Paul Driessen

Prioritizing climate over pandemics

As of May 20, the United States had more than 1.5 million confirmed cases of Wuhan Coronavirus. US deaths related or attributed to the virus topped 92,000 (though many were really due to old age and related co-morbidities). Because of COVID, much of the US economy has been shut down since late March. More than 36 million American workers have now filed for unemployment insurance, while tens of millions more have been furloughed or seen their hours and/or salaries reduced severely. 

The real climate science deniers

Manmade climate crisis promoters reject inconvenient evidence of natural climate change  Fifty years ago, I helped organize Earth Day #1 programs on my college campus, calling attention to serious pollution problems that afflicted much of the USA. Over the ensuing decades, laws, regulations, and changed attitudes, practices and technologies reduced most of that pollution, often dramatically. 

A miraculous turn of events

Never in my wildest dreams did I envision a day when I'd agree with anything filmmaker Michael Moore said – much less that he would agree with me. But mirabile dictu, his new film, Planet of the Humans, is as devastating an indictment of wind, solar and biofuel energy as anything I have ever written.

Financiers of poverty, malnutrition and death – Part 2

It's easy to farm organically in the wealthy, advanced EU and USA, where consumers can afford much more expensive organic meats, eggs, fruits and vegetables. It's much harder if you have to deal with the insects and crop diseases that plague African farmers on constant massive levels and locusts that bring true catastrophes every few decades – and then sell your meager crop yields to impoverished families.

Financiers of poverty, malnutrition and death – Part 1 

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization, anti-development banks, the Agency for International Development (USAID), NGO (non-government organization) pressure groups and other eco-imperialists are properly condemned for using their money, power, and control over trade and lending to keep millions of African, Asian and Latin American families from having access to reliable, affordable energy, pesticides and spatial insect repellants to prevent disease, and modern agricultural technologies. 

Fauci-Birx climate models?

President Trump and his Coronavirus Task Force presented some frightening numbers during their March 31 White House briefing. Based on now 2-week-old data and models, as many as 100,000 Americans at the models' low end, to 2.2 million at their high end, could die from the fast-spreading virus, they said. 

Let's quarantine some fake corona and energy news

Some 40,000 children slave away in Chinese-operated Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) mines, digging out cobalt for cell phones, laptops, Teslas and Green New Deal technologies, the London-based Guardian has reported. They're exposed constantly to toxic and radioactive mud, dust, water and air. Blood and respiratory diseases, birth defects, cancer, paralysis and death by suffocation are common. Other investigators have confirmed the horrors. But the human rights violations continue. 

Fight the virus, not carbon

The many trillions of dollars proposed to be spent under dubious "green new deals" should be spent instead (effectively and within reason) on health care, especially virus prevention, protection and cures. This is the gist of an "Open Letter to World Leaders" from the Climate Intelligence Foundation.  The Foundation, or CLINTEL, makes this clear right up front: "Your Excellencies, compared to COVID-19, climate change is a non-problem! It is based on immature computer models, and it looks into the distant future. In the current health emergency, however, your attention to the peoples’ needs is today! Please, don’t continue pushing your zero carbon emission ambition in a time that the world is dealing with a deadly global crisis. Yes, there is an emergency, but it is NOT climate."

The real reasons Africa has another locust plague

The ChiCom coronavirus and COVID-19 outbreaks, deaths and responses continue to dominate US, European and Asian news. Meanwhile, a very different infestation is devastating East African crops and leaving tens of millions at risk of starvation and death. If COVID hits these weakened populations, amid their malaria and other systemic diseases, it would bring tragedy on unimaginable scales. 

How exactly do they plan to replace fossil fuels?

Berkeley, CA, Takoma Park, MD and other cities; California, Connecticut, New York, Virginia and other states; Germany, England and other countries; the European Union – all plan to banish oil, natural gas and coal within 10, 20 or 30 years. A number of US states have joined Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiatives and proudly say We Are Still In ... the Paris climate treaty, no matter what President Trump says or does.  

Virginia's ‘Clean Economy Act' will have dirty results

Largely with party-line, urban-vs-rural votes, Virginia's legislature is poised to enact a Clean Economy Act that would eliminate coal-based electricity generation, prevent construction of new gas-fired power plants – and replace reliable, affordable fossil energy with wind, solar and battery-backup power. The bill offers important cautionary lessons for voters, workers and consumers in Virginia and across the United States.

Fight fires with facts – not fake science

"We are all born ignorant," Benjamin Franklin once said, "but one must work very hard to remain stupid."  Greens are incensed over suggestions that anything but fossil fuels and climate change might be turning green California and Australian ecosystems into black wastelands, incinerating wildlife, destroying homes and killing people. The notion that they and their policies might be a major factor in these fires gets them so hot under the collar that they could ignite another inferno. But the facts are there for all to see.

Reform USAID energy aid policies now!

Apparently unable to grasp the cruel irony, USAID Commissioner Mark Green boasts that "electricity enables access to refrigeration to store fish, milk and vaccines. Electricity brightens the night and helps schoolchildren study. Electricity allows businesses to stay open later and makes communities safer."

Climate alarmist banks go carbon-colonialist 

Africa has the world’s lowest electrification rate. Its power consumption per capita is just 613 kilowatt-hours per year, compared to 6,500 kWh in Europe and 13,000 in the United States, African Development Bank (AfDB) President Akinwumi Adesina observed in July 2017. That’s 9.4% of EU and 4.7% of US electricity consumption. It’s equivalent to Americans having electricity only 1 hour a day, 8 hours a week, 411 hours per year – at totally unpredictable times, for a few minutes, hours or days at a stretch.

It’s actually even worse than that. Excluding significantly electrified South Africa, sub-Sahara Africans consume an almost irrelevant 181 kWh of electricity per capita – 1.4% of the average American’s! 

No end in sight for the biofuel wars

The Big Oil-Big Biofuel wars rage on. From my perch, ethanol, biodiesel and “advanced biofuels” make about zero energy, economic or environmental sense. They make little political sense either, until you recognize that politics is largely driven by crony-capitalism, campaign contributions and vote hustling.

Activist junk science breeds bad policy

The House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources recently approved HR 2854, the 2019 Protect Our Refuges Act, prohibiting the use of neonicotinoid insecticides in any of the nation’s 560 National Wildlife Refuges, some of which are the size of Delaware and even Indiana. The legislation will now be considered by the full House, while a companion bill (S 1856) makes its way through the Senate.

Replacing fossil fuels with “renewable” energy would devastate the only planet we’ve got 

Environmentalists and Green New Deal proponents like to say we must take care of the Earth, because “There is no Planet B.” Above all, they insist, we must eliminate fossil fuels, which they say are causing climate change worse than the all-natural ice ages, Medieval Warm Period or anything else in history. 

The giga and terra scam of offshore wind energy

Can anti-fossil fuel policies based on climate crisis alarmism possibly get any more insane than this?

In what might be described as a pre-Halloween trick of ginormous proportions,   he assures us. That’s well above the current global demand of 23,000 terawatt hours, Birol and a new IEA report say.

Is it climate socialism – or eco-fascism?

Green New Dealers have convinced themselves that our planet faces an imminent, existential, manmade climate cataclysm – that can be prevented solely and simply by government edicts replacing fossil fuels with biofuel, wind, solar and battery energy. They achieve this state of absolute certainty largely by propagating constant scare stories, while ignoring and suppressing contradictory evidence and viewpoints. 

More buckets of icy cold energy reality

The full-court press is on for climate chaos disaster and renewable energy salvation. CNN recently hosted a seven-hour climate event for Democrat presidential aspirants. Every day brings more gloom-and-doom stories about absurd, often taxpayer-funded pseudo-scientific reports on yet another natural event or supposed calamity that alarmists insist is due to fossil fuels that provide 80% of US and global energy.