By Neil Halloran: A Skeptical Look at Climate Science

I haven’t had time to write a new essay, and I wanted a new post so newcomers don’t assume un-Denial.com has shifted its focus to Covid, which is a confusing space populated by crazy people assigning complex global conspiracies to a bunch of incompetent and sometimes corrupt leaders.

Thank you to reader Frank White for providing a good reason for a quick post with a new video by Neil Halloran on climate change.

It’s my first exposure to Halloran and I’m really impressed. He targets people that are skeptical of climate change and does an amazing job of leading them to conclude we are in serious trouble and must act.

I left this comment on his YouTube channel:

Brilliant content and production! This is best video I’ve seen for persuading climate change skeptics that we are in serious trouble. Thank you.

Your next step should be to address the human genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities.

https://un-denial.com/denial-2/theory-video/

167 thoughts on “By Neil Halloran: A Skeptical Look at Climate Science”

  2. It’s endlessly fascinating that almost all of our vanishingly few aware people discuss everything except the one and only policy that would improve every one of our overshoot related problems: rapid population reduction.

    It’s got to be the genes talking.

    https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2021/06/28/climate-change-relegated/

    For a quarter of a century, a particular – “bright green” – version of climate change has been allowed to drown serious discussion of a predicament in which 7.8bn humans are attempting to continue growing on a planet that could not sustain an eighth of that population without the energy we derive from fossil fuels. Those who warned that technological solutions could not work – not least because the technologies are themselves dependent upon fossil fuels – were ostracised and censored. Nothing, it seems, can be allowed to hurt the feelings of those who – with no grounding in physics or engineering – insist that we can run a modern industrial economy solely on sunlight and wind. And so discussions about the true sacrifice and hardship involved in weaning ourselves off fossil fuels were pushed to the fringes; even as we continued to increase our fossil fuel consumption. And as a result, the gathering storm which we now see looming before us – of a rapid economic simplification – is going to be far harder than it need otherwise have been.

    It is all too easy to be a vegan in an economy in which the supermarket shelves are overflowing. It is just as easy to protest fossil fuels in an economy which has more than enough energy to go around. Being a social media activist is easy when there is enough surplus energy to free you from the drudgery of non-industrial food production. And virtue signalling about green new deals is easy while industrial agriculture still ensures than people’s bellies are full. As the disintegration of the global economy gathers pace though, these will be overtaken by more visceral concerns. Already we have seen that as the costs of climate policies exceed people’s ability to pay, they rebel. From Australian voters rejecting an overtly green Labor Party manifesto to French workers violently opposing a rise in diesel duty and the polite Swiss public voting against environmental policies in a referendum, the trend is clear; ordinary working people are increasingly unprepared to pay the bill for implausible responses to climate change.

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    1. “Rapid economic simplification” Huh? Come again? You aint saying I have to give up my Starbucks Triple, Venti, Half Sweet, Non-Fat, Caramel Macchiato? Hot showers? Sushi takeout? No way man. The American way of life is non-negotiable.

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  4. Fascinating and perhaps a glimpse into the future of rich counties.

    There’s no need for 18 wheel tanker trucks or paved roads when you have a 125cc motorcycle.

    Hidden deep in the mangrove swamps of the Niger Delta lie hundreds of illegal refineries, “cooking spots”. It’s the stronghold of hostage takers and armed groups. For some ten years these men have been spreading terror in the region. Few cameras have been able to penetrate the closed worlds of these oil thieves. For one month with the assistance of one of their number we managed to film the everyday existence of the traffickers.

    On the one side, Nigeria. An extremely unstable region with economic and political stakes on a global scale. It’s the biggest oil producer in Africa and one of the ten biggest producers in the world. 95% of its revenues derive from this “black gold”. On the other side, Western countries, major consumers of fuel, for whom oil is indispensable. Between the two, the inhabitants of the Niger Delta, cast aside from this manna and the enormous profits generated by the “black gold”. Driven by a sense of dispossession, they engage in increasing armed action to deviate a part of the oil production.

    Nicknamed “Bonny Light”, it’s one of the purest crude oils in the world. It is so pure, they say, that you could run an engine with it without any refining… exactly as it is extracted. However, the robbers of the Delta still have to refine it. They put the “crude” into drums that have been cut in half, heat it and sprinkle it with chemical products. It’s a dangerous operation. It can explode at any moment. So that their clothing doesn’t catch fire and turn them into human torches, the traffickers work naked, in a choking atmosphere, without the slightest protection. They have no other choice. To survive, they must take risks. Once refined, the fuel is put into buckets before being transferred into cans. It is then refined by traditional methods and distributed on the parallel markets of neighbouring countries. This “black gold” road passes via Cameroon, Benin, Togo and Ghana.

    However, in the Delta, oil is above all a plague. The water is filthy. The earth, fields and forests are polluted. Here, oil is a curse. All the villagers live below the poverty line. In the village of Okrika there is no drinking water or electricity. So, in order to survive, most of the farmers have a strange occupation. They fish for sand. Such is the case of Daniel, 55, who in order to feed his family tirelessly scours the beds of rivers for sand. It’s an unthinkable job, harsh and exhausting, for this new Nigerian slave. Every day, and sometimes at night too, and totally naked, he dives to depths of 5 metres to fill his buckets with sand. When his boat is full, he has to deliver it far away, at the mouth of the river. Once his boat has been unloaded, he must start his labours all over again.

    Once the oil has been stolen and refined, it has to be delivered. Neighbouring Benin is a major consumer. In the south of the country, along the border, oil trafficking is a real industry that supplies 70% of national consumption. Every day, 25 year-old Antoine risks his life to transport stolen oil on his motorbike. A real “bomb on wheels”, he carries more than 700 litres of oil on each trip, with the sole protection of the Voodoo gods!

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  5. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/heat-wave-dome-2021-seattle-portland-weather/

    The heat wave baking the U.S. Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, Canada, is of an intensity never recorded by modern humans. By one measure it is more rare than a once in a 1,000 year event — which means that if you could live in this particular spot for 1,000 years, you’d likely only experience a heat dome like this once, if ever.

    Portland, Oregon, has already broken its all-time record hottest temperature at 108 degrees on Saturday and the peak of the heat wave has not even been reached yet. Canada is expected to register the nation’s all-time highest temperature before the event is done. These are extremely dangerous numbers, especially in a region not used to heat like this, where many people do not have air conditioning.

    For the past week, as computer models have consistently forecast seemingly unbelievable numbers, meteorologists struggled to grasp how a heat wave of this magnitude could even be possible, given this region has never experienced anything of this magnitude before. Were the models wrong? Or, given climate change, should we now expect the unexpected — is this now just becoming routine?

    Turns out, the models were correct and we should expect extreme heat waves, even unprecedented ones like this to become more routine. “There is no context really, in the sense that there is no analog in our past for what we are likely to see this week,” says Dr. Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University and author of the new book “The New Climate War.”

    But calling it a new normal does not suffice says Mann, “Some people called this a ‘new normal. But it is worse than that,” explained Mann. “We will continue to see more and more extreme heat waves, droughts, wildfires and floods as long as we continue to warm the planet through fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions.”

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  6. Good comment by CTG @ OFW.

    https://ourfiniteworld.com/2021/06/18/how-energy-transition-models-go-wrong/comment-page-7/#comment-301446

    In the 1970s, when oil peaked in USA, extraction technology has to go into overdrive to extract out the difficult-to-extract oil. If there is no excessive debts or money printing, then physical limits will be hit. It is not a surprise that Nixon took USD off the gold standard at the time when oil peaked in USA.

    With debts or money printing or financial shenanigan, an oil company can use that freshly printed money to improve the technology of oil extraction without actually hitting the physical limit. It is a substitute for high EROEI because money is not detached from its physical backing of “promise of future productivity”. The company used the money borrowed to improve the technology to extract more oil. There is no more underlying claims for the money YET (until the day it does, which is actually “now”). The company can either go bankrupt and the debts are extinguished. Investors lost money and the claims towards that “future productivity” is gone. However, that technology has been invented and used by someone else.

    If that company did not collapse but flourished, then, with inflation, the debts can be paid off and the “claims for future productivity” will be postponed to a date in future (which is “now”, by the way).

    A debt can be sold and passed around in a daisy chain through banks, pension funds, etc. since 1970s, financial engineering was and is crucial to the extension of BAU. Government closing a blind eye towards financial accounting trickery or changing the goal posts help move the world forward on a “financial engineering or accounting” basis since 2008. There is no productivity growth other than debt-related or debt-fuel “growth”. Debt is the center of everything now. Debt is a burden for future generations. Future generation of the 1970s is the present generation. It is a millstone around the neck of future generations (which is the present generation). For every dollar that is there, probably 50-80% are used to payoff debts or roll over new debts. Until a point where it is not possible anymore (90%+ perhaps now?)

    At this point where 50%-90% (??) of every dollar is used to pay off the debts, what is the use of cheap energy? It will cause more problems than solving it.

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  7. h/t Gail

    https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-leaked-un-report-warns-worst-is-yet-to-come-on-climate-change-heres-how-you-can-help

    A leaked draft report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paints the starkest picture yet of the accelerating danger caused by human use of coal, oil, and gas. It warns of coming unlivable heat waves, widespread hunger and drought, rising sea levels and extinction. To understand the report’s warnings, William Brangham turns to atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayoe.

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    1. “A picture is worth a thousand words” LOL. Not anymore. Not that I don’t accept the above pic as real, but fact is, today you can’t always unconditionally trust what you see in a picture or video. Or hear in a recording. Not with Photoshop , video editing, deep fakes and others forms of techno sorcery.

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  10. Trillions are sloshing in and out with the daily tides.

    I hope the baffles in the ballast tank hold.

    This is not normal. Notice that the idiots in mainstream news ignore (aka deny) this.

    This morning, the Fed sold a record $992 billion in Treasury securities in exchange for cash, via overnight reverse repos (RRPs), to 74 counterparties. Yesterday’s overnight RRPs matured and unwound this morning, and were replaced, plus some, by today’s RRPs. You can practically hear that giant sucking sound of cash that the Fed is draining out of the financial system.

    These cash pressures originated as a result of the Fed’s crazy and continued money-printing binge. Obviously, the real solution to the cash pressures would be to stop QE and then begin unwinding the assets on the Fed’s balance sheet. But that would be too radical a step to take. The Fed has mopped up $1 trillion in short-term cash via the repo market.

    https://wolfstreet.com/2021/06/30/feds-reverse-repos-spike-to-1-trillion-cash-drain-undoes-8-months-of-qe/

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    1. I have impression that things will happen quickly now…
      Maybe not within weeks, but when people learn that “bright green future” is not there (and I guess it will be within 2-3 years maximum), the crumble spiral will be faster and faster…

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      1. It’s the big question. I have no idea, but I do say that interest rates will never rise significantly (above2% on the 10 year UST for more than six months) before collapse. The authorities will frantically pull demand forward as long as possible. It’s amazing to see. It’s the one prediction in which I have a lot of confidence.

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        1. Short thoughts on what collapse looks like financially?

          Will it first be multiple countries on the periphery of this current global system falling financially or politically (food shortages, food prices as possible triggers), as the U.S. continues to “print” money to its advantage and the disadvantage of others? Or will the core of this current system, the U.S.A., suddenly reset downward to a much lower level of consumption and buying power? Can the Federal Reserve’s sustain it bond buying indefinitely? Maybe the test comes with the next geopolitical grey or black swan.

          U.S. corporate earnings still look good, but maybe it is shortages of raw materials or much higher prices for those materials that start to eat into those profits and decrease consumer consumption levels, especially for discretionary items. A willingness to believe a materially prosperous future driven by technology still seems to be there, if frayed a bit by increasing social disorder/dis-union and increasing bad environmental news. Most people have their heads in the sand, or hands over there ears/eyes, to avoid thinking about the implications of those issues. There is no other alternative than continued belief in the existing system.

          Behind all this discussion of possible outcomes of course is the invisible hand of energy supply and relentless depletion, and especially oil production. I think we are still down ~7mbpd global oil production from the November 2018 high, and if global GDP is tightly correlated, so real global GDP is down some commensurate amount. From memory the U.S. production today is something like 11mbpd down from 14mbpd. Maybe the globe and the U.S. could go back up to pre-COVID levels? But…

          Background depletion on global oil fields in production is 3-6mbpd per year, so production activity is running on a faster and faster treadmill. Apparently, OPEC has quite a bit of surplus capacity still, but from two reports I saw that slack is gone in a year or two.

          In any case, it seems like a bumpy ride from here on out in the best of economic cases. Supply chain issues from COVID will take several years to mend even if we had all the energy we needed. Then true oil shortages arrive. (Maybe they are there now, just masked by COVID. Environmental wastes including CO2 are now beginning to really impact food supply.

          Seems like there is no “out” to a normal economy ever. Maybe there will be brief periods of respite, but the Federal Reserve will be forced to continue buy bonds until it cannot any longer.

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          1. Thanks. As long as there’s affordable oil and food the system seems to be quite resilient thanks to 8 billion clever monkeys all working hard to keep the system going. I’m amazed at how minor the inconveniences from Covid have been.

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  12. The Tyee is one of the better new outlets. Nevertheless they of course do not mention the need for population reduction (fewer new homes) nor consumption reduction (smaller homes) so that we cut fewer trees.

    When I was a kid in the 70’s a 1000 sqft home was normal, now the normal exceeds 2000 sq ft. We are not happier or more comfortable today. We just consume more to keep up with our neighbors.

    The Climate Disaster Hidden in BC’s Forests

    The province doesn’t count forest emissions in its global warming plan. That’s a big, dangerous mistake, say advocates.

    Here are two key words that have been largely left out of the broiling debate around British Columbia’s old-growth forests: carbon emissions.

    Even in the recent forest policy update, the provincial government only mentioned carbon emissions twice. And that was to say forests suck up and store carbon, which environmental advocates warn doesn’t tell the whole story.

    By B.C.’s own reporting, forests are the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the province — 23 per cent larger than the total emissions from the energy sector.

    To talk about forests while ignoring carbon emissions is “climate denialism,” says Torrance Coste, senior campaign director for the Wilderness Committee.

    When B.C. reports its official carbon emissions, that number excludes emissions from forests. Coste says that’s a huge problem, because “emissions associated with forests in some years surpass B.C.’s total emissions. Which is staggering. It’s like a second B.C. we don’t count.

    https://thetyee.ca/News/2021/06/24/Climate-Disaster-Hidden-BC-Forests/

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  14. I have just read that YouTube has demonetised Brett Weinstein’s account. I find this deeply disturbing. I’m going to have to give some serious thought into how I interact with YouTube in the future.

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  17. The situation in Israel is developing more or less as outlined by van den Bossche: the number of cases is increasing and the vaccine is (much) less effective than it was thought. It seems that van den Bossche is not as wrong or clueless as insinuated by some/many.

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    1. Not really.

      Look at deaths in last weeks – practically 0 for last 4 weeks.
      Additionally 33 serious/critical cases in 2901 totak cases (1%) (what I can display now in worldometers.info).

      So far this is exactly what mainstream promised – 80-90% of protection against getting sick and almost 100% against being sick morbidly.

      I see nothing strange there – if we have millions of cases circulating around the world (as acive cases), you can expect that 10-20% of that get sick even after being vaccinated.

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  18. A short post on the epistemology of COVID. 😊

    To function well psychologically, and socially, you must mentally simplify and accept the “truth” of many assumptions and socially accepted assertions about the nature of the world. For an individual, there is not enough time or energy to continually check or challenge these assumptions and assertions. You must accept the “truth” of things and move forward as best as one can, under the constraints imposed by place and circumstance. To continually question the truth of every foundational idea is to be frozen into paralysis by analysis or lost in an epistemological quick sand, or ostracized from ones social circles.

    So we human beings, including even scientists, will repeat assertions about the world we assume to be true, but that we do not really KNOW are true. God exists, and rides a chariot across the sky every day.

    Of course, over time, we do challenge our foundational ideas. Science provides a methodological framework for challenging assumptions and assertions about the nature of the world and finding “truths” that are more effective enabling us to leverage the natural world. Scientific “Knowledge” is hard won and can take years or decades to confirm.

    Are the these new mRNA vaccines (for just the spike protein) safe in the short term? Long term? Truly a game changing technology? Should we attempt to mass vaccinate 8billion people? Or will mass vaccination will create evolutionary pressure for more transmissible or virulent variants or not? Should we vaccinate people who were previously infected? etc. etc.

    I do not have the scientific knowledge to know the provisionally “correct” answers to all the questions about the SARs COV 2 virus and vaccinations and treatment. But I think I can see that that there are many assertions and assumptions being made about what is “true” regarding SARs COV 2, that are not backed by hard won scientific knowledge, tested over time.

    These assertions are being made by scientists, public policy folks, and the mainstream media, in order to move forward under the current circumstances and social pressures. No one really KNOWs these answers. We are in the middle of a giant science (and social) experiment, gathering the data necessary to reach some tentative conclusions, in a few years from now at best. It could be a decade or more before we KNOW the “correct” answers.

    And yet, there is certainly some science on which these consensus views and public policy are based. So today, what is provisionally true, and what is not, with regard to SARs Cov2? Should we mass vaccinate or not? On a personal level, should I get vaccinated even though I have had COVID? I don’t think so to both, but have to admit I am now wading in that epistemological quick sand on these issues. My friends and family have a much easier time of things, just accepting what they are told and taking action based on that. I know that the people in Peru, where the COVID death rate appears to be 9%, would take all the vaccines they could get right now.

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    1. Well said.

      I agree with you that the issues are very complex, we don’t yet know the answers to most of the questions, and we are conducting a giant experiment.

      On the other hand, if a goal is to prevent people getting sick, we know that vitamin D helps with very little cost and zero risk.

      And if a goal is to prevent death or serious illness for those who do get infected, we know Ivermectin helps with very little cost and near zero risk.

      Yet our leaders are not promoting Vitamin D or Ivermectin. So what are their goals? And why should we trust anything they say if they can’t get the basics right?

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      1. My bad. I am churning through too much information these days. The article I saw was in the English? rag “The Sun” quoting 9% of all patients dying, not of infections (IFR). That Sun article is up on the web. It is correct that Peru is currently the leading the world right now in IFR.
        https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-53150808

        O.6% is 4 times worse than the annual flu of about .15. Do they have vitamin D and Ivermectin in Peru? I don’t know. Maybe they really need more vitamin D in general if darker skin native Peruvian ancestral groups now spend far less time outdoors than there ancestors. With my British Isles ancestry, I can get all the vitamin D I need in a day with 1o minutes of summer sunshine on my face. On the other hand, I burn in the tropical sun, or at altitude.

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        1. Correction to above comment.
          IFR in my above comment should be CFR…Case Fatality Rate. CFR is the number of people who have died, divided by the total number of people DIAGNOSED with the disease.
          See how Peru is in fact now at 9%. Mortality Analyses – Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center (jhu.edu) https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
          The Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) is the number of deaths from a disease divided by the total number of cases/infections. Total number of cases in this calculation is usually estimated from antibodies in population blood samples, etc. This is the much lower figure of 0.6% above.
          How to put all that in perspective? Don’t know. Peru has a total population of about 33Million. 193,909 have died to date.
          And I should not be playing virologist on a web blog. ☹

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  20. Sometimes the explanation for a troubling phenomenon is staring me in the face and yet I cannot see it:

    The #1 advertiser in all media is the pharmaceutical industry.

    For profit news sources are therefore unable to criticize the pharmaceutical industry.

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  24. Nice rant from Mac10 today. It seems he’s coming out the closet and is worried about much more than the stock market bubble.

    https://zensecondlife.blogspot.com/2021/07/bullshit-is-driving-global-warming.html

    Bullshit Is Driving Global Warming

    These wildfires and record temperatures across the globe are another widely ignored warning for the days to come. The cost of this delusion will be measured not in dollars, but in carbon units…

    COVID was the wake up call, so the Idiocracy hit the snooze button and went ALL IN risk assets at the end of the longest cycle in U.S. history. Gamblers to the very end.

    The leaders of this denialist paradise are the most corrupt human beings in U.S. history. They’ve profited mightily from the fact that societal moral collapse has been front-running their death spiral of depravity. And who to trust in this human disaster but the same assholes and policies that got us into it in the first place. I predict that the days of accountability are fast arriving for these serial psychopaths.

    We face an epic meltdown not just in markets but in human mental health as well. The self-indulgent consumption lifestyle has left The Lonely Crowd cleaved of any and all meaningful social connection. The end result is mental health breakdown, suicide, and addiction. Rampant selfishness is leading to societal disintegration. THIS is exceptionalism. Guns don’t kill people, psychopaths with guns kill people. What should we resolve the guns or the psychopaths, let’s vote for neither. The right is seduced by this notion that nothing has changed and we can easily revert back to the good old days, if we only had the will to do so. Unfortunately, EVERYTHING has changed. Everything has been denatured over the past decades. Which means that the good old days no longer exist in the current paradigm. We must adapt to survive. We cannot live in a Blade Runner reality soundtracked with country music.

    Adaptation means that less is more. We must no longer strive for competitive self-destruction. And yet, the system demands that we be fed into the same old meat grinder as usual. Today’s super idiots must obey the prime directive. The only vestige that remains of the past is the imperative to recycle proven failure.

    I personally don’t worry about the carbon level anymore because this sequence of events will lead to the sharpest drop off in carbon output in global history. In addition, I don’t concern myself with societal meltdown, because the Deep State has far more weapons and ammunition than their would be adversaries. In summary, I am not paranoid, I am enlightened. Because finally we see the Creator’s Plan coming together.

    And it’s not carbon neutral.

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    1. Seems to me that for the longest time, Mac10 has been often right detecting symptoms of the economic illness, but wrong in the final diagnosis of the disease. His economic model was a traditional one, and assumed – using all his stock and money charts – that there would at some point be reversions to historical means (or below), and the normal business cycle reckonings of recession or depression.

      I have made this same mistake in assuming we might go through one last period of standard business and equity market cycles. Time will tell, but if Limits to Growth BAU scenario is the roughly correct scenario, if Dr. Morgan’s SEEDS model is directionally correct, if environmental and climate models are roughly correct, we are at the end of economic growth as measured by energy and non-energy natural resource flows through the economy. We are also at a point where the waste products of any additional economic activity feedbacks against material growth. (Loss of food supply due to weather pattern changes, for example.)

      Therefore, as Christopher O. Clugston states in his book “Blip,” there will never be another recession (or a depression) as conventionally understood. We are nearing the end of the economic system that began circa 1750, and organized circa 1945 into its current financial and geopolitical structure. Many of the standard assumptions about economics will NOT apply, as those assumptions were mostly devised during the period of economic growth powered by fossil fuels and in particular by oil. Correlations and analogues often used by prognosticators to predict stock market behavior are no longer relevant, if they ever really were. All those charts Mac10 puts up…

      We can only speculate what the end of this system means for equity and bond markets. My guess, just a guess, is that the central governments and central banks continue to create additional liquidity as long as possible, until the current system crashes rather completely. Equity prices remain elevated, bond yields continue to reach historical lows. Until…the system crashes in some way. Material consumption, particularly in the U.S., then resets at a significantly lower level, maybe 20-30% lower. From this lower plateau, we reset financially, socially, and politically in a domestic sense, and geopolitically from a global sense.

      What happens to stocks and bond in this crash? How do money, stocks and bonds function in a world of degrowth? Hard to say.

      Of course, it’s a little small minded of me to worry about stocks and bonds, in a world that is burning and being diminished more every day by industrial consumption and waste. But I was born and raised during The Great Acceleration, and so I am a product of that system. My brain assumes so many things about how the world works, that are probably not true anymore. I suspect only those born on the other side of the great reset, and in the great deceleration, will be able to think differently.

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      1. Thanks. It does feel like the next correction will be a big one due to the extreme debt we have used to delay the inevitable. I’d guess a 30-50% drop in our standard of living. If we had acted like adults and accepted reality we could have climbed down more slowly and had a better chance of retaining a civil society and avoiding war. The majority will of course say that no one saw it coming.

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  25. Albert Bates in the past has argued for peak dog. Today he makes the case for peak cat.

    https://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-great-pause-week-69-one-dark-secret.html

    In the US, dogs and cats consume about a third of the animal-derived food produced. They produce about 30 percent, by mass, of the feces of USAnians (5.6 million tons vs. 19 million tons), and, through their diet, constitute about 25 to 30 percent of the environmental impacts from farm animal production in terms of the use of land, water, fossil fuel, phosphate, and toxic agro-chemicals. Dog and cat foods are responsible for release of between 80 million and 5.8 billion tons of CO2 and CO2-equivalent methane and nitrous oxide, depending on which study you read.

    At the lower end of the estimates, dogs and cats produce more greenhouse gases than 174 separate countries. At the high end of that estimate, pets would be responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions each year than energy-related emissions from the manufacturing of fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, refrigerants, and oil and gas extraction, combined. Twice as much as commercial air travel. Twice as much as cement. More than all the freight trucking. Twice as much as freight maritime transport and cruise ships. More than greenhouse gas emissions from Russia, Africa, or South America. More than any of 197 separate countries. More than Mar-A-Lago.

    If just a quarter of all animal protein used in the food of American pets was human-grade, it would provide the caloric intake average for 5 million USAnians or 50 million Syrians or Venezuelans. Dog diets are estimated to be composed of 33 percent animal protein. Cats need 99 percent. We will explore all these calculations in finer detail in next week’s post.

    The next time you think the perfect gift for your child would be a cuddly little kitten, consider all this. Which would you rather have: songbirds greeting you every morning, a climate your children can live with, or a warm ball of fur to snuggle next to in bed? (It’s a trick question. If you are willing to skin the cat you can have all three).

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    1. Sorry,
      I was a little unimpressed with Albert Bates screed today. Sure pet ownership is utilizing resources wastefully and that contributes to global warming . . . but it is small potatoes compared to the global warming that is driven by transportation (planes, train and automobiles), a high fat, meat centered diet (that’s us 1st world!), and all the concrete and infrastructure for 8 billion (but probably most of it is for the top 10% economically). Once economic collapse occurs there will be far few “pets”. I went to China 35 years ago to my wife’s ancestral village. Never saw a cat, the only dogs were for eating, and NEVER saw an obese person. China probably has an advantage on us in that they can probably go back more easily to an agrarian lifestyle (if that’s even going to be possible??) than anybody in the U.S./Canada/Western Europe. We need fewer people (with fewer people there will be fewer pets too).
      AJ

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      2. I would completely agree with this socially/culturally, but resource wise they are still in trouble. China has destroyed approx. one third of their arable land to mining (especially for rare earth mining for things like EVs and solar panels). They are one of the few countries willing to get these minerals. They have also lost a lot of top soil in the last few decades due to erosion, flooding, and the gobi dessert expansion. And the population is bigger than ever.

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    2. Albert Bates is a long-time resident of The Farm (that’s what it’s called…) in Summertown, Tennessee. The Farm was founded by Stephen Gaskin, who with his wife, Ina May Gaskin (founder of the modern midwifery movement), led a group of hippies from the San Francisco Bay area to Tennessee in the 1970s. Albert was in Mexico when Covid hit, and has been stuck there for the last year and a half. The Farm went through growing pains in the 1980s, but found new life in the sustainable-living Global Ecovillages movement. My wife briefly hung out with the Gaskin crowd before they left the S.F. Bay area. The Farm has a thing against pets – dogs and cats – regarding them as part of the unsustainable Western lifestyle. They have a point – but there are plenty of other things to be more worried about.

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        1. No hopium 😉 – just delusion and denial in service 0f social standing (as James (Megacancer’s back!!) said – humans evolved for 3 primary things, social standing, consumption and reproduction). Gates keeps going after the social standing thing. Wonder if it’s because of the divorce “problems”?
          AJ

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  29. Remember the good ol’ days when the Saudi’s used their huge surplus to buy our debt so we could live beyond our means and buy their oil?

    https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Huge-Dividend-Cripples-Worlds-Largest-Oil-Company.html

    Huge Dividend Cripples World’s Largest Oil Company

    The transformation of Saudi Arabia’s flagship asset, Aramco, from perpetual cash-generation machine into a debt-laden giant is set to pick up pace in the coming weeks with a series of schemes aimed at raising much-needed funding for the now-beleaguered oil and gas company.

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