Finally, 15 years and a trillion dollars too late, George Monbiot says what skeptics have been saying all along. Nearly every single carbon reduction scheme is a useless make-work machination that creates the illusion that the government is doing something. He calls it “perceptionware”.
A new paper was released in Science pointing out that in the last 25 years, barely 4% of climate policies in 41 countries have made any real difference. And by “real difference” we mean reducing a useful fertilizer, so it’s a good thing that 96% of the ploys failed, but a tragedy that a thousand billion dollars was stolen from decent people.
In any case, finally Monbiot sees the tip of the iceberg of grift and graft, but doesn’t realize his own role in it, doesn’t realize the same failures of journalists like him also failed the science world where 96% of papers have achieved nothing they set out to do as well — like predicting the climate. Climate science has been spinning its wheels, creating perceptionware and failing to figure out the climate for fifty years, but George hasn’t noticed.
Monbiot hasn’t even taken the obvious leap: Where were the Greens, the people who supposedly were the smart ones who cared the most? Most of these carbon reduction failures were obvious to anyone who owned a calculator. Could it be George, that the Greens were the dumb ones wrapped up in their own perceptionware game, pretending to care about CO2 to impress their friends at dinner parties but not actually giving a damn? Or worse, could it be that some Greens were bought off by industries and foreign countries that profit from the carbon grift?
Who stood up for the poor, the workers, and the taxpayers who were being shafted — only the skeptics.
Out of 1,500 global climate policies, only 63 have really worked.
That’s where green spin has got us
George Monbiot, The Guardian
“Grand schemes, many backed by governments, masquerade as positive action on the environment. They should be disowned”.Let’s talk about perceptionware. Perceptionware is technology whose main purpose is to create an impression of action…
Monbiot zeroes in on the endless fantasia that is the quest for airline biofuel:
…perhaps the clearest example of perceptionware is the repeated unveiling, across the past 25 years, of mumbo-jumbo jets. Throughout this period, fossil fuel and airline companies have announced prototype green aircraft or prototype green fuels, none of which has made any significant dent in emissions or, in most cases, materialised at all. Their sole effect so far has been to help companies avoid legislative action.
Now he worries the poor are starving as we burn their food, and chop down forests so we can fly to Bali:
But never mind, this perceptionware is now Labour policy too. Failure is baked in. Even with restrictions on which feedstocks can be used, any significant deployment of biofuels for aviation will increase total demand, which means either that agricultural crops are removed from human consumption, raising the price of food and therefore increasing global hunger, or that wild ecosystems are destroyed to make way for agricultural expansion.
George still doesn’t realize the root of the problem is Big Government itself. In the crazy biofuel market, it was the government that “picked the winner” and decided we should burn food to save the world, not the free market. Who could have guessed that convenient high energy plant matter would also be the same stuff people wanted to eat?
As for using waste, this promise is repeatedly rolled out to justify disastrous policies. Biodiesel would be made from used cooking oil, but as soon as production increased, new palm oil was used instead. Biomass burners would mop up forestry waste, but soon started taking whole trees and, in some cases, entire forests. Biogas would be made from sewage and food waste, but operators quickly discovered they could produce more with dedicated crops like maize and potatoes. Why? Because waste is generally low in energy, variable and expensive to handle. Already, there’s intense competition for the small portion of waste that might be commercially useful, as companies chase carbon payments: so much so that fresh palm oil has been sold as waste oil, as this attracts a higher premium.
The government funded monopoly in science created a fake crisis that parasites could feed off, and he is surprised that parasites turned up to dinner.
Where were all our expert climate scientists, George, while 25 years of money and time was wasted? Did they or did they not want to save the world, or were they too stupid, or too scared to say the obvious?
REFERENCE
Stechemesser et al (2024) Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions: Global evidence from two decades, Science, 22 Aug 2024, Vol 385, Issue 6711,pp. 884-892, DOI: 10.1126/science.adl6547