by Michael Schellenberger
Journalists, experts, and elected officials are today blaming heat wave deaths, forest fires, and electricity shortages in New York, California, and Texas on climate change, but the underlying cause of those events is lack of air conditioning, lack of electricity, and the failure to properly manage forests, not marginal changes to temperatures.
It’s true that there have been more heat waves in the United States since 1960, and that higher temperatures dry out the dead wood in forests, contributing to a greater area burned by forest fires. “Climate dries the [wood] fuels out and extends the fire season from 4-6 months to nearly year-round,” US Forest Service scientist Malcolm North explained to me last summer.
But what determines whether people die in heat waves is whether or not they have air conditioning, not whether temperatures rose to 111° instead of 109°. Proof of that comes from the fact that heat-related deaths declined in the US by 50% to 75% since 1960 thanks entirely to air conditioning, even as heat waves grew in frequency, intensity, and length.
What determines whether a fire in a forest is high-intensity or low-intensity is the amount of wood fuel. Climate change is “not the cause of the intensity of the [mountain forest] fires,” stressed North. “The cause of that is fire suppression and the existing debt of wood fuel.”
And what determines whether or not there is enough electricity is whether there are sufficient “baseload,” reliable power plants and fuels, not marginally higher use of air conditioners. The people who manage electricity grids knew perfectly well that it could be hot last summer, hot this summer, and that a cold snap like the one that occurred in Texas in February was likely, since worse cold snaps had occurred in the past.
The main reason there aren’t enough reliable power plants is because progressive activists, scientists, and journalists successfully persuaded policymakers to shut them down, not build them, or not operate them.
And the reason California has failed to properly manage its forests is because, for decades, its leaders underinvested in fire prevention, including by diverting money that the state’s electric utilities could and should have spent on clearing the area around electrical lines, to renewables.
Read the complete article:
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/the-real-reason-they-blame-heat-deaths
