Utilities Hide Behind the Climate Change Mirage

By Alan Caruba

Like a mirage in the desert, climate change—the term that has replaced global warming—looks real, but disappears in shimmering rays when approached.

Of course there’s climate change. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Its history is about climate change. Such changes occur over centuries. They are not the stuff of the myths about “global warming” with tales of glaciers melting, oceans rising, and other melodramatic events that are not happening now and not likely to happen.

Most certainly, global warming does not cause the onset of an Ice Age as one recent Hollywood film depicted. That requires a suspension of logic that only the extremely stupid can achieve.

The Earth has warmed about one degree Fahrenheit since the last mini-ice age ended in 1850. That’s a natural warming. There is nothing dramatic about it, nor is it the result of human activity. The forces that drive weather are far too vast and powerful, and we see this demonstrated all the time.

Why then has my local utility advertised, asking the question, “What is Driving Up Electricity Prices?” and answering the question by saying that the nation needs to pay greater attention to “combating climate change” by reducing “emissions from power plants”?

Simple, known science tells us that carbon dioxide, the most famous of the “greenhouse gases”, represents barely 0.038 percent of the atmosphere. It doesn’t cause change and scientists have demonstrated that any changes in the amount of CO2 come well after major climate change events such as ice ages.

What drives up the cost of electricity is the failure to use the centuries’ worth of abundant coal that exists in the United States, some of which is off limits thanks to former President Clinton declaring its location in Utah to be a national historical site.

What drives up the cost of electricity is the refusal to allow liquid natural gas storage facilities to built in order to have access to this other source of power generation. Famously, the resistance to the building of nuclear generation facilities is also causing prices to rise.

The utility’s advertisement does make one thing clear, stating that, “the cost of producing electricity has gone up dramatically.” For that you can thank environmental organizations like Friends of the Earth and others who continue to do everything they can to thwart the building of new power facilities or access to the oil and gas reserves that exist in the U.S.

This is not a problem about climate change. This is a supply and demand problem. This is about requiring utilities to spend billions to lower emissions that, in fact, have no impact whatever on climate.

Worse, not only have utilities bought into the global warming/climate change myths, the media continues to repeat all the scientifically discredited claims.

There’s the truth and there’s the billions that will be sucked out of the pockets of American consumers by utilities using the climate change mirage to hide the fact that ample natural gas and coal exists to produce electricity or that nuclear is clearly the way to go in the future.

No matter what the advertisements and corporate statements say, climate change is something that occurs over centuries and is something over which no nation, nor all the nations of the world, has any control. History has taught us this over and over again.

As for global warming, we are emerging out of a record-breaking and record-setting cold winter that hit, not only the northern hemisphere, but reached down into South America and South Africa.

So, who do you believe? The utilities? The environmentalists? The government? Or the simple evidence of recent massive blizzards, rapidly growing glaciers, increased polar ice shelves, and snow where snow has not fallen in a very long time?