Many people, especially people on the left, are fond of signaling their virtues, as far and wide as possible. People in groups, like, say, a municipal government, are not immune to this tendency. But when a city government is wasting time and spending taxpayer money on these virtue-signals, that's something that should prompt a voter revolt in the next municipal elections.
All too often, though, these revolts never materialize. And that's a shame, because a fair number of American cities right now are wasting time and money on "climate action plans," and the voters in those municipalities just seem inclined to go along with it.
The problem is, as is generally the case with this issue, the facts don't support the virtue-signal. The Pacific Research Institute has more.
Municipal entities small (South Lake Tahoe, Calif., Bozeman, Mont., Las Cruces, N.M.), medium (Sacramento, Anchorage, Salt Lake City) and large (San Diego, Phoenix, Denver) are increasingly adopting “climate action plans.” The documents, per the C40 Knowledge Hub (“a resource for cities wanting to act on climate change”), lay out “a framework for measuring, tracking and reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” as well as what “adaptation measures” will be adopted.
Predictably, climate action plans are heavy on catastrophism. ;San Francisco’s claims that residents “now experience heat waves, drought and wildfires that blanket the city in smoke,” with “impacts … compounded for people by racial, social and economic inequalities.” Portland’s thunders that to “prevent irreversible damage to the planet, we must keep average global temperatures from increasing 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels.” Boise’s lectures: “Our days are getting hotter, our water resources are threatened, forests are burning and air quality is worsening. As individuals, as a city, as a country and as a global community—we must take bold action to address climate change.”
At the municipal level? Will they be measuring average temperatures in these cities before engaging in drastic actions? Will they be considering the time scales in which the planet's climate operates, with cycles lasting from hundreds of years to hundreds of thousands of years? Are they aware of the urban heat island effect?
The problem is that these catastrophic predictions never seem to materialize. No matter the scale, the predictions never hold up; the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps are still in place, our coastal cities haven't done a repeat performance of Atlantis sinking into the sea, and our planet isn't on fire. The inconvenient truth here is, as always, that the Earth's climate is a vast, complex, chaotic thing that we still don't understand all that well.
What's more, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), often cited as the authority on climate matters, is not only suspect in their very origins, but also is an organization run not by climatologists but by politicians and bureaucrats.
The IPCC was created in 1988 largely due to the efforts of Maurice Strong, a billionaire and self-confessed socialist, as part of a larger campaign to justify giving the United Nations the authority to tax businesses in developed countries and redistribute trillions of dollars a year to developing nations. Strong had previously succeeded in bringing about the creation of the UN Environment Programme in 1972 and served as its first executive director. The IPCC is a joint project of that entity and the World Meteorological Organization.
And:
The IPCC is also designed to put political leaders and bureaucrats rather than scientists in control of the research project. It is a membership organization composed of governments, not scientists. The governments that created the IPCC fund it, staff it, select the scientists who get to participate, and revise and rewrite the reports after the scientists have concluded their work. Obviously, this is not how a real scientific organization operates.
In other words, not a scientific organization, but a political one, and fundamentally anti-science. The IPCC uses scientific inquiry as a prop, after tweaking the results to suit the agenda. That's not how science works.
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Here's the thing: Even if we were to accept the changing climate as an existential threat - it's not, and more and more people are recognizing that by the day - it seems odd to worry about American cities, which house about 80 percent of the American population, or 272 million people. There are 8.2 billion people on the planet; America's urban populations are a small portion of that. We do consume more energy than most parts of the world, but the United States also produces cleaner energy already than most of the world, and it's not because we're building more windmills and solar farms; it's because we're using technology, including nuclear and natural gas, that are reliable, clean, and safe.
If these urban climate scolds were really worried about the Earth warming up, they wouldn't be worried about the United States. America's CO2 emissions are declining and have been for years. China and India, on the other hand, are still increasing emissions. But oddly, you never hear the scolds complaining about China opening a new coal-fired power plant, seemingly every few days.
End result: Our major cities are still engaging in stupid policies that, in the end, will make things worse - like banning the use of natural gas for cooking and heating. But in the end, the amount of effect city governments can have just isn't significant.
American cities’ carbon-cutting capacity grows paltrier, once consideration is given to what little control municipalities have over energy, commerce, transportation and lifestyle choices within their borders. North Carolina’s capital, for example, admits that in 2022, most of its “community-wide GHG emissions come from community activities while less than 2% come from city of Raleigh municipal operations.” An assessment conducted for Irvine, Calif., concluded that “municipal operations generated approximately 18,579 [metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent] in 2019, which makes up less than 1% of the city’s communitywide total emissions.”
So, the classic leftist virtue signal: A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. And it's a safe bet the voters in those cities will continue to elect pols who will keep up the sham.
