The AGW movement is targeting affluence, not "climate change." After all, in 2035 how is anyone to know what temperatures would have been without EV's? And as far as temperatures, www.timesmachine.com has an issue of the New York Times for years with newsworthy events of that date, going back to 1859. The temperatures today are comfortably within shouting distance of the temperature any of those random dates, unless those dates happen to fall within a heat or cold wave. For example, this year's selection was 12/20/1972. The forecast high that that for NYC was 48, the forecast low 37. Today's forecast high and low, 46 and 29. My first December 20, 1957 on the earth, forecast high, 56, forecast low, 50. My mother's first December 20, 1932 on the earth, high 40, low 25. My Dad's, 12/20/1925, high 43, low 38. So it goes. I happen to believe there are ulterior motives, such as restricting consumption and growth. I think that some wanted, all along, either depopulation or a return to more primitive lifestyles. During the 1950's John Kenneth Galbraith penned a book called The Affluent Society. The book foreshadows the "environmental" movement, taking the position that we as a society is frivolous in its consumption and should be investing more in people. Remember, this was the era that the Interstate Highway system was opening, the era of tail-fin cars, and the beginning of frequent international travel. The book subliminally reflects, in my view, a certain "Puritan ethic" of guilt for doing well, which has grown with time. This foreshadowed by other authors and thinkers, such as Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck. In Travels Steinbeck rails against conspicuous consumption and other signs of affluence. One of the opening paragraphs of The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford reads: This line of thinking from academia and elsewhere has seeped into the culture, and pops up in policy decisions such as recycling of garbage (largely useless for a variety of reasons), suppression of "ozone emissions" by refrigerators and air conditioning, plastic bag bans, (and now even paper bag, see Reusable Bag Glut Creates New Environmental Issue; Solve One Problem, Create Another), and other measures that make life more difficult without much if any offsetting gain. Put simply, this line of "thinking" is unmoored from reality. The "climate change" types call freedom "freedumb." What they don't like is Western affluence. The West's affluence has been in their sights as a target for the longest of time. Many of politically liberal views are ashamed of affluence. Jimmy Carter, in his "Crisis of Confidence" speech of July 15, 1979, often called the "Malaise" speech, stated in part (link): Earlier examples are the "sumptuary laws" from Elizabethan England. I came across this from Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson by Gordon S. Wood. The word "sumptuary" means "relating to personal expenditures and especially to prevent extravagance and luxury" and sumptuary laws means laws "designed to regulate extravagant expenditures or habits especially on moral or religious grounds." (link to source). There is a strain that goes back before the start of European civilization in America that sees a positive value in self-abnegation. I did not realize that this went back beyond the days of John Adams and further, to Puritan times. I had thought that this philosophy of life seeped into the U.S. via books such as the 1950's classic by John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society. This foreshadowed by other authors and thinkers, such as Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck. In Travels Steinbeck rails against conspicuous consumption and other signs of affluence. Going back to ancient Greek time, there was a philosopher named Epicuris, who believed (link to source) that was decidedly the opposite from Puritanism, for convenience called epicurean-ism. I did not think of any modern connections in thought, Indeed, I had thought that this line of thinking was recent, a response to post-War prosperity. The same is true of Europe's manic move away from nuclear and fossil fuels. It had to be reversed. I wish so much oxygen were not being wasted on the effort to go "green." These objections to wind power are unsurprising. Green energy is besides the point. Go to wind, the whales won't like it. Who knows what the bogeyman with solar is to be? In summary, I rather believe that Sumptuary Laws in 18th Century England morphed into Puritanism and modern wearing of the hair-shirt. I believe that the rebellion against that kind of thinking results in surprise phenomena such as Reagan's election over Carter in 1980 and Trump's 2016 election; people who want a better living standard sometimes rebel against pedantic lectures.
Your choices ate incomplete. The list should include - Greed and Power. Never waste a crisis. And of there is no crisis make one up.
I reference an idea that I got from a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report that summarized the CO2 issue quite well back when I worked in DC in roughly 2008. At that point Massachusetts v. EPA had just been decided raising the completely illogical possibility of EPA being forced to regulate CO2 as a pollutant. CRS, by the way, is a Congressional staff service that produces research on issues for members of Congress. Anyways, it started with a simple equation of how CO2 is produced. Basically, the amount of CO2 produced by a society equals the population times economic activity (represented by the society's GDP). That's it. The whole shebang. Which of course means that to reduce CO2 production you have to reduce the population or reduce economic prosperity or both. And that ends up being the entire problem. Climate change openly desires to kill off the surplus population in order for the elites to continue to thrive, free of all the distractions that the less fortunate create. It's nothing more than craven, self centered immorality.
The Chinese Communist Party is counting on the Western Democracies to reduce economic growth by increasing the price of energy by reducing CO2 emissions. In fact they are making a lot of money manufacturing solar panels and wind turbines whilst they are building two new coal fired power plant every week. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160...ed more coal power,coal power plants per week.
In this case as in others, the wise words of Prince Talleyrand are a guide: "Do not attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity."
