Apocalypse, Interrupted

Dystopian Dems are just plain creepy

Some unkind souls have likened Tony Evers’s gubernatorial years to a zombie apocalypse, but I’m here to sort of defend the poor governor, especially about the apocalypse part.

Oh sure, his administration has been a train wreck, an economic and regulatory catastrophe, and he’s completely turned his back on working Wisconsinites and farmers, but it’s not quite an apocalypse. We have the GOP-majority legislature to thank for saving us from the worst excesses of the woke mob running the Democratic Party and that Evers answers to.

Left to the governor’s whims, we’d all be calling our mothers inseminated persons and our fathers persons who did not give birth. But only after we smoked our legal recreational marijuana and watched William and Harold win the girls sports’ events over at the local high school.

Fortunately, it’s been apocalypse, interrupted.

As for the zombie part, well, I won’t go there, though it’s always fun to watch WisPolitics.com’s press release list after Democrats introduce their latest social justice crusade—seems like all of them have the same idea at the very same time and release the same boilerplate press releases, dozens of them, one after another, all saying the same thing and using the same language: “Child care is infrastructure!” “It’s not spending, it’s investing in our future!” “Democracy is on the ballot!”

This week it was the LGBTQ+ Equality Agenda, or LGBTQ+EA, in which our reanimated political corpses made a point of denouncing, in unison, the so-called LGBTQ+ “panic defense”—all except Rep. Greta Neubauer (D-Racine) who slipped up and called it the “gay and trans” panic defense, which the LGBTQ+ community doesn’t like because they don’t think it’s inclusive enough. Guess she didn’t get the memo, or maybe she’s just a rebel.

Still, while Evers may have the Zombie Caucus on his bloody hands, or in his bloody hands, as the case may be, the governor himself is not above using a little apocalyptic rhetoric, especially when it comes to the climate.

And especially when it comes to his 2025-27 budget proposals. In that tome of curses, the governor wants us to know that climate change is a real and looming calamity of the first order, a grim reaper for inseminated and uninseminated persons alike. Here’s how the administration put it in the 2025-27 budget proposal: “From flooding and more severe weather events to droughts and lack of snow in the winter, Governor Evers recognizes that climate change is an imminent threat to our state, economy, and our kids’ future and has been working to tackle the climate crisis head on.”

An imminent threat. If that sounds bad, it is. It’s downright apocalyptic, in fact—not the climate “crisis” but the budget proposals, that is. Thankfully, when the legislature’s Joint Finance Committee (JFC) waded into the governor’s dark fantasies, they sliced 612 items from his gothic mental forest, including the worst of the climate hocus-pocus.

Not that those proposals couldn’t pop right back up, and so it’s worth a reminder why they should remain buried in the governor’s playbox and why it’s not a good idea to elect modern-day Democrats as governor in the first place.

Or as anything. What with their inseminated persons and sky-is-falling environmental follies and millionaires and billionaires who hate millionaires and billionaires, not to mention women, dystopian Democrats are just plain creepy.

The wish list

So let’s take a gander through Evers’s budget thicket, but best bring along a machete because there’s a lot to thrash through in this trash.

For starters, Evers’s stated climate goals are and have been no more than a verbatim copy of the most extreme elements of the 2015 Paris Climate agreement, adopted for Wisconsin, the major goal being to achieve 100 percent carbon-free electricity consumption by 2050. If Joe Biden was the auto-pen president, then Evers is the cut-and-paste governor—everyone knows neither one of these guys is lucid or original or insightful enough to actually call any policy shots. Cue the DNC.

Evers also apparently never got the memo that the United States has withdrawn—again—from the Paris Climate Accords, which, along with Neubauer’s progressive lingo malfunction, raises the specter of mass memo theft in Democratic circles. Still, give the governor credit for carrying the banner of states’ rights. Well, at least the banner of state bureaucracy rights.

In all, Evers proposed 55 climate solutions across nine economic sectors. How regulatory was this approach? Very, given that there are only eight economic sectors. He split off a ninth as a bonus for bureaucrats.

So just how are we going to fight the climate apocalypse?

Well, the governor proposed more than $10 million over the biennium and another full-time position to create a community climate action grant program to assist local governments in preparing climate risk assessments and to help those governments implement emission-reducing and undefined climate action projects.

In other words, it would have been $10 million to increase regulation, to bully and bribe local governments into infrastructure spending they don’t need, to stymie economic investment, to kill jobs, and to make sure Wisconsin stays closed for business.

Nixed by JFC, thankfully.

Then there was more than $1.3 million over the biennium and yet another tax-supported position to administer a program to “promote community engagement on climate and clean energy needs,” including grants to local nonprofits to carry out the sacred pilgrimages.

Translated, this money would be paid to climate activists to travel around the state and spread climate hoaxology.

Done in by JFC, satisfyingly.

There was lots of money, too, for renewable energy subsidies, for instance a $1 million pilot program at the Public Service Commission to “assist” developers and electric providers with the cost of developing renewable energy infrastructure on brownfield sites.

Reassuringly dropped faster than you can say contaminated budget bill.

And of course the biggie, $50 million in fiscal year 2025-26 to increase support to the Green Innovation Fund, “which will increase lending and investment activities in the renewable energy sector,” especially solar and any “net-zero energy use” project the governor happened to like, including “industrial decarbonization.” In Evers’s eyes, the only way to avoid the apocalypse is by having the government pick winners and losers, and Evers’s winners are known to blow around a lot of hot air, especially about the sun.

Into the budget compost pit this provision went, which was delightfully renewing.

Now some of these do sound nice. What town board can resist a young woman dressed in a blue Greta Thunberg sweatshirt that reads ‘Extinction Rebellion,’ warning you of your impending demise unless you rebel against extinction by spending a lot of tax dollars to implement a one-water approach to extreme weather.

Don’t ask, “What extreme weather?” It’s on the way, trust her.

Better to nix the crusader position rather than subject the state to such temptation. In fact, virtually all of the governor’s climate proposals are wrong-headed—except for his nuclear initiative—and so it’s worth a look at why the GOP was correct to cut all this nonsense, and why they should not be allowed to rise from the dead. It’s also useful to point out this foolishness when it comes to the next election.

A not-so-appetizing budget

Who doesn’t love a good dinner made with Curry?

Curry goes with a lot of things—rice, chutney, raita—but one of the things it doesn’t get along with is a main dish of climate doomsday talk. Not if the curry we’re talking about comes with a capital ‘C,’ as in Judith Curry, the climatologist and former chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Curry started her career as a climate apocalypse apostle, even serving on the National Academies Climate Research Group and NOAA’s Climate Working Group.

Then a strange thing happened. Unlike other academics, Curry clung to real scientific inquiry and research—including studying connections between hurricane intensity and global warming—and over time concluded that “research and other professional activities are professionally rewarded only if they are channeled in certain directions approved by a politicized academic establishment,” and so she retired from Georgia Tech because of what she called her “growing disenchantment with universities, the academic field of climate science and scientists.”

In reality, Curry is a climate moderate—I would call her a climate questioner rather than a climate skeptic—though to progressives that means she is a full-on evil climate denier. That has not stopped her from continuing to come up with some of the most rigorous climate research out there, and just recently she and Harry DeAngelo of the University of Southern California School of Business, published a new paper, “A Critique of the Apocalyptic Climate Narrative,” which just happens to completely eviscerate the policy pillars of Evers’s approach to climate.

For starters, Curry and DeAngelo take on the overall doomsday narrative and call it what it is: Political propaganda deliberately intentioned to scare through gaslighting.

“Alarming narratives that have an aura of plausibility can be highly effective tools for shaping public opinion and public policies,” Curry and DeAngelo wrote in this spring’s paper.

At least Evers is rethinking nuclear, but his dogged commitment to a quick transition to net-zero emissions would nuke the economy long before a viable nuclear energy rescue. So that begs the question: Are the governor’s and the DNR’s climate assumptions projecting imminent disaster even accurate? The answer is no. They aren’t even in the ball park.

Let’s just assume the worst

For example, the governor is betting at least half of the climate farm on extreme temperature increases. Here’s how the DNR puts it on its completely fabricated website page hilariously entitled “The Science of Climate Change”: “Wisconsin is likely to become a much warmer state over the next few decades, with average temperatures closer to southern Illinois or Missouri. Results show that Wisconsin has warmed 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1950, and it is projected that the state will warm an additional 2 to 8 degrees by 2050.”

An accompanying chart shows the vast majority of the state in Blaze Orange, meaning the temperature is expected to rise by 6 degrees Fahrenheit in the next 25 years, or 3.3 degrees Celsius. (If anybody believes this, please contact me. I have a bridge to sell you at a rock bottom price.)

The data comes from the Nelson Institute at the UW-Madison, and specifically from the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts (WICCI) and its Climate Working Group. In its 2021 Climate Assessment Report, the group tells us they analyzed two different future climate scenarios, “based on a mid-range and high-end estimate of future greenhouse gas emissions.”

“By mid-century, both the high and middle range emissions scenarios suggest that average temperatures in Wisconsin will be about four to six degrees warmer compared to our baseline climate conditions at the end of the 20th century (our recent past),” the report states.

The chart on the DNR webpage is a high-emissions scenario (TMEN, RCP85), with little to no reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. It is considered the worst-case scenario, so naturally that’s the chart the DNR chose to use. A second chart buried over at the WICCI website shows a chart (TMEAN SSP245) depicting the medium-range scenario, estimating temperature increases of 5 degrees Fahrenheit over most of the state, or 2.8 degrees Celsius.

All of it is bunk. The first glaring flaw is that the climate assessment reports the DNR uses funnel all climate change down to one driving force—human-made greenhouse gas emissions. Its scenarios do factor in natural variability, volcanic eruptions, and natural ocean and atmospheric cycles, but the models presuppose the dominance of human activity over the last 150 years or so, and many models don’t align with actual observations, with the models consistently running hotter than actual temperatures, some by as much as 200 percent.

What’s more, without even the intention of bias, climate modeling is so complex that it compels subjectivity. That’s why even models biased toward greenhouse gas emissions as the primary problem so often diverge. And the subjectivity has fed at least a highly questionable climate narrative that is nowhere sound enough to base policy on, namely, that if you simply turn off the emissions, the warming goes away. Don’t turn them off radically and immediately, humanity goes away. Or, as WICCI puts it: “WICCI also stresses, as science has detailed, the need for large and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Action at all levels of government is necessary.”

To a progressive, it always is.

The second problem is that even the most hardcore climate activists at the UN’s IPCC have acknowledged the above discrepancies and know the extreme projections are garbage. Here’s how Curry and DeAngelo put it:

“The Apocalyptic climate narrative and the most extreme impacts are driven by extreme emissions scenarios, with 4–5◦C of warming by 2100 (above a baseline in the late 19th century),” they wrote. “However, since 2021, the UN’s climate negotiators have abandoned extreme emissions scenarios as unrealistic for two reasons. First, they make unrealistic assumptions, especially about coal use. Second, actual emissions have been tracking well below their most extreme emission scenario, and indeed slightly below their medium emissions scenario.”

We should note that WICCI does not countenance a low emissions scenario, even though, as Curry and DeAngelo observe, the UN climate scientists are now doing what Wisconsin activists refuse to do—factor in other conditions and causes and adjust for the overheated projections of past modeling.

“The UN is now working with an estimated year 2100 warming of 2.5◦C, while the IEA Roadmap to NetZero projects 2.4◦C of warming by 2100,” they wrote. “When plausible scenarios of natural climate variability and values of climate sensitivity on the lower end of the UN’s IPCC likely range are considered, the expected warming could be significantly lower.”

The bottom line is, the most probable outcome, factoring in all variables including greenhouse gas emissions, are likely to skew toward a lower emissions scenario than the higher end doomsday range the DNR decided to present to the public, and even lower than the median range buried over at the WICCI website.

In addition, Curry and DeAngelo observe, if 2.5 degrees Celsius is used, more than half (1.3◦C) of the predicted increase in temperature has already occurred.

We can take a little heat

And then here’s this thought to ponder, that maybe a little warming might not be so bad, and could even be beneficial to agriculture and protective of the poor.

“Moreover, the so-called threshold of danger of 2◦C warming since pre-industrial times is not an objective threshold of danger,” Curry and DeAngelo wrote. “Rather, 2◦C is a politically negotiated target designed to motivate broad-based actions to reduce emissions. Importantly, there is no credible case that missing the 2◦C target would pose an existential risk to humanity. Humans have adapted to (and thrived in) climates extremes far worse than in the pessimistic extreme scenario, as summertime residents of Phoenix and wintertime residents of Minneapolis demonstrate every year.”

Curry and DeAngelo also make an important economic point—the Democrats point out the need for climate justice initiatives because marginal and poor communities are hit hardest by climate change. If that’s the case, eviscerating the economy by taking drastic but unnecessary measures on far-fetched scenarios—those large and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions—will only make matters worse in those underserved communities:

“First, a basic assumption in the socioeconomic scenarios used in formulating the UN climate-assessment reports is that vulnerability to weather and climate extremes decreases with greater wealth and economic development, as adaptive capacity increases,” they wrote. “All of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) scenarios constructed for the most recent UN climate assessment entail dramatic growth, with global GDP in 2100 between four and ten times larger than in 2010. These scenarios do not imply any futures for humanity that are worse than today.”

Then, too, Curry and DeAngelo write, risks from human-caused global warming are difficult to separate credibly from natural weather and climate variability and the risks to a large degree reflect the vulnerabilities of less-developed countries and poorer populations generally.

“Increasing wealth and productivity will continue to reduce humanity’s vulnerability to weather- and climate-related risks,” they write.

Simply put, that means a future rich with fossil fuels, not the net-zero carbon emissions Evers envisions in his budget maze. His attempts to spend tens of millions of dollars, to be followed by hundreds of millions of dollars, is a fool’s errand that will penalize taxpayers, lower the standard of living, and most hurt the people he claims he wants to protect, and all based on an incoherent and unsupported theory of an extreme climate emergency that doesn’t exist.

It’s not just temperatures telling us so. Indeed, while Evers fiddles with local infrastructure spending proposals for extreme weather, there’s no evidence of increases in such weather, even with rising sea levels, as Curry and DeAngelo tell us: “Since the late 19th century, Earth’s average temperature has increased by about 1.3◦C (2.3◦F). During the same period, average global sea level has risen 8–9 inches, and there has been little or no detectable change in most types of extreme weather events when measured against the background of natural weather and climate variability.”

The other fatal assumption driving his emission reduction proposals is that fossil fuels are evil per se. Curry and DeAngelo assert:

“The Apocalyptic climate narrative incorrectly portrays CO2 emissions as inherently and unequivocally dangerous and an economic ‘bad,’ that is, a purely negative externality,” they wrote. “This portrayal ignores the fact that CO2 yields direct benefits (e.g., it is plant food) and the inarguable technological reality that fossil fuels are currently irreplaceable inputs for producing food (via ammonia-based fertilizer), steel, cement, and plastics, which are central features of modern life.”

The last 150 years have seen an enormous increase in human welfare that occurred to a large degree because of the use of fossil fuels for electricity, transportation, agriculture, and the material inputs for manufacturing and infrastructure construction, they wrote.

As such, they correctly point out, the 2015 Paris climate goal of “net-zero” global emissions (a balance between greenhouse-gas emissions and off-setting emission removals) by 2050 can only be achieved by drastically reducing fossil-fuel use over the next 25 years, precisely the goal of Evers with his proposed emission-reducing projects and his planned forays into renewable energy.

“The problem with the Paris agreement is its urgent timeline for abandoning fossil fuels before we have viable replacements for the energy they provide and the myriad other roles they play in creating products that benefit humanity,” they wrote.

In 2020, Vaclav Smil put it bluntly, Curry and DeAngelo point out: “Designing hypothetical roadmaps outlining complete elimination of fossil carbon from the global energy supply by 2050 is nothing but an exercise in wishful thinking that ignores fundamental physical realities.”

All of which is why net-zero policies have failed, Curry and DeAngelino write. Meanwhile, climate activists try to place blame elsewhere, but the two scholars swat those down easily.

“In public discourse, capitalism and democracy are sometimes unfairly blamed for increasing emissions and the failure of net-zero policies,” they wrote. “China has strong elements of a government-planned rather than capitalist economy and no reasonable observer would mistake it for a democracy. Yet China is the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitter.”

And while fossil-fuel firms are also portrayed as the root cause of global warming, that’s not the case, either, Curry and DeAngelino wrote.

“If humans did not desire the products made with fossil fuels, there would be no firms producing such products,” they wrote. “Consumption demand by individual human beings is the root cause of fossil-fuel use and greenhouse-gas emissions. Net-zero policies are failing because they do not deal with this fundamental reality.”

Another fundamental reality is that voters will not have patience for any kind of carbon tax or other onerous net-zero emissions burdens once they realize those things would have virtually no climate impact.

“If the United States hypothetically cut its greenhouse-gas emissions to zero today, there would be no reliably detectable effect on Earth’s weather or climate over the 21st century,” they wrote. “If we accept the climate model projections of 1.2◦C or maybe 1.3◦C additional warming over the rest of the 21st century, US annual emissions of about 13 percent of the world’s total would contribute less than 0.2◦C of warming over the next 75 years.”

It would be a very tough sell to convince US voters to incur massively higher tax bills for a small reduction in the warming trend: “It would be especially tough to make that sale when China, India, and many other countries are continuing to emit greenhouse gases at prodigious rates.”

And yet, on the state level, that’s exactly what Tony Evers is asking of us: Higher utility costs, higher taxes for infrastructure adaptations, less reliability in the grid. And, as he seeks to seed renewables with grants and taxes, he is making his bad choices even worse. Curry and DeAngelo assert:

“Bad choices about future energy systems are a damaging consequence of the false sense of urgency that the Apocalyptic climate narrative has created about suppressing fossil-fuel use,” they wrote. “That urgency effectively dictates that existing technologies like solar and wind must replace fossil fuels. However, overcoming the low power quality, intermittency, and synchronicity problems of solar and wind power remains an ongoing challenge that may not ever be solved in a cost-effective way.”

The technological reality is that solar and wind are far inferior to fossil fuels for producing energy at the needed scale and, at present, they are incapable of producing many of the materials that are responsible for the lives of remarkable abundance available to people who live in advanced industrial economies, Curry and DeAngelo wrote.

“The unfortunate result is to distract attention from the potential role of more advanced energy technologies that are under development and that are expected to provide better medium- and long-term solutions than solar and wind,” they wrote. “The issue is not if, but when, more advanced energy technologies will emerge as practical and economically viable at scale.“

Meanwhile, Curry and DeAngelo wrote, human flourishing today requires enormous amounts of low-cost energy.

“That energy can come only from the technologies and systems that we know how to build right now, which are mainly fossil-fuel-based,” they wrote. “Attempts to suppress fossil-fuel use aggressively are therefore socially destructive in that they would impose significant avoidable costs on humanity.”

And that’s exactly what Evers tried to do with budget proposals. In short, Evers’s doomed climate initiatives were deleted because they were not in the public interest. The governor proceeded from a flawed globalist model based on net-zero emissions that is not practical and was never necessary. He tried to carnival bark his way to more than $60 million in climate spending in this budget alone to advance emission reductions and extreme-weather spending plans that have no basis in reality and would sacrifice the vitality of the economy.

The governor is serving someone’s interest with his cut-and-paste radicalism, but it surely is not Wisconsin’s best interests.

Give us unsubsidized, deregulated energy industries, ban government-paid propagandists from the land, and let the markets work. That’s the best defense against apocalypse there’s ever been, and it still is.