Climate change hysteria stoked by Techcrunch
March 28, 2023
Techcrunch shows in a new article just how extreme climate change hysteria has become.
The piece’s complaint is that the latest IPCC report says that the 1.5°C target might not be met, and that we might go as far as 2.0°C. As the IPCC reports also say that’s not a huge problem. It’s something we can mitigate and adapt to. That, of course, is entirely different from the worries that we might go to 3°C, or 4°C, and the world becomes very, very different. That is, by the way, what those official reports say.
But leave that aside and think about what is being said here about money. Instead of venture capital being spent on software and computers and such, it should instead be piled into solving climate change. Which is where being innumerate comes in. The amount being talked about – $122 billion on software as a service company – is entirely trivial when compared to what is being spent on climate change. Germany alone has spent nearly two trillion euros (about $2.2 trillion dollars) already on trying to deal with climate change. There really is no shortage of money sloshing around to be spent on green things that might solve climate change.
But they’re also being illogical. Take software, just as an example. That plus the internet means we can work from home. That reduces transport emissions. This is part of the point about climate change, everything must change. But that then means that every change is part of dealing with climate change.
The point is not to pick little holes in the arguments presented. It’s to show how badly the climate change story is being understood, even by those who handle money. We’d think – we’d hope – that they are calculating machines, doing what actually works. But here, as with the mania for ESG (environmental, social, governance) issues at banks and investment funds, people seem to be losing sight of how things work.
Yes, OK, climate change. We need to reduce emissions. But the US – and most of Europe – is reducing emissions. U.S. emissions per person are down at least 25% since their peak in the 1970s. We have made solar and wind power cheap, we are building them out. The electric vehicle revolution is happening. The internet has reduced emissions hugely. Better shipping reduces emissions. International trade can – can – reduce emissions (think what the emissions from greenhouses to grow pineapples in Canada would be) and on and on.
But people – even money people like those at Techcrunch – are so swept up in the “end of days” thinking that they refuse to acknowledge what is already being done.
We blame the general mis- and dis- information about climate change in the usual media ourselves. This piece in Techcrunch is both a result of that and a further iteration of it getting worse. Why aren’t investors doing more about climate change? Well, the complaint is mostly because you’re not recognizing what investors have already done about it. A 25% and accelerating reduction in emissions is pretty good. All caused by people investing their money to build things that solve the problem.
Why is it that the media in general simply never recognizes what has already been done? Sure, we can argue that more should be, we might even argue that ourselves. But given that what has been done clearly works it’s – to be polite about it – no obvious that the current system of getting things done doesn’t work, is it?
But to read any journalism on the subject – as here at Techcrunch, some massive change is necessary – and we’re told that the entire system must change and now.
What, the system that works so well at dealing with the problem being complained about?