I am sure you remember this adage from the health care industry about our collective responsibility to act responsibly with COVID 19. I tracked our progress weekly and wrote a summary of how we were doing right here in our community and compared that to other parts of the US and the world. I offered alarms when there seemed to be an uptick in our cases and offered encouragement as we all tried to be good citizens. The goal of course was to avoid overloading our healthcare system.
It is striking to me that we are not offering the same public tracking information for our concerns over carbon emissions. The data is all there as the chart here shows. Why aren’t we offering insights into how we are doing?
Perhaps the reason is that the curve is going in the wrong direction … it is getting worse at an increasing rate. We have bent the curve in the wrong direction. How can that be with all the world talking about this plus the last few years of COVID 19 supposedly thwarting economic growth?
If you have been following my blogs, you know precisely why the curve is bending in the wrong direction. A part of it is that we are simply not retiring coal as the pundits promised (see China, India, and Pakistan), and all of these EVs, solar panels, and batteries embody years of carbon dioxide in their production. All this is of course driven by the increasing appetite of the world for things we take for granted here in the US.
We are spending money like drunken sailors yet nobody can give us any cost-benefit analysis to justify it. We have alarmists and scare tactics prodding us on to throw more money at EVs, solar and wind, yet all of these are going to further bend the curve in the wrong direction.
Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.