Activists love to talk about the hypothetical far-future “health risks” of a less-cold planet. They are not so keen to discuss the very real harms caused by their hysterical anti-carbon claims here and now. We at JunkScience.com are not so reticent.
The immediate trigger for this is an article in the Adelaide Advertiser from South Australia: Deadly legionella bacteria threatens power savers. Like many in the Western World a number of Australian politicians are afflicted with the malady of carbon phobia, driven by the delusion humanity can control the world’s climate by insignificant adjustments in the atmospheric concentration of a trace gas. Herded by the insistent noise of greens, activist groups and a mainstream media desperate for relevance, self-interested and science-illiterate politicians agree with absurd proposals, sacrificing cheap, reliable baseload power for the gaudy baubles of hyper-expensive and completely impractical “renewables”, leaving consumers stuck with the tab.
The number of legionella mortalities will be small, merely the unnoticed collateral damage of stupid warm-and-fuzzy “save the planet” policies but no less dead for the would be planet savers’ lack of concern.
They are not the only casualties though, are they?
Consider the elderly, the unemployed and the impoverished struggling to pay for sufficient energy to warm their homes – mortalities always spike in these groups during cold weather with another, albeit smaller spike in excessively hot weather for want of air conditioning. Their defense is cheap, abundant energy and their killers are those who campaign relentlessly to strangle the energy supply, the rent-seekers purchasing mandates for their inferior products, the complicit media and the lazy politicians buying cheap votes through gleeful acceptance of planet quackery.
There are many more casualties, of course, the increased road fatalities that result from idiotic interference with rational manufacture (mandate more miles per gallon forcing smaller, lighter vehicles and sacrifice passenger protection), the number forced out of employment by excessive energy costs making manufacturers uncompetitive in world markets and so on. I’m sure you can think of plenty more examples – feel free to add them via comments if you choose.
The nonsense over Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is the greenies’ greatest success – the DDT debacle only killed millions while the CAGW campaign is still in with a chance to bring down Western Society.
The cost of green is poverty, misery and death. Perhaps you should ask your representatives if that’s really what they are voting for.