TheGreenGreatLeapForward

The West Mimics Mao, Takes a Green Leap Forward

By Helen Raleigh

The green movement’s rush to transform the energy economy while ignoring the laws of nature and economics calls to mind China’s ruinous Great Leap Forward. By 1957, Mao Zedong had grown impatient with his country’s slow industrial development relative to the West. He sought to transform China quickly from an agricultural society to an industrial powerhouse through forced industrialization and agricultural collectivization.

Steel production was a priority of the Great Leap Forward. Mao wanted China to surpass the U.K. in steel output within 15 years. Across the country, including in the village where my father lived, people tried to contribute to this goal by building small backyard furnaces. Each village had a production quota to meet, so everyone—including children and the elderly—pitched in. Using everything they could find to keep the furnaces burning, villagers melted down farming tools and cooking pots. These efforts yielded only pig iron, which had to be decarbonized to make steel. That was a process a backyard furnace couldn’t handle. The effort and resources were wasted.

The steel campaign diverted manpower from farming, even as the government ordered farmers to meet unrealistic quotas. Local party officials initially compelled farmers to experiment with ineffective and sometimes harmful techniques, such as deep plowing and sowing seeds much closer than usual. When these radical methods failed to increase yield and depleted the soil, local leaders had no choice but to lie to their political superiors about how much had been produced (a practice referred to as “ launching a Sputnik”). Based on these false production figures, the state demanded villages sell more grain than they could spare. In a vicious circle, the more the local officials lied about their output, the higher the central government set the quotas. Farmers were forced to hand over every bit of grain they had, including the following year’s seeds, to meet the quotas. Resistance was violently suppressed.

The combination of lies, failed experiments, absence of labor and violent requisition practices led to famine. From 1959 through 1961, an estimated 30 million to 40 million Chinese people died from hunger. The Chinese government continues to refer to the famine as a natural disaster, pretending forces beyond their control were to blame for this man-made calamity.

Like Mao, today’s advocates for the green-energy revolution have become impatient with the slow progress made by renewable energy. Fossil fuels and nuclear power provide 80% of the energy the world needs. Despite years of subsidies, renewable energy is still unstable and unreliable, since the sun doesn’t shine at night and the wind doesn’t blow all the time. Almost all renewable-energy power plants require either nuclear or fossil fuels as backups.

Rather than gradually phasing out fossil fuels while investing in renewable energy research and development, Western green-energy revolutionaries have launched their own version of the Great Leap Forward in Europe and the U.S. Today’s greens operate in a democratic system unlike Mao, but they have resorted to government coercion to replace fossil fuels (and nuclear power) with renewables on an aggressive deadline. The European Union is set to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030, and the Biden administration promises to “achieve a 50-52 percent reduction from 2005 levels in economy-wide net greenhouse gas pollution in 2030.”

One of the essential lessons from China’s Great Leap Forward is that catastrophic failures inevitably follow from politicians’ insistence on ignoring reason, logic, truth and economics. Europe’s current energy crisis, California’s continuing power outages and Sri Lanka’s food shortages are all warning signs. The Green Leap Forward has set humanity on a fast track to another man-made catastrophe.

Ms. Raleigh is the author of “Confucius Never Said” and “Backlash: How China’s Aggression Has Back-fired.”


The green scramble to transform energy is reminiscent of China’s forced industrialization.

The Australian

NO ‘EMERGENCY’ SHOWN IN
CLIMATE RECORDS
GRAHAM LLOYD
An international study of major weather and extreme events
has found no evidence of a “climate emergency” in the
record to date.
The study by Italian scientists provides a long-term analysis
of heat, drought, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and
ecosystem productivity and finds no clear positive trend of
extreme events.
The authors do not say that no action should be taken on
climate change but argue the issue should be placed in a
bigger context.
“Fearing a climate emergency without this being supported
by data, means altering the framework of priorities with
negative effects that could prove deleterious to our ability to
face the challenges of the future, squandering natural and
human resources in an economically difficult context,” the
report, published in European Physical Journal Plus, said.
The paper – “A critical assessment of extreme events trends
in times of global warming” – found the most robust global
changes in climate extremes are found in yearly values of
heatwaves, but it said global trends in heatwave intensity
were “not significant”.
Daily rainfall intensity and extreme precipitation frequency
were stationary.
Tropical cyclones show a “substantial temporal invariance”,
as do tornadoes.
The impact of warming on surface and wind speed remained
unclear.
The team, led by Gianluca Alimonti from the Italian National
Institute for Nuclear Physics and the University of Milan,
extended the analysis to include natural disasters, floods,
drought, ecosystem productivity and yields of the four main
crops (maize, rice, soybean and wheat).
“None of these response indicators show a clear positive
trend of extreme events,” the report said.
The authors said it was important to underline the difference
between statistical evidence of excess of events, with given
characteristic, and probabilistic calculation of anthropogenic
attribution of extreme events. The statistical evidence is
based on historical observations and tries to highlight
differences between these and recent observations or
possible trends as a function of time. “The anthropogenic
versus natural attribution of the origin of a phenomenon is
based on probabilistic models and makes reliance on
simulations that hardly reproduce the macro and
microphysical variables involved in it,” the researchers said.
“In conclusion, on the basis of observational data, the
climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are
experiencing today, is not evident yet.”
On floods, the report said: “Although evidence of an increase
in total annual precipitation is observed on a global level,
corresponding evidence for increases in flooding remains
elusive and a long list of studies shows little or no evidence
of increased flood magnitudes, with some studies finding
more evidence of decreases than increases.”
The paper said there was “no evidence that the areas
affected by the different types of drought are increasing”.
In conclusion, the findings do not mean we should do
nothing about climate change. “We should work to minimise
our impact on the planet and to minimise air and water
pollution,” the authors said.
“Whether or not we manage to drastically curtail our carbon
dioxide emissions in the coming decades, we need to reduce
our vulnerability to extreme weather and climate events.
“How the climate of the twenty-first century will play out is
a topic of deep uncertainty. We need to increase our
resiliency to whatever the future climate will present us.”