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So far in in this series, we've examined newly-elected Democrat representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's sense of entitlement. This was largely brought about by our K-16 "education" system systematically lying to their students.
Instead of being held back when they don't master the material, "social promotion" demands that students be bumped along to the next grade just for showing up because being held back makes them feel bad. Instead of being urged to master the material, students are constantly told how great they are in an effort to build "self esteem." AOC's cohort seems to believe that they have a divine right to a prosperous life, and that only selfishness by Big Business stands in their way.
She's also been taught an utter disregard for the actual reality of the economics behind her business failure, the failure of the bar where she worked, and the looming bankruptcies of New York City, Chicago, and other Democrat-abused locales. Oddly, her own mother has figured this out, but had apparently aged past the point where AOC was willing to learn from her.
Important as these issues are, they don't compare to her greatest fantasy, the Green New Deal, which deserves its own two articles - this one and the last one in the series.
Actually, the GND deserves an entire series, but we won't address all the non-climate provisions in the plan like free college and an adequate living for people who are unwilling to work. Instead, we'll simply focus on the driving motivation behind the plan: climate itself.
We aren't going to rehearse the long, long list of warmist predictions that haven't come true because you can look them up yourself. Googling "failed warming predictions" without the quotes gives more than 8 million hits. No doubt many are duplicates - surely there haven't been 8 million separate failed predictions made? - but we challenge our readers to show us one, just one, prediction that actually has worked out as the warmists predicted.
Not that this stops anybody from making more. The MSM and its colleagues in the Democrat party, like AOC, have gone all-in on predicting the coming catastrophe. They're loudly supported by the many grifters and scam artists who make money persuading the government to subsidize "green" energy. Jointly, they accuse anyone who disagrees with them with wanting to kill polar bears and otherwise wreck the planet.
It's easy to believe that AOC may be unaware of the degree to which ordinary people aren't convinced of the coming catastrophe. It's an even better bet that she has no idea how little difference her Utopian dream would make toward Saving the Planet even if all of it came to pass.
Time shows that she has drunk deeply of the environmental Kool-Aid offered by profiteers such as Al Gore, none of whose apocalyptic prophesies have come true:
As an activist, Ocasio-Cortez is used to focusing more on moral imperatives than on incremental policy wins. "I don't think that we can compromise on transitioning to 100% renewable energy. We cannot compromise on saving our planet. We can't compromise on saving kids," she says. "We have to do these things. If we want to do them in different ways, that's fine. But we can't not do them."
AOC (or at least her voice) recently starred in a short film which presents itself as a look backward from a Utopian, carbon-free future, to today's sudden flash of enlightenment brought about by none other than AOC herself!
The movie and her statement to Time show that she hasn't looked deeply at what's involved in "transitioning to 100% renewable energy."
She's blissfully unaware that even if her Green New Deal succeeded in eliminating American CO2 generation, it would make no worldwide environmental difference whatsoever - any more than does banning plastic straws or plastic grocery bags.
It may damage American egos to admit this, but what we do about our CO2 emissions is irrelevant on a world scale. The Wall Street Journal projects that India's use of electricity just for air conditioning will rise from 8 terawatt-hours in 2010 to 239 terawatt-hours by 2030 as the middle class grows. This estimate will turn out to be on the low side if the planet does indeed get warmer because people will crank the A/C harder.
The 900 million residential air conditioners in the world today are expected to rise to between 2.5 billion and 3.7 billion room units by 2050. If little is done to improve efficiency, air conditioning will account for 40% of global growth in energy consumed in buildings by 2050-an amount of energy equivalent to all the electricity used today in the U.S. and Germany combined. [emphasis added]
This projection is based on historical experience. As Japan made the transfer from Third World to First, the middle class had three non-negotiable demands, known as the 3C's - car, cooler, and color television. India is a lot further south than Japan and has a much bigger population, so their demand for coolers will be far greater.
Just giving the figure of 8 terawatt hours now and 239 in 2030 doesn't tell you much. For comparison, a web site says that New York City on average uses 11,000 Megawatt-hours of electricity each day. 1,000 megawatts is a gigawatt, so New York City uses 11 gigawatt-hours of electricity per day. Multiplying by 365 gives a bit over 4,000 gigawatt-hours, or 4 terawatt-hours, per year in New York City.
In 20 years, electricity use in India alone for air conditioning alone will increase by 231 terawatt hours. That's 55 times the total electricity consumption in New York City!
Suppose AOC works a miracle and manages to light up New York while producing no CO2 at all. That would reduce CO2 by 1/55 of the projected increase in Indian electricity use just for air conditioning.
How are the Indians going to produce enough electricity to cool their population, which is four times the size of our population? With coal, of course. India has ample coal supplies, and coal plants are a lot cheaper to build and operate than nuke plants.
India also has quite a lot of sun, so you might expect solar power to play a role. And no doubt it will; but the problem with solar is that we have no good way to store vast quantities of electricity. Peak air conditioning use comes when people go to bed after the sun goes down; India needs something besides solar to run the air conditioners at night. Anyone here ever tried to run an air conditioner on a battery? There's a reason your car won't even let you try.
What's more, India isn't the only country building coal-fired electric generators. The BBC reports that Chinese air is so polluted that businesses which build coal-fired power plants are selling coal plants overseas to avoid shutting down:
"By having China invest in over 60 countries along the Belt and Road Initiative, it's perpetuating a source of pollution that has been demonstrated to be harmful not just to the climate but also to economies," she [Ioana Ciuta, Bankwatch energy coordinator] said. [emphasis added]
The projected worldwide increase in electricity used for air conditioning alone will be greater than all the electricity use in the United States and Germany combined. What's worse, most of the 60 countries where China is building coal plants won't use it for luxuries like air conditioning: they want to catch up to the developed world in using electricity for other, more basic purposes. Their explosion in air conditioner use will come later and will require even more electricity.
Instead of just waiting passively for this massive increase in demand to hit, the Indian government is working with Richard Branson to offer a $3 million prize for improved air conditioning. No doubt any imaginable air conditioner technology will use some amount of energy, but it's easy to imagine that there may be ways to dramatically increase efficiency and lower electricity consumption.
This is an effort everyone can get behind, conservative as well as liberal, regardless of whether or not you believe warmist claims. Anything that increases efficiency of power generation or usage will be economically beneficial for the entire world. Indeed, over the years, America's ratio of power consumption per unit of economic output has dramatically dropped; so has China's, and the further it drops the better off we all would be.
It would be far more constructive for AOC offer major prizes for technical breakthroughs, instead of offering government subsidies as the German government did. Government subsidies require the government to choose winners and losers, something bureaucrats are infamously awful at doing. Handing out prizes requires only proof that the gadget works, which even they can handle much of the time.
There's abundant proof that attempting to create technological advances by bureaucratic fiat fails miserably. Forbes reports that American CO2 emissions went down after Mr. Trump pulled us out of the Paris agreement. Germany stayed in, their CO2 emissions went up, and their electricity prices skyrocketed, turning electricity into a luxury good. Mr. Obama promised that electricity prices would "skyrocket" based on his plans and that's exactly what happened when Germany followed them; is that what AOC wants for America?
Why would anyone want to make everyone living in America pay far more for energy without helping the climate? The LA Times tells us that Governor Jerry Brown of California agrees with AOC about the necessity of boosting energy costs. In an attempt to fulfill the Paris agreement after Mr. Trump pulled the US out, Gov. Brown attended "22 invitation-only meetings, including conversations with government officials from four states and 17 foreign countries." The Times quoted Gov. Brown:
"They are looking to California as an example of very imaginative and aggressive climate action," he said in an interview.
Gov. Brown probably knows that nothing California can do will have any real effect of world climate. Why is he doing it? Just to set an example? Does he really think that the rulers of India, who can be voted out of office if they don't supply an acceptable middle-class life to their people, will care about the "California example?" Or that the rulers of China, who are well aware of the many peasant rebellions in Chinese history and realize that another would occur if their peasants are denied air conditioning and other electric-powered comforts, will care a whit what California does?
So we see that, when you actually do the math, it's plain that AOC's plans to make American electricity cost a lot more won't have any measurable effect on worldwide CO2. It's a good thing we haven't actually tried to apply most of her pointless and grossly expensive plans.
Fortunately for us but unfortunately for them, other nations have already started down that road. In the next article in this series, we'll explore other nations' attempts at implementing some of AOC's other suggestions. Looking what they've done shows conclusively that unless we go about it very differently, we'll get no results at great expense, just as they did.