Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., wants to incarcerate all global warming “deniers.” “I think they should all be in jail,” he recently said at the People’s Climate March in New York. “I think they should be enjoying three hots (meals) and a cot in The Hague with all the other war criminals there.”
Where to begin? How about with the fact that it is impossible today to accurately predict global warming trends, let alone their causes. As a recent study put it: “True experts in the field understand that climate change is highly immature. We are in a period of ‘negative discovery,’ in that the more we know about climate change, the more we realize we don’t know … while someday we may be able to meaningfully predict climate, it is not possible now.”
For example, carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that environmentalists claim is the chief cause of global warming, continues to pour into the Earth’s atmosphere, yet according to countless environmental scientists, including Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute, there has been no measurable global warming since 1996 — that’s 18 years.
In addition, the amount of CO2 produced by the human industrial process is less than 5 percent of the CO2 emitted naturally by the atmosphere and oceans.
In other words, even if there is global warming — and for 18 years no evidence of it exists — and even if CO2 causes global warming — which we can’t (yet) know for a fact — the chief perpetrator is Mother Nature through her “atmosphere and oceans.” Yet RFK Jr. wants to jail people who are merely skeptical that, as environmentalists claim, “The science is settled.”
Equally ignorant was his insistence that, “You can’t make a car unless it’s an electric car,” because, unlike gas-guzzlers, the tailpipes of electric engines don’t emit carbon dioxide.
True, but does Bobby Jr. understand that electricity doesn’t magically appear? Virtually all of the electricity that electric cars run on is produced when fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas are generated into electricity. What’s more, coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, generates 40 percent of America’s electricity, meaning that during the electricity-generation process necessary to power electric cars, tons of CO2 goes into the atmosphere. Also, generating electricity from fossil fuels is horribly inefficient. Two-thirds of the useable energy is lost in the generation process.
So Bobby Kennedy is ignorant about the causes of climate change and wrong about electric cars as a solution.
And he is also a hypocrite. He just bought a $5 million, 3,000-square foot house with pool, pool house, guest house and storage barn that will probably use more energy — and emit more greenhouse gases — in a month than most Americans will emit in a year.
