Raymond Castleberry Blog

Monday, June 5, 2017

How to Delete a Google My Business Listing – A Common Question with a Complex Answer

“How do I delete a Google listing?” is an FAQ on local SEO forums — and it represents an oversimplification of a complicated and multifaceted issue. The truth is, simple deletion is seldom the answer. Rather, most events that arise in the course of doing business require knowing which steps to take to properly manage GMB listings so that they’re helping your business instead of harming it.

When it comes to managing unwanted or problematic Google My Business listings, it’s a case of horses for courses. There isn’t a single set of instructions you can reliably follow, because your particular scenario defines which steps you should take. The following table should help you identify common situations and choose the one that most closely matches yours. From there, you’ll learn which actions are available to you, and which ones, unfortunately, can’t be accomplished.

Because management of problem GMB listings usually requires either being in control of them or unverifying them, our chart begins with three verification scenarios, and then moves on to cover other typical business events.

Scenario	Context	Steps	Notes
Unverify a Verified Listing You Control	You have a listing in your GMB dashboard that you no longer wish to control.	Log into your GMB dashboard Click “edit” Click the “info” tab Click “remove listing” Check all the checkboxes Click “delete account”	No worries: The last step does NOT delete your Google account or the listing, itself. It simply un-verifies it so that you are no longer controlling it. The listing will still exist and someone else can take control of it.
Verify an Unverified Listing to Gain Control	You need to take control of an unwanted listing. You can tell it’s not verified, because it’s marked “claim this business” in Google Maps or “own this business?” in the knowledge panel.	Simply follow the normal verification process outlined by Google.	Once you’ve verified the listing, you can take next steps to manage it if it's problematic.
Take Control of a Listing Someone Else Verified	You need to take control of an unwanted listing, but someone else has verified it. You can tell it’s verified, because it lacks the attributes of “claim this business” in Google Maps or “own this business?” in the knowledge panel.	Contact Google via these steps Google will contact the owner If Google doesn’t hear back from the owner in one week, you can verify the listing	There are some anecdotal accounts of owners being able to prove to Google their rights to control a listing based on their control of an email address that matches the website domain, but no guarantees. You may need to seek legal counsel to mediate resolution with a third party who refuses to relinquish control of the listing.
Manage a Duplicate Listing for a Brick-and-Mortar Business	Your business serves customers at your location (think a retail shop, restaurant, law practice). You find more than one listing representing the business, either at its present location, at an incorrect location, or at a previous location.	If the address exactly matches the correct, current address of the business, contact Google to request that they merge the two listings into one. If the address contains an error and the business never existed there, use the “suggest an edit” link on Google Maps, toggle the yes/no switch to “yes,” and choose the “never existed” radio button. If the address is one the business previously occupied, see the section in this table on business moves.	If reviews have become associated with a business address that contains an error, you can try to request that the reviews be transferred PRIOR to designating that the business “never existed” in Google Maps.
Manage a Duplicate Listing for a Service Area Business (SAB)	Your business serves customers at their locations (think a plumber, landscaper, or cleaning service). You find more than one listing representing the business.	Once you’ve verified the duplicate listing, contact Google to request that they merge the two listings into one.	Remember that Google’s guidelines require that you keep addresses for SAB listings hidden.
Manage an Unwanted Listing for a Multi-Practitioner Business	The business has multiple partners (think a legal firm or medical office). You discover multiple listings for a specific partner, or for partners who no longer work there, or for partner who are deceased.	Unfortunately, Google will not remove multi-practitioner listings for partners who are presently employed by the business. If the partner no longer works there, read this article about the dangers of ignoring these listings. Then, contact Google to request that they designate the listing as “moved” (like when a business moves) to the address of the practice — not to the partner’s new address. See notes.* If, regrettably, a partner has passed away, contact Google to show them an obituary.	In the second scenario, Google can only mark a past partner’s listing as moved if the listing is unverified. If the listing is verified, it would be ideal if the old partner would unverify it for you, but, if they are unwilling to do so, at least try to persuade them to update the listing with the details of their new location as a last resort. Unfortunately, this second option is far from ideal. On a separate note, if the unwanted listing pertains to a solo-practitioner business (there’s a listing for both the company and for a single practitioner who operates the company), you can contact Google to ask that they merge the two listings in an effort to combine the ranking power of the two listings, if desired.
Manage a Listing When a Business Moves	Your company is moving to a new location. You want to avoid having the listing marked as “permanently closed,” sending a wrong signal to consumers that you’ve gone out of business.	Update your website with your new contact information and driving directions Update your existing GMB listing in the Google My Business dashboard. Don’t create a new listing! Update your other local business listings to reflect your new info. A product like Moz Local can greatly simplify this big task.	Be sure to use your social platforms to advertise your move. Be sure to be on the lookout for any new duplicate listings that may arise as a result of a move. Again, Moz Local will be helpful for this. Google will generally automatically move your reviews from your old location to your new one, but read this to understand exceptions.
Manage a Listing Marked “Permanently Closed”	A listing of yours has ended up marked as “permanently closed,” signaling to consumers that you may have gone out of business. Permanently closed listings are also believed to negatively impact the rankings of your open business.	If the “permanently closed” label exists on a verified listing for a previous location the business occupied, unverify the listing. Then contact Google to ask them to mark it as moved to the new location. This should rectify the “permanently closed” problem. If the permanently closed listing exists on a listing for your business that someone else as verified (i.e., you don’t control the listing), please see the above section labeled “Take Control of a Listing Someone Else Verified.” If you can get control of it in your dashboard and then unverify it, you’ll then be able to contact Google to ask them to mark it as moved.	The “permanently closed” label can also appear on listings for practitioners who have left the business. See the section of this chart labeled “Manage an Unwanted Listing for a Multi-Practitioner Business.”
Manage a Merger/Acquisition	Many nuances to this scenario may dictate specific steps. If the merger/acquisition includes all of the previous physical locations remaining open to the public under the new name, just edit the details of the existing GMB listings to display that new name. But, if the locations that have been acquired close down, move onto the next steps.	Don’t edit the details of the old locations to reflect the new name Unverify the listings for the old locations Finally, contact Google to ask them to mark all the old locations listings as moved to the new location.	Mergers and acquisitions are complex and you may want to hire a consultant to help you manage this major business event digitally. You may also find the workload significantly lightened by using a product like Moz Local to manage the overhaul of core citations for all the businesses involved in the event.
Manage a Spam Listing	You realize a competitor or other business is violating Google’s guidelines, as in the case of creating listings at fake locations. You want to clean up the results to improve their relevance to the local community.	Find the listing in Google Maps Click the “suggest an edit” link Toggle the yes/no toggle to “yes” Choose the radio button for “spam” Google will typically email you if/when your edit is accepted	Google doesn’t always act on spam. If you follow the outlined steps and don’t get anywhere with them, you may want to post the spam example in the GMB forum in hopes that a Top Contributor there might escalate the issue. Unfortunately, spam is very common. Don’t be surprised if a spammer who gets caught comes right back on and continues to spam.
Manage a Listing with Bad Reviews	Your company is embarrassed by the negative reviews that are attached to its GMB listing. You wish you could just make the whole thing disappear.	If the reviews violate Google’s policy, consider these steps for taking action. Be advised that Google may not remove them, regardless of clear violations. If the reviews are negative but genuine, Google will not remove them. Remedy the problems, in-house, that consumers are citing and master responding to reviews in a way that can save customers and your business. If the business is unable to remedy structural problems being cited in reviews, the company may lack the necessary components for success.	Short of completely rebranding and moving your business to a new location, your business must be prepared to manage negative reviews. Unless consumers are citing illegal behaviors (in which case, you need legal counsel rather than marketing), negative reviews should be viewed as a FREE blueprint for fixing the issues that customers are citing. Bear in mind that many unhappy customers won’t take the time to complain. They’ll just go away in silence and never return to your business again. When a customer takes the time to voice a complaint, seize this as a golden opportunity to win him back and to improve your business for all future customers.

Whew! Eleven common Google My Business listing management scenarios, each requiring its own set of steps. It’s my hope that this chart will not only help explain why few cases really come down to deleting GMB listings, and also, that it will serve as a handy reference for you when particular situations arise in your workday.

Helpful links

If you’re not sure if you have problem listings, do a free lookup with the Moz Check Listing tool.
If you’re a Moz Pro member, you have access to our Q&A forum. Please feel free to ask our community questions if you’re unsure about whether a GMB listing is problematic.
The Google My Business Forum can be a good bet for getting advice from volunteer Top Contributors (and sometimes Google staffers) about problem GMB listings. Be prepared to share all of the details of your scenario if you post there.
If you find yourself dealing with difficult Google My Business listing issues on a regular basis, I recommend reading the work of Joy Hawkins, who is one of the best technical local SEOs in the industry.
Sometimes, the only thing you can do is to contact Google directly to try to get help with a tricky problem. Here is their main Contact page. If you’re a Google Adwords customer, you can phone 1-866-2Google and select the option for Google My Business support. Another way to seek help (and this is sometimes the fastest route) is to tweet to Google’s GMB Twitter account. Be advised that not every Google rep has had the benefits of complete training. Some interactions may be more satisfactory than others. And, if you are a digital marketer, do be prepared to set correct client expectations that not all problems can be resolved. Sometimes, even your best efforts may not yield the desired results, due to the limitations of Google’s local product.

Why it’s worth the effort to work to resolve problematic Google listings

Cumulatively speaking, inaccurate and duplicative listings can misinform and misdirect consumers while also sapping your ranking strength. Local business listings are a form of customer service, and when this element of your overall marketing plan is neglected, it can lead to significant loss of traffic and revenue. It can also negatively impact reputation in the form of negative reviews citing wrong online driving directions or scenarios in which customers end up at the old location of a business that has moved.

Taken altogether, these unwanted outcomes speak to the need for an active location data management strategy that monitors all business listings for problems and takes appropriate actions to remedy them. Verifying listings and managing duplicates isn’t glamorous work, but when you consider what’s at stake for the business, it’s not only necessary work, but even heroic. So, skill up and be prepared to tackle the thorniest situations. The successes can be truly rewarding!

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Friday, June 2, 2017

Ranking Fluctuations: What to Expect + How to React - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Rankings fluctuations can be panic-inducing, but they happen to everyone. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses why ranking fluctuations occur, the importance of keeping your cool during those darker moments, and how to identify when you should actually be concerned.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we are chatting about rankings fluctuations.

So many of you who monitor your rankings in Google might do so weekly or daily or monthly. For those of you who do it daily, you probably observe something like this. I made this up. This is not actually the keyword I tracked, but these are the numbers that I saw. So, basically, you might see that, over the course of four or five days, you hop around from number one, number two, one, one, one. But as you go down this list to the ranking position four or five or six, you're seeing things like oh number 5, and then I'm ranking number 21, number 19, 7, 8. Gosh, it's just going all over the place. This happens quite a bit actually.

Many folks ask questions on the Moz Q&A platform and all over the web and to their SEO professionals like, "Why are my rankings jumping around so much? Is this bad? Is there something I should do?" The answer, generally speaking, is no. Rankings bounce around like this in most search results, especially in the sort of bottom half of page one and especially page two, three, four, or five quite a bit, a tremendous amount in fact.

We see SERP fluctuation as being quite high, quite common and consistently so. It is rarely actually the case that you see that number one, number two, number three positions that stay that way for extended periods of time, many weeks or months without moving at all. Some random days you will check it and you will see some of these changes. Others you'll see them in their consistent positions.

What to expect in rankings flux

A few things to note:

1. There is obviously more fluctuation in the lower down results, on average, usually than there are in the higher results.

So if I get my rankings up here, can I expect no flux? Not exactly.

2. When you first gain rankings in the top three, four, or five, let's say, you will usually see more fluctuation than after you've been there for a sustained period.

So what's unusual is to see a ton of rankings fluctuation for a URL that's been ranking for a keyword in position one or two or three for two or three months in a row. That's pretty uncommon. You might see one or two position changes, but you usually don't see four or five or six.

3. You should also expect to see more fluctuation, even in the top results, when there's a highly temporal topic or result. That you can observe by looking at the search results and seeing if Google has got that gray text that says three hours ago or two days ago, or they give a specific date of when it came out, March 15th. When you see those and lots of them, you should expect more fluctuation.

What to do

What should you do about this? Well, first off, please, please, please, please...

1. Do not freak out. A lot of people just lose their cool with their SEOs or with their team or with themselves. They panic. I would urge you not to arbitrarily change your tactics.

If you're observing rankings fluctuation like the kind I'm describing -- so down here in the five, six, seven positions, up here in the three, four, five positions from day to day -- that's okay. You are not doing something wrong or bad, at least not necessarily and not usually.

2. I would urge you to use weeks as your time period, not days, and measure at least four to six weeks of rankings before you start to freak out over, "Hey, there's too much rankings fluctuation."

3. You should also compare your own fluctuation to your competitors. So if you see, hey, I'm ranking here and I'm fluctuating a bunch, oh, but it turns actually the positions around me are also fluctuating, guess what? It's not you. It's the SERP. It's Google. Don't blame yourself for this.

4. I would try and compare your rankings to traffic. So it can be the case that if you're hitting your rankings on a particular day or from a personalized device or a geographic area or something like that, that you could be getting different kinds of rankings than what's actually being seen by most people.

Now, rank trackers, like Moz's or SEMrush's or Ahrefs or Searchmetrics or any of these folks who do rank tracking at scale, use a non-personalized, non-geo-biased system. I'll show you how to replicate it in the comments if you're interested. But you should expect that you might see some of that bias.
So what I'd urge you to do is also look at your page traffic. So if you look at traffic to your pages and then organic search, if this is me over here with Healthfind, maybe I should check how many visits from organic search did this page get. Oh, actually it looks pretty consistent from day to day and week to week. Well, maybe I shouldn't panic then. Probably you shouldn't.

5. The thing to be concerned about is precipitous falls over many pages in a quick period of time. So if you see that you've got 20 pages on your site, 50 pages on your site, they all lost rankings yesterday and fairly significantly, okay, that's cause for real concern. Now I would go investigate. I'd see if you did something wrong, or if maybe Google caught something that they thought was sketchy that you were doing, or if they devalued some of your links, or you had some site problems, whatever. But normal flux, so two to four positions regularly at the top or more down at the bottom, that is to be expected.

Don't panic. You're going to be okay. Google fluctuates all the time. And we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Thursday, June 1, 2017

Level Up Your SEO Skills at MozCon Workshops: SEO-Intensive

Posted by Danielle_Launders

Can’t get enough of MozCon? Neither can we.

Join us a day early for our new half-day working session series and have fun learning, brainstorming, and collaborating with some of the brightest minds at Moz.

They’ll cover all of the nitty-gritty aspects of SEO to help those new to the industry have a better understanding of ranking in the SERPs.

Those who are more experienced will get some hands-on time with Moz’s SEO experts to fine-tune their skills and take home some actionable tips and action plans.

I’m in! Save my spot!

The details

Exclusive to MozCon attendees, these additional workshops are interactive 75-minute working sessions designed to have attendees leave with outlines, strategies, and action plans to start implementing right away. You’ll be able to customize your workshop agenda by choosing 3 out of the 5 available workshops to attend in the order of your choice. Read through the workshop descriptions below so you can plan your perfect day when you register.

MozCon Workshops: SEO-Intensive Schedule

Sunday, July 16
$400

The workshops

The 10 Jobs of SEO-focused Content

Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz

Content creation, optimization, and amplification are powerful levers for SEO, but with more companies than ever investing in the practice, you'll need a competitive edge to get value. More than how to rank content, Rand shows how to make the right content for the right platforms, get it in front of the right people, and earn value from that visibility.

Keyword Targeting for RankBrain and Beyond

Dr. Pete Meyers, Marketing Scientist

The days of one keyword, one page are gone. Thanks in part to machine learning, Google can interpret keyword concepts, understand intent, answer questions, and even guess questions you didn't ask. Dr. Pete guides you through a future-proof approach to keyword research, keyword targeting, and content structure and help you understand where to put your effort.

Make the Most of Moz Pro: Insider Tips & Tricks

Brian Childs, Training Program Manager

Want to save time doing SEO analysis? Learn shortcuts and lesser-known features in Moz Pro from our Training Program Manager, Brian Childs. Unlock the full power of Moz Pro as Brian shows you easy ways to develop reports, analyze competitors, and find link building opportunities.

Risk-Averse Link Building at Scale

Russ Jones, Principal Search Scientist

Nearly all link building strategies tend to either fall afoul of Google's guidelines or fail to deliver effective, sustainable results. Learn a practical strategy for scaling link acquisition efforts comfortably within Google's guidelines, detailing the strategies, tools, and tactics to amplify link growth. Participants will walk away with a sound foundation for executing white hat link building campaigns safely and effectively.

Technical KPI-driven SEO Audits

Britney Muller, SEO & Content Architect

Learn how to deliver technical SEO audits that are rooted in a website’s specific goals. What sections of the site convert the most visitors and need close attention to detail? What technical site fixes would provide the most opportunity?

Sign me up!

Calling all business and farm owners! Upcoming C-PACE Presentation in Delta

Do you have a building that needs upgrades? Are you interested in going solar? Are you interested in a long-term, positive cash flow financing mechanism? The time is now! Building-owners who utilize C-PACE funding for an eligible project will repay the cost over a period of 20 years through an additional charge, or assessment, on their property tax bill.

Join the Solarize Team at 10am Saturday June 17th, at the Bill Heddles Recreation Center in Delta for a Colorado Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE) Presentation with our program director Tracy Phillips to learn more about this new financing option.

Please RSVP for the free event by contacting us by email, phone, or using the link below.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/c-pace-financing-presentation-for-delta-county-tickets-34983524664?aff=es2

For more details on the program contact the Solarize Team at solarize@solarenergy.org or call 970-527-7657 x213. Sign up at www.solarenergy.org/solarize-delta-county-farms/

The post Calling all business and farm owners! Upcoming C-PACE Presentation in Delta appeared first on Solar Training - Solar Installer Training - Solar PV Installation Training - Solar Energy Courses - Renewable Energy Education - NABCEP - Solar Energy International (SEI).

Agriculture Energy Efficiency Presentation with the Colorado Energy Office and the Colorado Department of Agriculture

The Solarize team invites Delta County residents to join them at 7pm Wednesday June 14th, at the Heritage Hall in Hotchkiss for an Agriculture Energy Efficiency Presentation with the Colorado Energy Office and the Colorado Department of Agriculture.

Colorado farmers spend more than $400 million annually on energy, equaling 7 percent of the industry’s total expenses. The Colorado Energy Office and the Colorado Department of Agriculture have partnered to offer a variety of programs to support and finance energy efficiency and renewable energy projects throughout the state. This presentation will focus on program offerings for energy audits, small hydropower, and other renewable energy options for irrigation, greenhouses, dairies and cold storage facilities. These program offerings address barriers that frequently prevent producers from investing in energy efficiency and renewable energy by bringing partners and resources together with new funding and a turnkey approach. The presentation will cover a variety of financial offerings available to producers including Colorado Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy. C-PACE is a financing tool that allows commercial and multifamily property owners to finance qualifying energy efficiency, water conservation, and other clean energy improvements on existing and newly constructed properties, with repayment of the financing through a voluntary assessment on their property tax bill.

Please RSVP for the free event by contacting us by email, phone, or using the link below.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/renewable-energy-and-efficiency-financing-for-agriculture-tickets-34920732852

For more details on the program contact the Solarize Team at solarize@solarenergy.org or call 970-527-7657 x213. Sign up at www.solarenergy.org/solarize-delta-county-farms/

The post Agriculture Energy Efficiency Presentation with the Colorado Energy Office and the Colorado Department of Agriculture appeared first on Solar Training - Solar Installer Training - Solar PV Installation Training - Solar Energy Courses - Renewable Energy Education - NABCEP - Solar Energy International (SEI).

The Philosophic Roots of the Paris Agreement Part II: The Malthusian People Problem

Part I of this series related the Paris agreement to the Church of Climate, which takes the natural world as optimal, fragile, and sacrosanct. Any human influence on climate—regional or global; warming, cooling, or both—is a per se bad to the deep ecology movement.

A sister intellectual movement has also filled the pews of the Church of Climate. Malthusianism fears population growth and has a broad agenda in the name of sustainable development, such as these 17 goals of the United Nations.

From Malthus to Jevons

In An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Thomas Robert Malthus saw “misery or vice” as the necessary equalizer between geometrically growing population and the arithmetically growing means of subsistence. His “incontrovertible truths” reached a gloomy conclusion: some mix of disease, famine, barbarianism, war, or forgone marriage/procreation would bring population down to the level of subsistence. The happy economics of Adam Smith was checked (Bradley, 190–92).

Two generations later, W.S. Jevons brought Malthusianism from agriculture to mineral energy. The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines (1865) reached a gloomy finale: England’s coal abundance was coming to an end, and the nation’s industrial and competitive might was living on borrowed time.

Jevons considered “the necessary results of our present rapid multiplication [of demand] when brought into comparison with a fixed amount of material resources.” “For the present,” he found, “our cheap supplies of coal, and our skill in its employment, and the freedom of our commerce with other wide lands, render us … out of the scope of Malthus’s doctrine.” But the “painful fact” was that “in the increasing depth and difficulty of coal mining we shall meet that vague, but inevitable boundary that will stop our progress” (Bradley, 195).

Jevons’s tome created the coal panic. The book’s factual detail, logic, and conclusion sparked a debate in British government about policy reforms to soften the coming decline. England’s minister of finance cited Jevons’s “grave and … urgent facts” as reason to retire the national debt, and Parliament established a Royal Commission on Coal Supplies to update Jevons’s findings (Bradley, 194).

As it turned out, Jevons’s prediction of a “threatening” increase in coal costs from depletion would prove illusory. It would take socialism after World War I to diminish and weaken the UK’s domestic coal industry, and by then the fossil-fuel family had expanded from coal to oil and natural gas for interfuel competition and substitution (Bradley, 199–202).

Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren

Fast forward to the 1970s. Energy shortages rocked the United States, and global population surged from three billion in 1963 to five billion 1987 (Bradley, 233). To a new generation of Malthusians, the causality was simple: more people, more problems.

In 1971, Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren reduced Malthusianism to the mathematical equation, I=P⸱A⸱T, where (negative) environmental impact was linked to any combination of population growth, increasing affluence, and improving technology. Their “gloomy prognosis” required “organized evasive action: population control, limitation of material consumption, redistribution of wealth, transitions to technologies that are environmentally and socially less disruptive than today’s, and movement toward some kind of world government” (Ehrlich, Ehrlich, and Holdren, 1977: 5).

The Ehrlichs and Holdren also stated:

We find ourselves firmly in the neo-Malthusian camp. We hold this view not because we believe the world to be running out of materials in an absolute sense, but rather because the barriers to continued material growth, in the form of problems of economics, logistics, management, and environmental impact, are so formidable (1977: 954).

In Global Ecology, Holdren and Paul Ehrlich starkly concluded:

Only one rational path is open to us – simultaneous de-development of the [overdeveloped countries] and semi-development of the [underdeveloped countries], in order to approach a decent and ecologically sustainable standard of living for all in between. By de-development we mean lower per-capita energy consumption, fewer gadgets, and the abolition of planned obsolescence (1971: 3).

North America, and particularly the United States, was in the crosshairs of Holdren and the Ehrlichs:

A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States … Resources and energy must be diverted from frivolous and wasteful uses in overdeveloped countries to filling the genuine needs of underdeveloped countries. This effort must be largely political (1973: 279).

When it came to energy, less was more to Paul Ehrlich and Richard Harriman:

Except in special circumstances, all construction of power generating facilities should cease immediately, and power companies should be forbidden to encourage people to use more power. Power is much too cheap. It should certainly be made more expensive and perhaps rationed, in order to reduce its frivolous use (1971, 1975: 72).

Holdren as Climate Planner

John Holdren recently completed eight years as science advisor to President Barack Obama, bringing Malthusianism to the mainstream. With Peak Oil refuted during his tenure, his overriding issue was climate change.

“Mr. Holdren’s influence can be seen in many of the administration’s policies, including its biggest on climate change — the plan to cut power plant emissions of carbon dioxide, the main contributor to global warming,” the New York Times reported in 2014. “‘John was right at the heart’ of the deliberations, said the White House chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough.”

And Holdren was right there for the Paris agreement. What Al Gore under Bill Clinton started, Holdren significantly advanced under Obama.

Climate Change as Malthusian

Julian Simon saw climate catastrophism as another excuse for population control and governmental planning. In his words:

The old rationales for World Bank population-control programs—economic growth, resource conservation, and the like—having been discredited, a new “rationale” has been developed on the basis of speculative assumptions about global warming’s economic effects derived from controversial climatological science. (1996: 433–34)

Indeed. Population and affluence are behind the rise and growth of carbon-based energies responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect. “We really should make every effort to change” projected global population growth, stated Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (2010–16), “because we are already—today—already exceeding the planetary carrying capacity.” Beyond fewer people, she advocates changing “the economic and social structure that we have.”

Similarly, former chair of the IPCC, rejected the goal of India’s becoming as prosperous as the UK: “Gandhi was asked if he wanted India to reach the same level of prosperity as the United Kingdom. He replied: ‘It took Britain half the resources of the planet to reach its level of prosperity. How many planets would India require?’”

Conclusion

“Misery or vice” … the “population bomb” … resource famines … “Peak Oil” … anthropogenic global cooling … anthropogenic global warming…. The Malthusian litany is now in its third century.

People remain the problem to the congregation of the Church of Climate, as much as they want to say that forced energy transformation is compatible with economic coordination and prosperity.

And here we are today. The Malthusian scares have been refuted one-by-one, leaving the daily sermons about the perils of manmade climate change. But trends are positive regarding the green greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. The ecological benefits of increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ is in the news. Climate sensitivity estimates to the enhanced greenhouse effect are falling. The Paris agreement has been exposed on the Left as “a fraud … a fake … worthless.” And the grassroots revolt against industrial wind turbines and solar farms is growing.

The good news is that the Malthusian bad news is wrong. May the Church of Climate find its pews increasingly empty.

Bradley, Robert. Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy. Salem, MA: M & M Scrivener Press, 2009.

Ehrlich, Paul, Anne Ehrlich, and John Holdren. Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment. San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1977.

Ehrlich, Paul; Anne Ehrlich, and John Holdren. Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions. San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman Company, 1973.

Ehrlich, Paul, and John Holdren. “Impact of Population Growth.” Science 171 (1971): 1212–17.

Ehrlich, Paul, and Richard Harriman. How to Be a Survivor. Rivercity, MA: Rivercity Press, 1971, 1975.

Holdren, John, and Paul Ehrlich. Introduction to Global Ecology: Readings Toward a Rational Strategy for Man. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.

Simon, Julian. The Ultimate Resource 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

The post The Philosophic Roots of the Paris Agreement Part II: The Malthusian People Problem appeared first on IER.