Texas just endured a brutal winter last season in which its partial reliance on wobbly wind power led to the deaths of at least 111 people, mostly from hypothermia. Now the United Nations, whose officials seem to have endless energy to run their mouths, is pressuring the Lone Star State to further scrap fossil fuels — based on “global warming” concerns. In response, Governor Greg Abbott returned the favor and issued a recommendation for the UN.
“Pound Sand,” he said.
The kicker is that all this is for Texas’s own good, swears the UN. KVUE.com reports on the story:
The leader of the United Nations says Texas must end its reliance on oil and gas production to remain prosperous in the era of climate change.
At a UN summit next month, world leaders will be asked to rapidly cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. A vast increase in the production of renewable energy will be required to reach those targets.
… “If Texas wants to remain prosperous in 2050 or 2070, Texas will have to diversify its economy and Texas will have to be less dependent on oil and gas,” Guterres said.
… “Texas is prosperous today because Texas is based on what was the main factor of what was wealth and power in the last century. Oil and gas. What we are seeing is, with things changing, the green economy will tend to be preponderant in the future,” Guterres said.
Yeah, and the United States’ population would decline to 22.6 million by 1999 due to starvation.
(That was another environmentalist prediction.)
The UN’s “input” prompted Governor Abbott’s measured response (below).
Of course, UN officials may pose as Experts in the Area of Everything yet don’t even perform their own basic functions properly. Exhibit A: China, Cuba, and Pakistan were placed on the organization’s “Human Rights Council” last year, which is a bit like having Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot on a pro-life panel.
What’s more, Texas is the last entity the world body should be lecturing on economic success. As commentator Monica Showalter informs, “Texas is the world’s ninth largest economy and a state that draws thousands of outsiders moving in. The Federal Reserve of Dallas says the state’s economy is booming and jobs are being created.”
As for the UN claim that its green prescription will ensure continued prosperity, actually, “it’s the road to becoming a third-world hellhole, where energy is always scarce and pricey yet never reliable,” Showalter adds.
The reality is that the world runs on energy. Living things need it to function and thus seek sustenance (a calorie is a unit of energy). Civilization requires not just human energy, but what that human energy has birthed: High intensity energy sources (e.g., fossil fuels) that enable us to mass-produce food, operate water delivery systems, heat homes, run factories, and do everything else that makes modernity — and the sustaining of large populations — possible.
This is why former Greenpeace figure Patrick Moore warned in 2019 that if the environmentalist scheme the Green New Deal were instituted globally, it could “result in the death of nearly all humans on Earth.” But before they died their miserable deaths, he pointed out, they’d cut down every tree for fuel and kill every animal for food.
And this is why the freest, most advanced, most prosperous nations also tend to have the best environments, as I explained last year in “Why the Greentopians Would Destroy the Earth.”
Ironically, Texas is already the U.S.’s largest wind-energy producer, and we see what that wrought the past winter. It’s not alone, either. The “U.N.’s favorite pet shop boy, Germany, is going through the same thing, turning to greenie energy over reliable fossil fuels and nuclear energy and now facing an ice-cold winter,” notes Showalter. “Nobody but political cronies with wind and solar subsidies gets rich from green energy.”
Of course, “green energy” promises sound good. Who wouldn’t want abundant, cheap, clean power? But green dreams really are nightmares, as the Manhattan Institute explained in a 2019 report.
Two problems with it are that it requires too much land and too many rare earth minerals. As Powerline wrote last year:
Wind and solar are low-intensity energy sources. It takes many acres of wind turbines to produce, on a best-case scenario, what a single power plant can produce. And solar panels are even worse. A single 3 mw wind turbine uses 335 tons of steel, 4.7 tons of copper, 3 tons of aluminum, 2 tons of rare earth elements, and 1,200 tons (2.4 million pounds!) of concrete. If we take seriously the idea of getting all of our electricity from wind and solar, where will all of those materials come from?
Moreover, their low-intensity nature means not much energy is produced per acre of land. Would you want wind farms or solar panels as far as the eye can see? The late senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) sure didn’t. He and other rich liberals helped kill a wind-energy project in his area, off Cape Cod. They sure don’t mind foisting them on “flyover country,” though.
None of this means that it’s fossil fuels forever. But here’s a prediction: Just as people in 1900 couldn’t even conceive of the things called nuclear energy and antibiotics, we have no firm idea about where technology will take us even some decades hence. There will be a viable alternative energy source, but it will be one most people aren’t even contemplating.
That is, if we don’t destroy ourselves first by listening to the Greentopians.
