Climate: What we are doing to address climate

Related:

• Climate Hypocrites Part 1
• Climate Hypocrites Part 2
• Climate: What Experts Say We Must Do (Cull the population, ban all dogs and cats, ban all travel, ban EVs – really… and so on)
• Climate, Wildfires: Is everything a single variable problem?

TL;DR

This was originally written to describe the steps we had taken to address our personal climate footprint. We have spent about US$64,000 to re-do the insulation of our home, install solar PV, a battery for the system, and purchase an EV. I ate vegetarian for 4 of the past 5 years — because meat was evil and the future was “plant-based”.

Since I first wrote this, much has changed.

First, I began reading what “experts” said we must do to fight the “Climate Crisis”. I started to see that much of it is unsupportable and unsustainable – such as banning all pet dogs and cats (they eat up to 30% of the meat supply, and since meat is bad, we must ban pets). This was my first “wake up” – a LOT of expert recommendations are nonsensical and unsustainable.

Second, after reading about climate hypocrite Sofia Kianni, I began seeing climate hypocrites everywhere. These are grifters telling us how to live our lives – while gallivanting about the world with airline and private jet travel.

Third, vegetarian eating led to vitamin B-12 deficiency – which is not a minor health issue. I had heart arrhythmia, migraines, visual auras/scotomas up to 10x/day, trigeminal nerve pain, non-viral hepatitis, inflamed gall bladder and pancreas and more – all linked to B-12 deficiency. I spent over $6,000 out of pocket on testing trying to find the cause of all the weird symptoms. Within 72 hours of B-12 supplementation, all problems began to disappear and have not re-occurred in 16 months. Vegetarian eating is not a panacea and for many, has serious health risks. The media was claiming vegetarian eating was growing in popularity – but that is false. Over the past 20 years, its gone from 6% vegetarian/2% vegan to 4% vegetarian/1% vegan (per Gallop polling).

Yet at this point, I was still considering climate and carbon emissions in my life choices.

Then, in early 2025, the left began attacking Tesla drivers and setting fire to Teslas and Superchargers. The hypocrisy was off scale. In March, while I was in the midst of a medical emergency, our Tesla windshield was shattered by a rock. There were no cars in front of us at the time and my wife thought the rock came from the right side of the road. We have no way of knowing the cause but this was suspicious. Over the next months, personally owned Teslas were vandalized around the nation by persons upset with Musk’s politics. We went from the left, specifically, mandating EVs in the future – to the left trashing EVs.

Terrified of the violent and mentally unstable attacks on Tesla drivers we stopped driving our Tesla for much of the next 2 months. I went back to driving my 2015 gas powered Honda Fit instead. I am upset about this but I need to keep my stress down and I am scared of being attacked for driving a Tesla.

Also note that MN Gov Walz (D) publicly called for destruction of the Tesla company and knocking it’s stock price down – yet he’s the Chair of the MN Pension board, which has 1.6 million shares of Tesla (and another 210,000 shares in another fund), and as Chair he has a fiduciary responsibility to act in the interests of the pension recipients – which he failed to do. No Democrat denounced the attacks on Americans who drive Teslas.

In June of 2025, “mostly peaceful” protestors in Los Angeles began hailing automated EV Waymo taxis, and when they arrived, set them on fire. Because you know, setting EVs on fire is good for the environment!

As of 2025, I feel defrauded, duped, and scammed by the climate change enthusiast community. I am disillusioned by the bull shit.

The primary goal was never climate, we now realize – it’s politics and a desire for rule by a technocratic elite – literally the same as communism. Climate became a religious cult. One leading climate cultist says Climate: “is a symptom of … inequality and injustice” – she confirms it has nothing to do with climate – it’s about redistribution of wealth and re-arranging global social structures. The only solution is global Marxism and leadership by a technocratic elite of Ph.D.s and academics who are smarter than us peons.

After spending US $64,000 on energy efficiency and carbon reduction measures over the past 5 years, I have given up on climate: We will no longer take climate into consideration regarding future decisions.

Insiders from Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, who left the groups, confirmed these groups have a goal of ending democracy and forcing global Marxism through acts of violence. What Extinction Rebellion insiders say: Climate: Extinction Rebellion Insider says ER is not about the climate – it’s about establishing global Marxism, in their own words.

We’ve been defrauded by propaganda campaigns. As of now, we are no longer playing along. If you have a problem with that, look in the mirror and look at what you’ve done.

We will still strive for an efficient lifestyle – but it is no longer a main focus for us.

Summary

• Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased.
• The physics says this will lead to warming.
• Ice packs in many areas have retreated. This is thought to be caused by human-induced climate change, primarily from burning fuels that emit carbon.
• Climate activists believe we can organize a highly complex sequence of decades long activities to control the climate via proxy.
• If we don’t act some say humanity will be extinct by 2030 (not a typo).
• Global elite demand we change our ways – but as shown in the Climate Hypocrites Part 1 and Part 2, prominent climate activists do not change their own ways and continue to lead a globalist lifestyle of luxury. Their emissions of greenhouse gases are more important than your emissions.
• Many climate activists, including youth activists, live a life of global luxury but say the rest of us should revert to lock downs, without future travel (travel has minor impacts on carbon emissions compared to almost everything else). As described in the above links, they literally travel all about the world telling the rest of us that travel should be banned.
• Many climate activists promote solutions that are not sustainable and will have little if any benefit. Their goals are something other than climate modification. For example, some activists say we must ban meat – and if you agree with that, do you also agree we must ban all pet dogs and cats? According to a UCLA study, pet dogs and cats consume 20-30% of meat in the U.S. Another study says 20% of global meat is consumed by pets. Is banning pets a politically supportable measure?
• Extinction Rebellion says their goal is that support from just 3.5% of the population will enable them to rule the world – thus the end of democracy itself. Thunberg tells us we must destroy capitalism but offers no alternative -> we must end democracy and freedom and succumb to rule by technocratic elite who are smarter than us! In their own words, their goal is to end democracy and capitalism and establish a global world order with the elite in charge.
• One climate activist rubbed me the wrong way – Sophia Kianni. Already a massive world traveler as a youth, in her teens, she flew to Spain to co-author a “youth manifesto” calling for an end to air travel. Since then, she has flown around the world much more, frequently posting selfies on her IG page, attending COP meetings to get selfies with the UN Secretary General and others – while delivering zero measurable results for her climate activism. More on her at the bottom of this post.
• Models are notoriously poor at predicting the future – Covid-19 disease models were so poor that in October 2022, the CDC discontinued publishing model outputs because, in the CDC’s own words, they had “low reliability”. Yet we rely on climate models to plan global wealth redistribution – “reparations” – for imagined future climate disaster costs that exist in climate model scenarios. And most published scenario-based papers use RCP 8.5, also known as the impossible or implausible scenario – because it is physically impossible. In other words, it is completely unrealistic and useless, but it is scary – and fear is the most powerful tool of propaganda.
• Today we blame routine and common weather events that are within the range of past weather events on “climate”. Based on this hype, we are planning for wealthier nations to send $2 trillion (by 2030) to countries where citizens openly discuss their government’s corruption – much of this money will line the pockets of government ministers – and do nothing for climate.
• Personally, we have done everything we can reasonably accomplish and estimate that we have cut our household carbon emissions to 1/10th that of typical U.S. household based on several online carbon emission calculators.

If climate change is real (and I assumed it is), the elite are not acting like it is a real issue

WHAT WE HAVE DONE

We have cut our overall carbon output to about 1/10th that of the average American household (estimated using 3 different online carbon emission calculators).

• My home has six-inch walls with R-19 (or better) insulation.
• We have triple paned, vinyl clad windows.
• We upgraded the attic insulation to R-60 (it’s more than R-60 since the insulation installer had excess material to blow in, so they did).
• We installed solar PV and solar energy powers 100% of our annual electricity (plus more).
• Solar PV charges our EV.
• Our home’s solar PV array is 1/2 the size of the solar PV array on the home across the street and 1/3d the size of another home’s array around the corner. Yet we produce almost 2 MWH of surplus electricity each year – because our home and use of energy is so efficient. This is why we have enough solar produced electricity to charge our EV for local and regional travel.
• I continue to drive my old Honda Fit which averages 42 mpg. Based on overall life cycle energy costs, this is more carbon efficient than replacing with an EV. One analysis finds that at 200,000 miles of EV driving, an EV reduces carbon emissions by a mere -28% versus a similar sized gas car when considering total lifecycle energy costs. Personal EVs have little impact on global carbon emissions (see more on that topic, below) – but the world has fixated on EVs since people see cars but do not see behind-the-scenes industrial operations and electricity generation that goes into making them (or making anything).
• Yet we did purchase an EV in 2023 – charged mostly by our own solar PV array.
• We air dry laundry on a clothes rack, seasonally outside, or inside during the winter months.
• Our house is lit with LED lighting, and we rarely have multiple lights on.
• Our home is heated by locally sourced wood pellets made from locally sourced wood waste; the UN says wood is carbon neutral (but since there is energy to collect, process and transport I disagree that it is entirely carbon neutral – but those energy costs occur for all forms of energy too).
• If we use electric heating – that comes from our heat pump which is twice as efficient as an electric furnace. We rarely use the electric heater (as I update this sentence in Nov 2023 it was 12 deg F/-10 deg C this morning and as I edit/update this in January 2024, the outside air temperature is 0 deg F.)
• Our house has AC (AC is the reverse operation of the heat pump) but we manage the summer house temperature by opening windows at night and cooling down the home’s thermal mass, which remains cool – usually below 77 degrees, all day, without using AC. We live in a high desert – on the day I wrote this sentence in July 2023, the outside temperature is in the mid-90s but inside it is mid-70s F – and the AC hasn’t been on.
• The water heater is electric; we turn it to “Off” or “Vacation” mode when we leave. This is the largest single consumer of electricity in our home. When off, our daily electric consumption, mostly for the fridge and freezer, is about 2.5 KWH per day. Today, as I write this (July 2023), our solar PV array is producing about 29 KWH (our peak days occur in early summer at about 32-33 KWH). The solar PV array produces more power than we use for about 9 months of the year. The excess is “banked” through our utility intertie, from which we draw a small amount during about 3 months of winter. (Local building code mandates that all residential solar PV systems be intertied to the grid, regardless of whether they have on site battery storage or not. )
• We compost all “green stuff” including kitchen scraps and yard waste.
• We eat little meat but we are not vegetarians. If you live in a northern climate, eating “vegan” means high energy usage to transport fresh fruit and vegetables, year-round, so you can enjoy eating vegan in the wintertime. Think about that. UPDATE: After several years of drifting into almost entirely vegetarian eating, I developed numerous severe health problems that were caused by a vitamin B12 deficiency, which is associated with vegetarian eating. The push for everyone to stop eating meat is reckless and dangerous. If you are considering this, you must consult your doctor, plus a registered dietician, take supplements, and have periodic blood tests, especially if you are an older adult. You cannot casually drift into vegetarian eating. The reality is hardly anyone is vegetarian, a point missed in the media stories pushing this: As of 2023, just 4% of the U.S. population identifies as vegetarian, and 1% as vegan, down from 6%/2% 20 years earlier, per Gallop polling.
• Most of our cooking is done with an efficient induction cook top or a small countertop oven (uses half the electricity and cooks twice as fast as the tradition oven – making it use about 25% of the energy of our traditional kitchen oven, which now is rarely used.)
• There is not much we can do, personally, in terms of energy used in food growing, production and distribution, or other products and services, including health care. We have done what we can do directly.
• Many do not understand that if you reduce your personal footprint, energy is still used to produce and deliver food, products, and services that make your life possible. You don’t see that the way you see cars on the road. All transportation produces an estimated 28% of US carbon emissions – that’s about 10% for ships, large trucks, aircraft and railroads – and 18% for personal vehicles and small business vehicles (pickup trucks, vans, etc). The rest (72%) comes from (mostly) electricity generation and industrial processes – but you can’t see this, so you pretend this does not exist – and end up focusing on personal EVs. Driving an EV impacts your minor component of greenhouse gases – but only if your electricity is cleanly sourced. If we switched all light vehicles used by consumers and businesses to EV, tomorrow, we might reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as little as 5% (per numbers in an MIT study). EVs are the major item everyone is pursuing yet their overall greenhouse gas reduction is near meaningless – and that’s because we ignore the total life cycle energy costs of EV – where most of their lifetime energy is used during manufacturing of the vehicle! This is why switching from an ICE to EV ultimately makes little difference in emissions!
• Choices you make influence carbon usage, but sometimes, in ways you did not intend. If you live where 100% of your electricity comes from coal, then buying an EV may make things worse! Conversely, if you live in a place with nearly 100% of your utility power from solar, wind and hydro, investing in solar PV may have no impact on carbon reduction! In the latter case, you’d do better by purchasing an EV! I have an essay on that topic here. As an aside, our power utility gets two thirds of its electricity from coal and gas, which is down from almost 80% a few years back, after they recently closed a coal plant. Hence, for many, buying an EV here looks good – but burns more coal!

Public Health’s Covid Response Impacted Trust in Science

From 2020 to 2023, the actions of public health/epidemiology/pharmaceutical industry and social media celebrity scientists led to a loss of trust and confidence not only in public health but in all science.

We were pummeled with two and half years of public health inconsistencies, contradictions, incoherent, illogical and often irrational messaging, outright lies and daily “dueling experts” contradicting each other, and calling each other names. In 2024, we learned that NIH staff were conspiring to hide their internal communications from FOIA. Most pandemics last 1-3 years and expire on their own, much like Covid did – in spite of, not because of the nonsense thrown at Covid. In 2019, the World Health Organization said that almost everything that was done for Covid – was known not to work or would only work briefly – but everyone ignored that, and they did it anyway. At 2 1/2 years, the CDC estimated 77% of everyone in the country had had Covid-19 – in spite of the mandates. (My state had health care closures, schools closed for 1.5 years, businesses closed, a 94% mask wearing compliance, etc. – what else would we have done?) A study published in early 2023 found the vaccines – which we were told were 95% effective at preventing infection – were, in fact, just 17% effective at preventing infection. As one person put it, a person with ten booster shots in 2024 can, in fact, give Covid to another person who has had ten booster shots – not exactly what we were being told.

Many of us lost trust in “experts”. The expert “fix” for Covid was to implement non-sustainable actions that the experts did not even understand. When they didn’t work, the experts blamed the people – and said we needed to lock down harder like China? Where they killed pets and welded shut doors on apartment buildings – only to have people die when fires broke out.

We see the same underway with climate enthusiasts – we must ban all travel, including a ban on all air travel from 2030 to 2050. We must ban consumption of meat. We must ban pet dogs and cats (they consume up to 30% of meat in the U.S., and 20% globally) We must end democracy and turn control over to an un-elected technocratic elite. We must censor online comments that disagree with or question climate enthusiasts.

But climate enthusiasts, like the public health experts who violated their own mandates and directives – do not follow their own rules. Climate activists are as hypocritical as the public health hypocrites who ignored their own rules. (See Climate Hypocrites, Parts 1 and 2, in the rightmost column for a lengthy list of well-known climate activists/hypocrites. Read it – your mind will be blown, and you will be as disgusted as me.)

Carbon dioxide increases are concerning – but the technocratic elite tell us how to live our lives, while they spew vast planet-sized clouds of carbon. Their direct message is they do not believe what they are preaching. (Again, read the Climate Hypocrites links.)

Much of what the media tells us about climate is false (there are many books that discuss how the media engages in misinformation, disinformation and exaggeration about climate – promoting unlikely scenarios to panicked levels of fear). A majority of scary climate studies presented in the media base their model on RCP 8.5 – a scenario that is so over the top that is is viewed as physically impossible. But it’s great for scary headlines!

The media goes all in on climate propaganda – weather maps now use the red color for temperatures in the 70 degree range (Farenheit).

Starting in 2025, the National Weather Service changed “Heat Advisory” to “Extreme Heat Warning” – turning up the Spinal Tap audio from 10 to 11 in order to frighten us more. The week I wrote this, the temperature hit 91 and we were under an “Extreme Heat Warning” for a perfectly normal summer time temperature in the high desert. This is climate change propaganda messaging.

If you get your climate information from mass media or social media, you are a victim of propaganda messaging. Read Factfulness by the late Dr. Hans Rosling, or SuperAbundance, or Climate Uncertainty and Risk by Judith Curry, Ph.D., to learn more about this.

Doomerisn has taken hold, rather than hope: Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion (and now in prison for five years) says we are all going to die and we are engaged in a “murder project” to destroy humanity. Exaggerate much?

Climate has become Covid 2.0 where the experts ignored their own rules: Speaker of British House of Commons suggests Covid lock downs were a dry run for climate lock downs

Yes – really, The Speaker of the British House of Commons said that – the goal is “climate lock downs”.

The effect of the last three years is to have lost trust in institutions, science and scientists. Public health burned up its reputation and did massive collateral damage to science itself. Celebrity epidemiologists on media and social media, spouting dueling inconsistent nonsense, engaging in bullying and calling each other names, made it worse. In June of 2020, after months of telling us to “Stay Home. Save Lives. Don’t Kill Grandma” they then told us, in these words, that protesting was more important than fighting a virus. (Seriously, they said that.)

After living through Covid rule by technocratic elite – did we stop the spread of Covid? No, almost everyone eventually had Covid at least once.

Why should we have confidence that government efforts to control climate will produce more benefits than harms?

Most government Covid programs run by elites were ineffective at best, incompetent at worst, and their mandates were routinely ignored by the elite – and had little to no impact on Covid. In many cases they caused more harm than benefits (often having no benefits).

The mostly likely outcome for climate is the same – mandates by technocratic elite (which are ignored by the elite), are likely to cause excessive harms while accomplishing little or nothing for the climate. A study published in 2024 found that 96% of funded carbon emission reduction programs had little or no effect on carbon emissions – just 4% produced useful results.

It’s as if none of what they had us go through made a difference – and certainly little of what they promised us was true. By early 2023, it was about day 1,500 of 15 days to flatten the curve …. and yet, a better description might have been just 15 more booster shots to flatten the curve…

At best, their rules yield “winners” and “losers”, where the winners are the globalized, technocratic elite in charge while the rest of us are the losers.

And with dueling experts telling us to do contradictory things, if we are confused by this and ask questions, us peons are told we are stupid – how dare we question the experts! This is not how to successfully persuade others …

My confidence in government control of climate is the same as confidence in public health: which is none.

Sorry if that viewpoint disappoints you. The elite and the hypocrites have destroyed our ability to trust them. It is not my fault they destroyed our trust – it is due to their own actions.

That said, it makes sense to continually seek efficiency improvements and effective energy reductions – regardless of whether climate change science is real, or less than estimated, or just messed up. You do not need to “believe” in climate change to adopt that approach. Therefore, I will continue to cut our own greenhouse gas footprint and continue to seek improvements in efficiency and effectiveness and will see if we can reduce even further than our 1/10th of the footprint of a typical American home.

I, however, will not spend every day spewing fear and hysteria, and engaged in self-flagellation over not being “pure enough” but will focus on workable and sustainable solutions – not virtue signaling – and will not tell everyone else how to live their lives.

Afterward – Sophia Kianni

In the Climate Hypocrites Part 1 and Part 2, I have listed the behaviors of numerous advocates for strong climate actions and mandates on the population.

Climate activist Sophia Kianni’s behavior, documented in Part 1, and that of other climate activists, such as Extinction Rebellion, really, really, really, really rubbed me the wrong way. Kianni is a global elite, global traveler who co-chaired a manifesto saying we should not travel – but not only is it okay for her to travel the world, everything is about her – look at those posts of hers from around the world and at COP27 – it’s all about self-promotion that she is better than the rest of us peons. At 20 years old, she confuses her wealth, youth, and pretty privilege for intellectual fire power. In 2022, I visited Europe for the first time – and I’m 3x her age. But since I was born at the peak of the baby boom (a fact over which I had no control), I am the one at fault for theoretical catastrophic climate change.

Kianni and many others come across as self-centered, narcissistic, wealthy kids telling the rest of us how to live our lives while they go about their elite lifestyles, preaching how virtuous they are. Almost none of them participate in developing solutions – that requires study and work in science and engineering. Instead, they study public policy and political science, learn to milk a career as professional whiners, and jet about the globe telling the rest of us to fix things because we are horrible people.

If they truly cared, they’d develop skills to invent solutions – but no, they’d rather be professional whiners galivanting the globe and hob knobbing with the elite at COP meetings. Climate change activism is a global travel club – there are always more speeches to give, more conferences to attend. Over 97,000 attendees and over 4,000 media were registered at COP28 – the 28th annual confab which, after 28 years, has accomplished nothing. It’s a private jet destination and travel club for the elite.

Behaviors of climate activists have become a turn off.