the US; but beggaring our allies is not a good strategy for world peace, the world economy, or the environment. World prices for oil are lower than they were before Russia invaded Ukraine but much higher than they were when Biden took office. Those prices went up and stayed up because the US is producing less oil than it did previously and than it could be producing now. You can thank Gina McCarthy and her boss for that shortfall.

Putin didn’t as much cause high energy prices as take advantage of them both to finance his Ukrainian mis-adventure and to attempt to coerce his European customers into acquiescence. Russia’s refusal to send gas to Europe has further increased the cost of that commodity as well as electricity which is mostly generated from natural gas despite the European rush to renewables.  There simply would not be enough gas to keep Europeans warm and run their factories this winter if the US were not shipping huge supplies there. Good thing for everybody that we didn’t ban fracking the way that most of Europe did – and the way the Biden administration would still like to do here.

Europe’s vulnerability stems from climate hysteria. There’s nothing wrong (except maybe the cost) with deploying wind and solar as Europe had done. There’s everything wrong with banning fracking and refusing new leases for oil and gas before a green alternative is in place. Europeans told themselves they were being green when they outsourced their growing need for natural gas and oil to Russia. Germans felt particularly environmental when they decided to shut down their nukes in an over-reaction to Fukushima. Now they’re trying to keep the last few nukes running and burning massive amounts of coal. Still they can’t keep the factories running.

In the short term, Americans are gaining jobs as European production shuts down and/or can’t compete. For our own  future, we must look at what’s happening to Europe now as an object lesson in what happens if you shut down traditional energy sources before you actually have a domestic replacement.

Image courtesy of Public domain

4 thoughts on “Tom Evslin: US national climate advisor Gina McCarthy misses the cost of climate hysteria

  1. This just out today in MA….because of Green Energy anti foissil fuel policies….two electric providers filed for a rate increase…GET THIS…..64%

    “National Grid and Eversource are the two major electricity providers for Massachusetts. Both companies have notified the Department of Public Utilities (DPU) that rates for electricity are about to skyrocket.

    National Grid has announced a 64% increase in electricity rates effective November 1st. While Eversource is on a different schedule, they too have announced an increase in natural gas rates of 38% on November 1st and the January 1, 2023, electricity rate will be announced in the next few weeks. Eversource is anticipated to announce a similar rate increase to National Grid

  2. The problem with the theory of catastrophic CO2 warming is that there’s no verification of that theory in actual weather balloon data.

    This was demonstrated by the Connollys when they analyzed data from thousands of weather balloons and found that the atmospheric temperature profile was dependent on molar density– the atmosphere thins with elevation due to the pressure gradient– and radiative gases had no bearing on this profile. https://globalwarmingsolved.com/2013/11/19/summary-the-physics-of-the-earths-atmosphere-papers-1-3/ There’s no perturbation of the atmosphere’s temperature profile by radiative gases, no radiative heating that can be detected anywhere.

    Even more amazingly, if we look at weather balloon data we find no perturbations of the temperature profile as the balloon moves from drier air (little of the main IR radiative gas, water vapor) to moister air. This would be akin to having the balloon move through a CO2 cloud, if CO2 weren’t a well-distributed gas. Yet there’s no disturbance of the temperature profile as the balloon moves from drier to moister air and then back: apparently, not even the most abundant greenhouse gas, water vapor, is affecting the atmospheric temperature profile as expressed in the lapse rate equations, which have no terms for radiative effects and are well-established in atmospheric physics.

    This situation– that there’s no signature whatsoever of greenhouse gases warming the atmosphere at any level– is a dirty secret, even though many still talk erroneously of how greenhouse gases act as something of a ‘blanket.’ No, they do not. There’s no sign of this blanketing effect, such that the atmosphere is heating up from this blanket, and overall there’s no heating of the surface by the atmosphere as that would violate the physics of heat transfer: heat flows from the warmer surface to the much cooler atmosphere, not the other way around. A colder atmosphere can’t warm a warmer surface.

    However, a simple fact seems to have escaped many: the atmosphere has mass. As such, it can be warmed. When we talk about the emissions temperature of the earth, then, we’re really not talking about the mass of the earth alone; were talking about the mass of the earth receiving energy as well as the mass of the atmosphere receiving energy indirectly through contact with the earth’s surface. Because of massive surface pressure (14.7 psi, which comes out to 2117 pounds/ square foot) most of the mass of the atmosphere, and consequently the heat capacity, is near the surface.

    There’s a way to wiggle out of this dilemma (that there’s no evidence of atmospheric warming by radiative gases) and that’s by asserting that what CO2 does is raise the emissions height due to radiative congestion such that IR emissions to space have to come from higher up in the atmosphere. Then, we count down from this higher emission height using the lapse rate to get a new, catastrophically warmer surface temperature.

    I won’t go into any detail about this last theory of CO2 catastrophe except to say that anyone who knows anything about the constantly-changing (on a daily basis) emissions height, the IR atmospheric window, and the constantly-changing lapse rate knows that this is complete nonsense. Climate scientists say that the lapse rate does nothing but cool the atmosphere because greenhouse gases are doing all the warming. Except, that it, when they need to save their theory; then the lapse rate can warm the surface.

    Literally, CO2 is doing nothing at all to atmospheric temperature. There’s zero evidence of this is real-world balloon data. Radiation is flashing in the sky at the speed of light, because IR radiation is in fact light. But it’s not affecting atmospheric temperature.

    The bottom of the Grand Canyon is always hotter than the rim. Why? Is it because there’s more CO2 at the bottom? No; it’s because the temperature increases approximately 5.5 F for every 1,000 feet, and this is the lapse rate which is pressure, not CO2 or water vapor, dependent. This demonstrates that the heating from the pressure gradient is real as the mass of the atmosphere is more concentrated the closer we get to the center of gravity, as we do when we descend down the Grand Canyon, and the kinetic energy of a gas increases with pressure as is well-known in textbook definitions of how an expanding air parcel cools when it expands because kinetic energy is converted to potential energy, and warms when it descends as potential energy is converted to kinetic.

    CO2 warming is a complete fiction.

    Jim1

  3. She’s as clueless as her boss the potato head puppet as are all in this mis
    administration.. Putting the cart (ev’s) before the horse (energy) we have to
    pull it. As all over educated under qualified tend to do she only see’s the goal
    while she misses the reality. Until there is enough blow/glow power you can’t be
    (which there will never be) mandating a change to 100% non fossil fuel. They are
    hurting the most vulnerable, poor and middle class the most with hoax while using
    tax money to support the rich who buy the high pollution EV’s.. Look to Europe who is now in the energy pit with the natives ready to burn it all down..

  4. McCarthy is not concerned about the financial wreckage her policies (politics) will inflict. Once enacted they will just say we tried to do the right thing and “deeply sorry” if it doesn’t work. Remember the Colorado Mine Spill from 2015?

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