“Affordable electricity has improved human welfare in the twentieth and twenty first centuries more than any other technology. Yet, as Matt Ridley reminds us, two billion people in the world have never seen an electric switch. Policies now asserted by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the U.S. government limit or prohibit financing for affordable fossil-fuel-fired electric generation in developing countries. This elite green perspective cruelly denies the world’s poorest families basic light, heat, and cooling, on which health and well-being depend. The greatest environmental killers in the world are cook stove smoke, contaminated water, and uncontrolled sewage. The elimination of indoor pollution, the provision of clean water, and the safe disposal of waste require treatment systems running on… electric power.” (223)
Global warming alarmists and politicized agencies tell us that the weather is becoming more extreme, as President Obama did in his 2013 State of the Union address: ‘Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods – all are now more frequent and more intense. We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe droughts in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science – and act before it’s too late.’ By repeating this nonsense, the president is contradicting the conclusions of the official climate science, which he insists we must accept. The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report concludes that there is no meaningful evidence that hurricanes, tropical storms, drought, floods, or tornados are more extreme or frequent than in the past. Judith Curry, the former head of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, likewise told Congress that ‘most types of weather extremes were worse in the 1930s and even in the 1950s than in the current climate, while the weather was overall more benign in the 1970s. This sense that extreme weather events are now more frequent and intense is symptomatic of ‘weather amnesia’ prior to 1970. Yet some developing countries are demanding ‘climate reparations’ and ‘climate justice’ from developed countries like the United States, to pay for the extreme weather damage they have incurred, allegedly from our country’s carbon dioxide emissions.” (224)