There’s a whole lot of hot air coming out of New York City this week.
As politicians, celebrities and academics descend on the Big Apple for Climate Week NYC, expect a lot of bad ideas — and ironically a lot of carbon dioxide emissions — from elites eager to force their political agenda on the masses but unwilling to make the sacrifice themselves.
Starting Sunday, these self-appointed climate crusaders are busily lecturing ordinary Americans about how to live, what to drive, and even what to eat, all while flying in on private jets and being chauffeured around town in SUVs.
As they pontificate from podiums and plush panels about reducing carbon footprints, they conveniently ignore their own outsized ones.
Climate Week is rehashing the same tired, failed schemes of the climate movement, branded this year with an “age of urgency,” perhaps in recognition that their ideas still don’t work.
Despite the ramped-up doomsday rhetoric, our environment is thriving — and this is the best time in human history to be alive.
If you’re looking for someone to blame for inflation, start with the devotees of Climate Week: Their anti-fossil fuel proposals have resulted in higher energy prices, which increase the cost of everything.
Add to that the tax burden of the hundreds of billions spent on renewable-energy subsidies (which have barely moved the needle on our energy landscape) and pressure from the ESG movement, which bullies businesses into adopting climate initiatives or risk debanking.
Yet for all that investment — and all that cost increase — wind and solar power still represent just 5% of the nation’s energy production.
Despite the Left’s best efforts, wind and solar are largely failed technologies. They work all right when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, but weather conditions are notoriously difficult to predict and rarely track with electricity needs.
No matter how many industrial wind farms and solar panels we build, those systems rely on fossil fuels to keep the lights on.
Imagine for a moment that climate activists achieved their goal and somehow managed to delete every drop of oil and gas and vanish every lump of coal nationwide.
First, of course, it would destroy our society and send us back to the Middle Ages — as Venezuelans found out firsthand, when week-long blackouts struck their once prosperous nation after their oil industry collapsed.
But what would happen to our dangerously warming climate?
Nothing. According to the same data models climate radicals misuse to claim the sky is falling, a total US ban on fossil fuels would shift global temperatures by a few hundredths of a degree at most.
These models have significantly overestimated warming every time, so even that may be a stretch.
Even if the whole world participated in the disappearance of fossil fuels, the effect would still be minute — less than a tenth of a degree. It wouldn’t be worth the trillions of dollars spent, the lives and livelihoods lost, and the destruction of our modern way of life.
But we’re not doomed.
Contrary to the Climate Week event snappily titled “Let’s Not Die,” climate-related deaths are down 99% in the last hundred years, according to researcher Bjorn Lomborg, even as the world’s population has quadrupled.
We’re not dying — in fact, by the numbers, we’re growing more resilient to climate-related disasters than we are to non-climate-related disasters like volcanoes and earthquakes. Clearly, the weather isn’t the problem here.
In reality, this is the best time in human history to be alive. Around the world, in the wealthiest urban centers and the most impoverished developing nations, people are living longer, healthier, better lives than ever before.
They have accessible, abundant energy to thank — and not the unreliable, unaffordable energy the climate movement promotes.
Access to affordable, reliable energy from fossil fuels dramatically improves life expectancy, infant and child mortality and economic opportunity, while reducing poverty and disease. Fossil fuels are the reason we have comfortable homes, access to nutritious foods and life-saving medicines.
They are the reason you can spend your free time reading this article instead of the back-breaking labor of life without them: subsistence farming, walking miles to collect water or firewood, and the likelihood of a short and difficult existence.
Climate Week’s dreams are nothing more than that — fantasies that won’t stop climate change, but would ravage our society.
If its organizers really hope to create a brighter future for humanity, they should unapologetically embrace the high-carbon lifestyle and acknowledge its power to transform the human condition.
Jason Isaac, founder and CEO of the American Energy Institute, previously served four terms in the Texas House of Representatives.