Stephen Moore: Technology and growth are the cures to climate doomsday

Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

I guess you could mark me down as a “climate change skeptic.” I’m not a climate scientist, so I have no expertise on what is happening with the planet’s temperature or severe weather events that can wreak havoc on life and property.

I am skeptical that “collective action” through governmental policies will make planet Earth a more hospitable place. Is this the same government that can’t balance its budget, control its borders, stop the crime spree across America and has allowed a 10% inflation tax, among other foibles?

Now, these same politicians will, like Moses, stop the oceans from rising? Fat chance. And they accuse the United States of being religious zealots.

But I do have faith in free markets and the technological advances that for thousands of years have moved us away from the Hobbesian nightmare of humans living in dank caves with life on Earth being “nasty, brutish, and short.”

Deaths from hurricanes, landslides, tornadoes, earthquakes, droughts, floods, food and energy shortages, severe heat and cold and other disruptions from Mother Earth have fallen sharply over the past century. The property damage from acts of nature as a share of our GDP continues to drop yearly.

For example, more accurate weather reporting prepares people for deadly weather events. Building technologies make mankind smarter about weather- and earthquake-proofing homes, buildings, bridges, and other structures to protect against collapse and rubble. The real “green revolution” on agriculture output has dropped rates of famine and hunger to all-time lows. My mentor, the late, great economist Julian Simon, taught us that the “ultimate resource” to save us from Armageddon is the human mind.

Hence, I was thrilled when CNN reported that scientists had invented a new technology that flies planes into clouds and injects them with silver iodide to make more rain and snow.

The technology could be a cost-effective way to alleviate severe droughts, which have afflicted the western U.S. in recent years.

If you’re a green climate change activist or scientist, you have to be thrilled, right?

It turns out the climate change industrial complex isn’t ecstatic. As CNN notes, some climate scientists complain that the technology could be “getting in the way of nature.” Read that sentence again because it is so rich with irony. Isn’t the entire climate change movement about altering Mother Nature?

This reaction also makes one wonder whether something is going on here in the climate change industrial complex beyond stopping the warming of the planet. Climate change has rapidly evolved into a multitrillion-dollar global industry.

Inexpensive and non-life-altering solutions aren’t part of the plan, just as the folks who said that we were running out of oil attacked the shale revolution, which proved them so tragically wrong.

There are thousands of other examples of new technologies beyond the rainmaking breakthroughs just mentioned. They have already invented or will invent in the years and decades ahead technologies to make our planet warmer, colder, drier, wetter, sunnier or in whatever direction we want to turn the dial. None of these require draconian laws and mandates to destroy our modern-day energy sector and replace our power supply with 19th-century windmills.

We have the supposed greatest minds in the world who have allegedly come to a solution to save the planet dramatically by hitting a “reset” button on energy by turning to some of the most inefficient sources. That’s the best they’ve got?

I was struck by this disdainful comment by UCLA climate scientist Donald Swain regarding the rainmaking machine: “Resources are much better invested in climate solutions already guaranteed to make significant and equitable impacts.”

The professor seems to be saying that it makes far more sense to eliminate 80% of the world’s cheap and abundant energy sources than to bring power to the world’s poorest regions and institute an inexpensive and promising technology that could cut the number of droughts by half or more.

It almost seems they don’t want these innovative and non-intrusive solutions to work. Free markets and technology may help save the world from doomsday, but they won’t overturn a century of progress in human welfare and won’t make the green energy lobby rich.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at Freedom Works. He is also author of the new book: “Govzilla: How The Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy.”

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9 thoughts on “Stephen Moore: Technology and growth are the cures to climate doomsday

  1. The 800 pound gorilla in the room concerning climate change-that nobody ever speaks about or provides solutions to is- OVERPOPULATION – the root cause for ALL negatives facing mankind and this planet. There are simply starting to be more people than the planet can sustain in the way of life we now take for granted. If the wacko environmentalists think things are bad now, and the overpopulation problem is not addressed-in 50 or so years, when the world population doubles to 14 billion-this thing called earth will be a very violent, polluted and terrible place to live.

  2. I am all for replacing Fossil, but it cannot be done overnight, the world is far too dependent on Oil and Gas to just throw a witch and cut off all fossil fuels and switch to wind or solar. Also I have yet to hear anyone explain how the no longer functioning solar panels will be disposed of, since it is almost impossible to recover any of the substances that make up a solar panel and many of these substances are high toxic and will contaminate the soil for years if disposed of in landfills. There is also the problem with sudden high demands of energy. Solar and Wind are great for steady flow of power but when a sudden increase is required they are both very slow to deliver, whereas oil or gas can be increased almost immediately by simply turning up the flow.
    Tell me HOW you plan to fix this problem and not just tell me that cutting off oil and gas will fix everything. Electric Cars are one thing, but just how will this electric-fix-all apply to Tractor-Trailers and Air Craft??? A 5 passenger Combustion Engine Car weighs about 3,500 pounds an Electric Car of the same size, weighs in at almost 6,000 pounds. Just how big and heavy will a Tractor-Trailer be to be able to haul the same load???
    The Boeing 777-300 has a Maximum Takeoff Weight (MTOW) 545,000 pounds, if the increase in wright of a car is almost double and that same logic is applied to the 777 it’s Maximum Takeoff Weight would increase to 1,090,000 pounds
    How long would it take to fully charge an Electric version of the 777, or even a Tractor-Trailer for that matter???

  3. Overpopulation is the root cause of every problem facing mankind and the planet. Every kind of pollution imaginable, shortage of finite resources like food and water, famines, pandemics, migrations, wars, etc etc. Until world population, especially in 3rd world countries is controlled the world will continue to be polluted from 3rd world countries like India, African continent, South America, Southeast Asia, China and all the other countries that use fossil fuels and wood with no regulations or oversight. America and other democracies can be clean as a whistle with zero emissions- and the world will still be polluted as the 3rd world populations continue to explode and pollute their environments and our oceans. Think things are bad now????, wait 50 years when the world population doubles to 14 Billion.

  4. Mr. Moore. You usually write excellent articles, but I think you need to think this through a little better. Seeding silver iodide into clouds to make it rain or snow more in one area just takes away moisture from another area. If you seed the clouds over Texas coming up from the Gulf of Mexico to get it to rain more over Oklahoma and Kansas, then there is less rain or snow to fall over Missouri and Tennessee and Ohio. These “climate change experts” can’t tell us what the weather is going to do in two weeks time, but, apparently, they can accurately tell us what the global temperature is going to be a hundred years in the future. They can’t do it. Their climate computer models can’t even accurately predict the past climate that has already happened even with all the info at their fingertips. I believe that their climate computer models are flawed from the beginning because of their focus on CO2. They focus so hard on CO2 because it has become the sole cause (at least in their minds). CO2 is 14 hundredths of one percent of the atmosphere. It is a trace gas in the atmosphere. Water vapor makes up 70% of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but it’s hard to blame evaporation and clouds and rainfall on human activity. We are currently at about 400 parts per million of CO2 concentration. Did you know that is almost the lowest level of CO2 ever recorded as far back as core samples can take us, which is millions of years back. CO2 has been as high as several thousand parts per million in the past and the earth didn’t burst into flames back then. Currently, 5000 parts per million of CO2 is considered safe in our submarines and aboard the space station. Nothing about “climate change” has anything to do with our climate, but everything to do with political control over people’s lives.

  5. “I’m not a climate scientist, so I have no expertise on what is happening with the planet’s temperature or severe weather events that can wreak havoc on life and property.”

    Really? I’ve saved that admission for the next time this “economist” chooses to pontificate on “climate change” or “global warming”..

    “Hence, I was thrilled when CNN reported that scientists had invented a new technology that flies planes into clouds and injects them with silver iodide to make more rain and snow.”.

    New technology? It’s been around over seventy-five years, so long the original patents have expired.

    “The technology could be a cost-effective way to alleviate severe droughts, which have afflicted the western U.S. in recent years.”

    One would think that an economist would first concern himself with its cost effectiveness before touting it as a solution. Try Levin, Z., Halfon, N., & Alpert, P. (2010). Reassessment of rain enhancement experiments and operations in Israel including synoptic considerations. Atmospheric Research, 97(4), 513–525. doi:10.1016/j.atmosres.2010.06.011 “This suggests that seeding had little or no effect on total precipitation on the ground. These results are in agreement with those presented by Rangno and Hobbs (1995), and the DR calculations of Kessler et al. (2006) and Sharon et al. (2008).

    Has he even considered the possibility of extending western riparian water rights to atmospheric water rights? Atmospheric water content is replenished thru evaporation and transpiration. If you ring out more precipitation over one area, what happens in the area downwind? Who was availing themselves of that precipitation first?

  6. The climate on this planet has been changing since the depths of the latest ice age. Add to that, some scientists who study the planet, and some who study the remains of plants and animals from previous eras conjecture that during at least one previous “interglacial warming” period the planet warmed up to temperatures higher than we are currently seeing.

  7. If John Kerry and Al Gore are proponents of it, be afraid, very afraid. They are two of the most ardent hucksters alive. Being able to own private jets and live in mansions proves this is a lucrative endeavor to be in favor of and it all comes at the expense of someone else..

  8. One does not have to be a climate scientist to understand the complete fraud being perpetrated on humanity in the name of the anthropogenic climate change, formerly global warming hoax. It has been heralded as a major crisis for over fifty years. Since then every 5 or 10 years if we don’t act immediately we are doomed, the water will rise, the sky will fall and we will all fry from dramatic temperature increases. This climate fervor has become an insidious cult that no one dare question while they pick our pockets with there greed!!

  9. The existential LIE that the building block of all Life , CO2 ( in molar equal measure with H2O ) is doing anything other than spectacularly Greening the planet is lie Goebbels & Stalin could only envy .

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