RGGI must be repealed.  There is no climate crises, and the unnecessary "Path to Net Zero" simply cannot be done by 2050, the date mandated.  The latest scaremongering from the IPCC  a week ago on March 20th, in which "top scientists" (according to the NY Times, Washington Post, and AP along with many others) now say that even more draconian action must be taken immediately to avoid climate catastrophe.

This is all designed to keep the legions of the uneducated, misinformed and brainwashed in a state of perpetual fear, as fear is by far the best motivator of all psychological techniques of the elites; it lets the Green elites in Richmond and on Wall Street make hundreds of billions of dollars  in future years because of higher taxes, higher inflation and higher electricity prices, from consumers and businesses in Virginia.

The analysis on which this latest IPCC document is based is best found by taking a deep dive in the weeks of the document itself, which I will do later in this public comment.  Suffice it to say now that it is written not by scientists, but rather by  UN politicians, apparatchiks and activists, and is approved by all governments participating.  You will see that they publish this before they publish the science reports, and they go back to rewrite those to align with this non-scientific summary they have already decided upon.  Thus the IPCC reports are government opinion, not real Science.

It is also worth noting that Virginia is experiencing net out-migration of its population, and higher and higher electricity prices will increase it by increasing the cost of living, and making the state even more  unattractive.

My study of the science of climate change has convinced me that no emergency exists, that plants want more CO2 (ideally four times what it is now); that man-made CO2 has led to re-greening of the planet, receding deserts, expanding rain forests and temperate forests, and record harvest year after year.  Satellite monitoring of biomass has shown marked increases, with as much as 15% since the beginning of this century, increasing with more CO2.  Instead of species extinction, which isn't happening, more food  for both the plant and animal kingdoms will only prevent extinction.  This is absent from the IPCC report, which falsely and nonsensically describes massive and widespread climate caused devastation to food production--the exact opposite of the truth.

The other benefit of CO2 is the greenhouse effect, without which the earth would be far colder and without life.  Predictions of CO2 runaway warming causing Armageddon have been around for fifty years, and get more strident and more false every day.  Greta Thunberg's prediction of the end of the world by 2023 didn't happen, and we have fewer than eight years to go before AOC's prediction of the end of the world.  I'm happy to be with anyone that it won't happen.  Climate has been changing since the earth was formed.  Recent warming, both natural and man0made, determined by highly accurate satellite measurements that have been available only since 1979, have shown a steady rise in lower tropospheric temperatures of 0.13C per decade, of 1.3C per CENTURY.  NOT A CRISIS.

Now, the earth is about  4.5 billion  years old and primitive life about 4 billion years.  About 600 million years ago, when it was much warmer and the air was mainly nitrogen, CO2 (ten times what it is now) and water vapor, the Cambrian Explosion happened, when green chlorophyll based plants burst forth.  They turned CO2 and water, with the energy from sunlight and chlorophyll as the catalyst, into glucose for energy, and liberated lots of oxygen as well.   Chlorophyll is a complex molecule based around a magnesium atom.  About ten million years later, heme iron appeared (we won't digress into how or why).  This is another complex molecule, almost identical to chlorophyll, with the magnesium atom replaced by an iron atom.  Then animals arrived breathing that new oxygen, moving O2 in and CO2 out, transported by hemoglobin in blood.  These new animals were able to eat the plants (or each other) for food, and the biosphere, plants and animals both, blossomed.

Starting 150 million years ago, CO2 gradually dissolved into the oceans where sea creatures combined it with calcium for shells.  When they died, the calcium carbonate fell to the sea floor becoming carboniferous rock, and CO2 declined almost to the point of wiping out plant life--and animal life after it.  Then we humans arrived to save the day by starting fire to burn wood, then coal, oil and natural gas, and raising CO2 to the level of today.

Claims of runaway heating are from unvalidated conjecture in the 1970's.  Temperature predictions based on it are two to three time higher than real data from satellites, which, as mentioned above, have been measuring temperatures only since 1979.  Only science done according to the Scientific Method is valid.  Science is the discipline which endeavors to find the best explanation of phenomena in nature, in which hypotheses are tested against outcomes of experiments of in nature itself.  If the predictions don't match outcomes, the hypothesis is invalid.

According to the new best science it will be well into the 2100s before the mild warming we have felt since the '70's could become a problem.  And so far, the warming has all been good, flowing from the tropics toward the poles, increasing growing seasons in northern latitudes, Canada for example.  There simply has not been any damage because of Global Warming--only benefits so far.

This is the IPCC report that is being referenced in the news: ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/ And this is the Summary for Policymakers: report.opcc.ch/ar6str.pdr/IPCC AR6 SYR  SPM.pdf   You can go into it and look at those items which the authors consider noteworthy, sea level rise and the like; they are all highlighted by the authors.

Since there isn't sufficient space, it is sufficient to quote an early paragraph in the IPCC SFP:

"A.2 Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.  Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the glove.  This has led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people....

A.2.1...Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to influence, has further strengthened since AR5...."

These scare are all nonsense, completely false, as carefully documented in detail by co2coalition.org in Arlington, VA, in the recently (February 2023) released "Challenging Net Zero with Science", by Lindzen and Happer, emeritus professors of physics at MIT and Princeton respectively.  Together they have published hundreds of peer reviewed papers in major scientific journals, with tens of thousands of citations.  For the full text, see: co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/challenging-net-zero-with-science-digital-co2coalition .pdf.  It is based entirely on science, not government opinion like the IPCC document.  And not that they mention extensively the work of Prof. Steve Koonin, author of "Unsettled", who was the "Science Guy" for President Obama; this isn't some partisan document, just science.

Their refutation of the catastrophes outlined in the paragraphs above are on the following pages:

Heat Waves pps 5-9

Hurricanes pps 9-11

Wildfires pps 11-14

Sea level rise pps 15 & 16

Tornadoes pps 16-19

Flooding pps 19 & 20        

Drought pps 20 & 21

Natural Disasters and Extreme Weather Generally pps 21-23

Monetary losses from Extreme Weather pps 23-25

Climate modeling pps 25-28

IPCC Findings: government opinions, not science pps 28-30

Left out of the IPCC document, as they go counter to the false IPCC narrative:

CO2's Six extraordinary Social Benefits pps 30-33

Fossil Fuel's Four Extraordinary Social Benefits pps 33-35

The IPCC omits the disastrous consequences of reducing fossil fuels and CO2 to achieve Net Zero pps 35-37

The IPCC reject the science that there is no risk of catastrophic global warming caused by fossil fuels and Co2 pps 37-43

The problem is that science got politicized in 1988 by politicians and activists at the UN, who wanted more power, power to govern the world; they seized on the unvalidated hypothesis that man-made CO2 had a positive feedback effect on water vapor, a much more prevalent greenhouse gas, and this would cause dangerous global warming.  They deliberately asked the wrong question of the scientific community: "How are activities of mankind causing the climate to heat up?"  The correct question should have been: "How are the activities of mankind AND NATURAL PROCESSES causing the climate to heat up, and what is the danger, and what are the beneficial effects of these activities?"  So they only heard about man's activities that cause problems, and scientists got paid only for discovering those causes, and couldn't get paid for finding natural ones and beneficial ones.

There have been tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer funded research, including a lot what is now known to be fraudulent, as well as just plain wrong, with over 100 climate models that have predicted warming well above what we have experienced since satellite measurements from 1979, which is 0.13C per decade or 1.3C per century.  The IPCC panics that there will be 1.5C of warming soon if we don't do something NOW!

Those advocating for RGGI are either in it for the money (such as renewable industry insiders), the misinformed or brainwashed.  With RGGI we can be 100% certain of these things: RCCI manages will toss us a few bones, but we consumers/rate payers/taxpayers will pay dearly for our electricity; price inflation will continue to spiral upward, boosted by higher electricity prices to producers of everything; and at the end of the day, atmospheric CO2 won't be reduced at all, as if that were a good thing.  And according to a new study, has actually increased it!

Self-styled elites and those who believe them all think that high energy prices are a good thing: to reduce energy use.  But cheap energy is a boon to mankind, and more CO2 is a boon to the plant and animal kingdoms.  And there is so much energy radiating from the sun, to say nothing of the cosmos as a whole, that anything we humans "use" doesn't even make it up to the category of "rounding error".  The United States uses about 100 quads (quadrillion Btu's)  of energy annually, but the sun rains down on the planet about 22 million quads annually.  So we use a miniscule 0.00005% of that energy, and the term "wasting energy" is simply nonsense.  And restricting its use b y jacking up the price isn't just stupid; it is evil.  While there may be carveouts in electricity pricing for poor people, they don't get carved out of the inflation that RGGI causes, which harms them disproportionally.  Before the Industrial Revolution everyone was poor by today's standards, including royalty and landed gentry, but now the vast majority of the world's population has been lifted out of poverty by heap energy.  Deliberately raising the price of energy for non-sensical and unachievable net-zero climate goals should be simply beyond the pale.

And since the majority of the poor are BIPOC, inflation cause by the RGGI taxes has a disparate impact on them; there fore, advocacy of raining energy prices is, to be blunt, racist, and people advocating for it are racists.

The subject of the possibility of even achieving net-zero by the year 2050 is entirely another subject.  Because of the engineering challenges from attempting to build an electrical generation, transmission and distribution grid for wind and solar electricity, it just can't happen, and is detailed in a new British publication: thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2023/03/Kelly0Net0Zero-Progress-Report-USA-.pdf.  The author details what would have to be done, starting with producing 400,000 electrical engineers overnight to design it and spend close to $50 Trillion to accomplish it.  In fact, the only way to get ot net -zero by the end of the century (much less 2050) is by the widespread use of nuclear power, or other advanced technologies, neither of which is even mentioned by the IPCC.

Inc conclusion, the greatest resource isn't wind or solar of nuclear power, or any other physical thing,  but the human mind.  Technology from many brilliant minds is surging forward every day.  As fossil fuels become scarce, their prices will continually rise; the new technologies will become progressively cheaper, and will replace them.  That is how the market works.  This has been the progress of technology since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and will continue into the future.  At first, CO2-free Small Modular Reactors, SMRs, will start commercial electricity generation right here in Virginia in this decade, with far more exotic technologies on the horizon.  For starter: space based solar, fusion power, and molten salt reactors that consume existing nuclear waste as their fuel.

An electricity generation, transmission and distribution system based on wind and solar would simply be to intermittent, diffuse and expensive to be envisioned as the energy of the future, and resources shouldn't be wasted on them.  Natural gas is the bridge to a future of safe, clean nuclear power, of of technologies now only imagined, or not even yet dreamed of.

RGGI is simply an appallingly bad idea, and it is time to get rid of it.

William D. Stewart

108 Windsor Cir.

Fredericksburg, VA 22405

stewartpoli@gmail.com