Let me begin by thanking Mr. McKibben for proving beyond all doubt how catastrophically insane climate Catastrophism is. For so spectacular has the failure been to halt, much less reduce, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 that, according to McKibben, the U.S. must now mobilize, in World War II fashion, to combat what he sees as a similar threat to humanity:
We’re used to war as metaphor: the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on cancer. Usually this is just a rhetorical device, a way of saying. “We need to focus our attention and marshal our forces to fix something we don’t like.” But this is no metaphor. … It’s not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. — https://newrepublic.com/article/135684/declare-war-climate-change-mobilize-wwii
In other words, we need to “marshal our forces” by redirecting industry to build war materiel consisting not of bullets and bombs but of solar panels and wind turbines. Why? Because “If we move quickly enough to meet the goal of 80 percent clean power by 2030, then the world’s carbon dioxide levels would fall below the relative safety of 350 parts per million by the end of the century.”
Sorry, Bill, but even if we wanted to (and we don’t, nor should we, more about which below), we couldn’t. Just ask Google:
We decided to combine our energy innovation study’s best-case scenario results with [NASA scientist James] Hansen’s climate model to see whether a 55 percent emission cut by 2050 would bring the world back below that 350-ppm threshold. Our calculations revealed otherwise. Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use. — http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/google-engineers-explain-why-they-stopped-rd-in-renewable-energy
Got that, Bill? Sure, as you want “her” to, the next President could issue an executive order outlawing fossil fuels, never mind that it would be a death warrant for billions. But while that may be what you really want (you and yours excluded, of course), something tells me that the order would not only be ignored but that “she” would be strung up by her cankles and left to rot in the noonday sun on a planet that is positively luxuriating in the life-giving embrace of the very thing that you want to starve it of:
From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25 [2016].
An international team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries led the effort, which involved using satellite data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments to help determine the leaf area index, or amount of leaf cover, over the planet’s vegetated regions. The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States. — https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/04/27/nasa-carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth-study-finds
Maybe Bill Mckibben isn’t certifiably insane, but the climate Catasprophism that he and his ilk endlessly spout — aided and abetted by a mainstream media bought and paid for by a ruling elite that is milking Catastrophism for all its worth (i.e., trillions) — most certainly is.
When will it end? Who knows, but the sooner the world wakes up to The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels (which I recently reviewed here: https://steemit.com/science/@freeradical/the-moral-case-for-fossil-fuels-an-unabashedly-biased-book-review), the sooner we’ll put this insanity behind us.
Exactly right. CO2 is plant food. It's NOT pollution. We actually need MUCH more of it. Let's shoot for a thousand ppm.