Originally posted December 3, 2015.
So 40,000 people—each one on the taxpayer dime—are meeting in Paris to (a) save the planet, and (b) to suppress any dissent to the orthodoxy of climate change. “And yet all of them somehow fly to Paris on planes burning massive amounts of fossil fuel, not noticing any contradiction between how they demand you live your life and how they live theirs,” writes Francis Menton in the Manhattan Contrarian.
Consider the case of our President. He has called the so-called “climate crisis” “worse than the terrorist threat.” He has also just flown to Paris in Air Force One, and presumably plans to fly back the same way. An Air Force One 747 consumes 5 gallons of fuel per mile. It’s 3855 air miles from Washington to Paris, 7710 round trip. Did I mention that Air Force One is actually two planes? They always keep a spare 747 within about a half-hour, just in case. So make that 15,420 air miles at 5 gallons per mile. A gallon translates to 21.1 pounds of CO2 emissions. So our dear President is emitting some 1,625,000 pounds of CO2 just for his own flight over and back, more than 800 tons. For comparison, the average American’s annual carbon emissions are about 20 tons — for everything you do for an entire year. Just for the President, and just for this one flight over and back, he is emitting 40 years worth of your carbon consumption. Add in the emissions of his massive entourage on this boondoggle, and it’s a multiple of what you will emit in your entire lifetime. Wired here calculates the total emission of all the attendees in attending the conference at 300,000 tons of CO2 — several hundred times what you will emit in your entire life. And these people purport to lecture you and restrict you by force on how much energy you can use?
So 40,000 government employees meet in Paris seeking, as Mr. Menton puts it, “to put over on the world’s people a spending/control program of multi-trillions of dollars, all based on so-called ‘facts’ that all are required to believe but are contradicted by the best available data. Our primary media sources systematically suppress the data. “
Just maybe, as the WSJ’s Review & Outlook suggests, President Obama should spend more time on America’s economic climate. (The leading measure of U.S. manufacturing fell in November to its lowest level since the end of the recession, and CEOs of America’s biggest companies offered a downbeat view of business for the third straight quarter.)
To see the latest satellite temperature record from UAH (University Alabama in Huntsville), from the time they first put up the satellites in 1979 and going right up to yesterday, go here. As Mr. Menton asks, “What does it even mean to say that ‘the Earth is warming’ when the best data show that the warmest time was 18 years ago? The trend since 1998 is down, not up. The trend since 1997 is completely flat.”
