United Nations: It's not too late to save the planet, but only if everybody immediately does everything we tell them to

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finally did their big reveal on Sunday of the already-leaked third installment of their four-part climate-change report jointly composed by every big-wig climate scientist, progressive economist, and globalist politician they can scrape together, and surprise: It includes just about every type of dire warning and urgent recommendation we’ve been hearing for decades on decades now. Nutshell version: The world is only a matter of years away from all-consuming calamity, but if every country could just bite the bullet and immediately commit to aggressively decelerating their own domestic economies in concert with global standards, things just might work out for humanity. So sayeth the “experts”:

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Delivering the latest stark news about climate change on Sunday, a United Nations panel warned that governments are not doing enough to avert profound risks in coming decades. But the experts found a silver lining: Not only is there still time to head off the worst, but the political will to do so seems to be rising around the world.

In a report unveiled here, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that decades of foot-dragging by political leaders had propelled humanity into a critical situation, with greenhouse emissions rising faster than ever. Though it remains technically possible to keep planetary warming to a tolerable level, only an intensive push over the next 15 years to bring those emissions under control can achieve the goal, the committee found.

“We cannot afford to lose another decade,” said Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chairman of the committee that wrote the report. “If we lose another decade, it becomes extremely costly to achieve climate stabilization.” …

The authors found that tackling the problem in a serious way would carry large costs, shaving a few hundredths of a percentage point off global economic growth each year. By the end of the century, societies would most likely be far richer than today, but almost 5 percent poorer than they would have been had they not spent the money to protect the climate, according to the study.

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Among the report’s vague-to-specific ideas for ways to willfully self-impoverish in the name of stabilizing global temperatures: More taxpayer subsidization of renewables to force higher investment in the field, more regulation governing efficiency and transportation standards (like more government-sponsored walking and cycling trends), getting rid of fossil fuel use altogether by the end of the century, human dietary changes (a.k.a., going full vegetarian and getting rid of pesky methane-emitting livestock), and so on and so forth.

Some of the ideas I can get behind from the report are encouraging more energy from natural gas and nuclear plants — or, rather, at least not actively inhibiting their development for political gamesmanship (although, of course, the UN sees these sources as a ‘bridge’ to their zero-fossil fuel future). Germany tried to completely get rid of nuclear power and discourage fracking in favor of all-out renewable subsidization with a plan pretty solidly resembling what the UN is recommending for the entire world, and guess what happened there? More coal and a whole lotta’ backtracking, that’s what. Oops.

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David Strom 5:20 PM | April 19, 2024
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