How Climate Policy Went Wrong – WSJ

If that sounds like a lot of spitballing based on a missing variable extrapolated from two different kinds of estimates that are already fuzzy to begin with, it is. Though I will spare you the interpretation, its sheer iffiness is admirably representative of the climate modeling enterprise overall, from which all forecasts flow. We don t have time travel. We have only one Earth. We can t experiment on it. We don t have 50 Earths with different levels of atmospheric CO2 that we can compare against each other.

The scientific effort is noble but becoming more and more beside the point. Long before we know which climate forecasts are right, thanks to the inevitable nerds at the Congressional Research Service or Government Accountability Office we ll know in detail how many trillions we spent on climate subsidies that had no effect on climate.

Another truth may arrive sooner, perhaps even this winter. U.S. natural-gas supply is perfectly ample but activists have prevented the necessary pipelines to meet demand in the Northeast. A recent report by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. indicates that last year New York City came dangerously close to running out of gas to maintain apartment-building heat. Had the gas failed, restoring heat to thousands of buildings would have been a job of months, not hours, as technicians went door-to-door relighting boiler pilot lights.

Between the lines of the government report as well as Mr. Hansen s, we have a picture of Americans on a path to commit energy suicide in the name of climate change while doing nothing about climate change.

This isn t sustainable and won t be, but it may well take something like the posited New York City deep freeze. Only then will politicians stop pretending to do something about climate change in favor of actually protecting the energy security of Americans amid a changing climate whose processes are not well understood and certainly are not being meaningfully ameliorated by public policy.

via www.wsj.com

Holman Jenkins.