As Santa Barbara County and the state of California continue with their efforts to save the Earth, the metrics for measuring success of the effort continue to change like the weather.
For example, in 2021 the Board of Supervisors set a goal of reducing so-called greenhouse gasses (GHG) by 50 percent of the 2007 levels by 2030. But in 2023, they changed it to 50 percent of the 2018 levels by 2030.
In the introduction to their plan, the authors say, “This Climate Action Plan (CAP) is the county’s roadmap to achieving that goal. The measures laid out in the CAP provide a foundation that aligns with the state of California’s goals to reduce GHG emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels and achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.”
That is a significantly different metric than the one adopted by the Board of Supervisors; just how much different is anyone’s guess.
One commenter to the draft plan summed it up this way, “Even if Santa Barbara stopped 100 percent of emissions, it would have zero impact. We locked down the world with almost nobody traveling or driving to school/work for 1.5 years, and it had zero impact on weather or global CO2. Think about that for a minute. Zero impact. All you were going to do is drive up costs for poor people with these inefficient plans. Wind, solar, and especially electric vehicle batteries require intense manufacturing and mining and landfill dumping. Cancel this dumb plan.”
I can’t argue with this person’s conclusions. I am guessing that he has as much “scientific data” to back up his observation as those who used and/or manipulated computer modeling for the predictions in the county’s Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment.
Another commenter noted, “I think it necessary to report on the success/failure of the 2015 Energy and Climate Action Plan. As I understand it, the result was not only did we fail to meet the 15 percent reduction by 2020, we actually increased the GHG. Each time I asked staff to provide a rationale for the realism of a 50 percent goal, the summary answer was: (1) there are three new staff positions to help implement the plan, and (2) there is more money available from multiple sources.”
That’s it: create new staff positions, spend more taxpayer money, and still not explain why your previous plan failed to deliver. That gives me little confidence that this plan will succeed either.
But as is common in most discussions about the environment, these comments were ignored by the decision-makers because they didn’t conform to the climate alarmists’ agenda.
Some of this plan will be very expensive. One example is to develop a “new strategy to improve electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure to support inter-regional travelers, freight, and transit throughout the Central Coast.”
This one idea will cost electric ratepayers millions of dollars just for the construction phase, and relying on unreliable wind and solar projects to provide increased energy needs is a fool’s folly.
But we must ask ourselves: Are greenhouse gases a good or a bad thing?
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology asked themselves that, and they explained that “the greenhouse effect is not a bad thing. Without it, our planet would be too cold for life as we know it. But if the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere changes, the strength of the greenhouse effect changes too. This is the cause of human-made climate change: by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, we are trapping more heat, and the entire planet gets warmer.”
Is the Earth warmer than in 1800? The New Scientist says, “It is worth bearing in mind that any data on global temperatures before about 150 years ago is an estimate, a reconstruction based on second-hand evidence such as ice cores and isotopic ratios. The evidence becomes sparser the further back we look, and its interpretation often involves a set of assumptions. In other words, a fair amount of guesswork.”
Since humans are supposedly responsible for killing the Earth with GHG, why is the Board of Supervisors ignoring this by increasing the population density in the new Housing Element? As the Canary recently observed, “Seven years from now, when the state’s got even more people to find housing for, any of those undeveloped spaces might be forced to hold even more units. Sixty units per acre? Eighty?” (“Elemental, my dear,” May 9).
Meanwhile the state welcomes undocumented aliens from all over the world. It seems that any policies that add people makes the GHG policy goals harder to accomplish.
So, why devote billions in taxpayer money and time to implement unachievable and/or irrelevant goals?
Ron Fink writes to the Sun from Lompoc. Send a letter for publication to [email protected].
