The County and staff have arbitrarily decided to pledge allegiance to the U.N. and adopt the Paris Climate Pledge. Years back, during a BOS meeting, Supervisor Dennis Rooker told me the he did not see any U.N. blue helmets there in the County, when I pointed out to him the flawed climate policies of the U.N. IPCC. My how times have changed. Now the County holds the U.N. up as a standard of reference.
What is the justification or objective of this County embrace of the U.N. now? It is unstated. The Paris Agreement is deeply flawed in terms of any theoretical impact on global climate change or temperature because two major contributors to global CO2 (if that is the parameter being targeted) are India and China, both of which currently remain unrestrained in their use of fossil fuels by that agreement. In addition, the IPCC has based its alarmist, computer-generated predictions upon the false assumption that carbon dioxide is the prime determinant of global temperature, while ignoring the facts that water vapor (clouds) is the number one greenhouse gas, and that there exists the effect of solar interactions with cosmic particles. https://www.sciencealert.com/cosmic-rays-could-influence-cloud-cover-on-earth
China emits almost twice the amount of greenhouse gases as the US, which it surpassed in 2006 as the world’s top contributor to atmospheric carbon dioxide. Today, China accounts for approximately 23 percent of all global CO2 emissions. The United States government estimates project that, barring major reform, China will double its emissions by 2040, due to its heavy reliance on fossil fuels for steel production and electricity.
India plans to double its coal production to feed a national power grid that suffers from increasingly frequent blackouts, and is the third largest contributor to fossil fuel CO2 production.
The US has never entered into any binding treaty to curb greenhouse gases, but has cut more carbon dioxide emissions than any other nation.
Prior studies have shown the utter futility of these carbon dioxide and fossil fuel reduction schemes on a state-by-state analysis:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/state_by_state.pdf
From which study, it was calculated that if Virginia were to cease use of all fossil fuels and CO2 production, the savings in global temperature by 2050 would be a minuscule 0.0016 degrees C. Moreover, it would take only 50 days before global increases in CO2 production would completely wipe out that insignificant temperature saving. Anything the County is proposing will have no real or measurable effect.
County planners and climate lobbyists tout renewable energy as a replacement for fossil fuels. Natural gas produces 35.1 percent of the kilowattage, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and coal is responsible for 27.4 percent. Wind and solar contribute 6.6 percent and 1.6 percent. Explain how 8 per cent wind and solar will replace 62 per cent reliable energy 24/7. During heat spells, wind activity falls, and wind turbine power output falls just when it is needed the most.
A logical conclusion is that the County staff have an agenda for wishing to ration energy in the County not related to temperature or climate change, or that they are uninformed of these climate/energy facts. The County Staff openly give away the game by using the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as their guide. Thus, we must then assume that they fully believe the U.N. when Ottmar Edenhofer, lead author of the IPCC’s fourth summary report released in 2007 stated the priority: “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”
This is the apparent County goal, and it is moving forward with the support of environmental activists and commercial enterprises hoping to profit from imposed de facto energy rationing. Members of the public at large are greatly outnumbered at relevant County hearings by special interest groups. Unelected County staff are crafting numerous schemes to ration the public’s free use of energy and modes of transportation. These schemes do not offer a cost-benefit analysis, nor do they quantify the impact on the climate. They do reflect an anti-democratic mindset which wishes to impose a government-defined bureaucratic a mode of living including unnecessarily more expensive energy, and higher taxes to subsidize commercial make-work efforts with no proof of cost effectiveness nor measurable impact on the climate.
Or as the chief of staff for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stated that her signature Green New Deal was not really about saving the planet after all.
In a report by the Washington Post, Saikat Chakrabarti revealed that “it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all … we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
That “thing” is known as democracy and informed freedom of choice.