Tag Archive for: Climate Change

Rescuing the GOP’s “Climate Policy” from the Theater of the Absurd

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For the fanatics on the far Left, and perhaps even for those deranged millions in the middle of the Democratic pack, there is nothing a Republican can say about “climate” that will impress them. Along with racism, xenophobia, and all the other assorted isms and phobias that allegedly afflict Republicans, acting like they care about the health of the planet has no credibility.

The Republicans, led by Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif), are trying anyway. As reported in The Hill and elsewhere, but without much fanfare, the GOP has released their own “climate plan” that is “meant to show voters the party cares about climate change.”

Predictable criticism came from the Left. As Vox reported “New conservative climate plans are neither conservative nor climate plans; they are mainly designed to protect fossil fuels.” But it also drew withering criticism from the Right. As reported in The Hill, “the conservative Club for Growth has pegged it as ‘stifling liberal environmental taxes, regulations, and subsidies’ while threatening to withhold support from any lawmaker who backs it.”

More in-depth analysis of what the Republicans are up to came from articles in Axios and Politico, and emphasized the party is trying to come up with a way to be recognized as concerned about the environment without going off the deep end. Of the four bills discussed, three were focused on carbon capture technology and infrastructure, mostly funded via tax credits, and one was designed to back up President Trump’s stated goal of supporting the “Trillion Trees” initiative.

The message the Republicans discussed trying to emphasize was to support a “clean environment” instead of focusing so much on “climate change.” It’s about time.

Returning to the Core Values of Environmentalism

There’s a lot to be praised about the GOP seizing some of the initiative with respect to environmental issues, but there is also a lot that can go wrong. For nearly twenty years, and with increasing intensity, the entire focus of the environmental movement has been on “climate change.” For anyone with a shred of scientific skepticism, or journalistic skepticism, or a love of freedom, or a basic sense of proportion, or common sense, or just a good bullshit detector, this has cost the environmentalist movement priceless credibility.

Does anyone who hasn’t already drank the Cool-Aid take seriously a movement that has to prop up a pampered teenage truant as oracle to the world’s elites, or organizes “die off” performative protests on the streets of European capitals, or, with straight faces, claims the world is going to come to an end in 12 years? Does anyone with a sense of history miss the connection between the “climate emergency,” complete with “dangerous,” “denier” scapegoats, propelled by literally billions of dollars being spent on corporate and government propaganda efforts, and not be reminded of how other nations and cultures have been down this authoritarian road before?

Environmentalism’s core values are sacred, and they have been profaned by corporations and governments channeling that calling into a climate crusade, with traditional environmentalists turned into willing accomplices. The professions of journalism and science have been corrupted, as has the nonprofit sector, and collectivists and capitalists alike are drinking at the trough. Meanwhile, the trajectory of progress on actual environmental challenges, from overpopulation to overfishing the oceans to wildlife poaching and wilderness preservation, have all been diminished.

This is why the trillion trees initiative is meaningful. It returns to the root benefits of environmentalism, and does so in a way that also gives a nod to the climate change zealots. The benefits of afforestation are undeniable, regardless of whether or not anyone believes in the dangers of anthropogenic CO2. Afforestation has been proven to restore water tables, reviving springs and rivers. It has been proven to bring back regular rainfall to regions that were becoming arid. Forests harbor wildlife and timber provides a cash crop. If it happens to sequester CO2, so much the better.

Find Projects and Policies That Are Good Anyway

This principle, to do environmentally sound projects that make sense anyway, regardless of the “carbon accounting,” is a pathway to credibility for the GOP, and even might point the way towards more of a national consensus on environmental policy. This is why it is such a good idea for the GOP to propose new research into developing biodegradable, nontoxic new types of plastic, and to research how to clean up the millions of tons of plastic that even now continues to pour out of Asian and African rivers into the world’s oceans.

Conversely, the GOP proposal to fund pilot plants designed to sequester CO2 gas in underground caverns is only slightly less ridiculous than California’s near miss regulation whereby they were going to require dairy cows to wear plastic bags attached to their anuses in order to capture the methane. California’s preposterous scheme, hatched by fanatics and glommed onto by “researchers” looking for a quick buck, at least had the virtue of only wasting millions of taxpayer dollars. Carbon sequestration schemes are on track to waste billions, to do, what? Pressurize every cave in America and remove how much many PPM of CO2 from the earth’s atmosphere? At what cost per PPM?

This is theater of the absurd. Maybe, maybe, sponsor research aimed at discovering how to convert CO2 directly into a fuel that maintains a solid or liquid form at room temperature. After all, trees do it. Otherwise, save the caves, and keep the bags off the dairy cows. It is, like so much “climate policy,” cronyism pretending to be part of a sacred mission. Some cronyism is inevitable. But at least get something out of cronyism that benefits society.

The GOP needs to aggressively promote climate change related proposals that make sense even if anthropogenic CO2 induced climate change really is the biggest hoax in human history. Because at the end of it all, we can then simply view “climate policy” as a means of capital formation to build things we needed anyway: seawalls, levees, reservoirs, desalination plants, nuclear power and other forms of clean energy; reforestation, sustainable fisheries, biodegradable plastic.

We can view these “good to do anyway” proposals as a way to fund scrubbers that will take the last bits of particulate matter out of the fossil fuel based energy economy, recognizing that even if CO2 isn’t harmful to humans, it is unhealthy to breathe carbon monoxide, lead, ozone, nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide, especially in cities across Asia and Africa that have barely begun to get that under control and are looking for solutions.

This is the clean technology revolution that makes sense. The GOP needs to boldly proclaim support for ways to help humanity complete the journey to a pollution free civilization, at the same time as they refuse to dismantle the capitalist system that gave us the wealth to pursue clean innovations; at the same time as they demand cost/benefit analysis on all “climate change” schemes; at the same time as they patiently remind anyone who will listen that fossil fuel use cannot possibly be precipitously eliminated; at the same time as they demand an end to the silencing and demonizing of rational contrarians who – imagine this – do not believe the world is about to come to an end.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Environmentalists Caused Australia’s Fires, Not “Climate Change”

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“These greenies and the government don’t want to burn s— off. We’re going to lose all our houses and properties because of you useless pieces of garbage will not burn off when its supposed to, through the winter time like we used to do years ago out in the farms up in the mountains; burn all the undergrowth off so everything was safe. But you p—–, you want to have a really good look at this, look at the state you’ve caused here. You are the biggest bunch of useless loser pieces of garbage God ever had the misfortune to blow life into.”
– Australian resident of New South Wales, January 7, 2020

This is the reason for this year’s devastating wildfires in Australia. Environmentalist regulations prevented landowners from burning off dry brush. For decades, every year during the Australian winter, across the continent, brushfires were deliberately set to safely burn the undergrowth. Even in pre-colonial times, the aborigines set brushfires to prevent tinder from accumulating.

If you want to watch an authentic, eyewitness account of what really happened – quoted above – you’ll find it 2:56 minutes into “The Truth About the Australian Bushfires,” a video posted on January 7th by the inimitable Paul Joseph Watson. But watch out. Most of the profanity is edited out of the above transcription.

Profanity is appropriate, however, given the frustration that level headed people have to feel when they confront the fanatics who want to micromanage every aspect of our lives in the name of fighting climate change, and the corporate opportunists who stand behind them. In most cases, the political agenda pursued in the name of fighting climate change is an expensive nuisance. But this time, down under, it has quite literally flared into a devastating inferno.

Terrifying Pablum vs Data and Common Sense

Rather than identify the countless recent examples of the predictable, infantile, Thunbergian, agenda-driven fearmongering propaganda that has been spawned by this latest “climate” disaster in Australia, let’s examine what’s really happening. Thankfully, sources of useful information can still be found online.

A good place to start would be an article posted on January 3rd entitled “Smoke And Deception Blanket Australia: NASA GISS Fudges Data, Cooling Turns Into Warming,” on Pierre Gosselin’s skeptic website NoTricksZone. In the article, the authors present a fascinating set of graphics showing a century of temperature data from field stations across Australia. In every graph, the raw data is shown, then the “homogenized” data is shown. For the uninitiated, homogenization of temperature data is a statistical process used “to remove non-climatic factors so that the temporal variations in the adjusted data reflect only the variations due to climate processes.”

This sounds innocent enough, but have a look at these graphics, before and after homogenization. In every case, what appears to be a flat temperature trend is turned into a rising temperature trend. In every case. How can this be? Is it urban heat island effects, as cities grew up around the measuring stations? But if so, wouldn’t eliminating that factor cause the homogenized data to show lower temperatures than the raw data? Reading the comments that accompany that article will provide additional insights, but the point here is not to accuse the analysts who homogenize data of introducing bias into their work. The point is that the only data we ever see in official press summaries is the homogenized data, and that this data is often manipulated using methods that rely on arbitrary interpretations of multiple variables.

Another source of insight into what’s really causing Australia’s catastrophic wildfires this year can be found on the website Global Warming, authored by climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer. In his article posted January 8th, “Are Australia Bushfires Worsening from Human-Caused Climate Change?,” Spencer acknowledges a warming trend in Australia, along with a long-term upward trend in precipitation on the arid Australian continent. He concludes there is a slight correlation between climate conditions and increased risk of wildfires. But Spencer, along with everyone else paying honest attention to the disaster, blames the extreme intensity of the fires to “the increasing pressure by the public to reduce prescribed burns, clearing of dead vegetation, and cutting of fire breaks, which the public believes to have short term benefits to beauty and wildlife preservation, but results in long term consequences that are just the opposite and much worse.”

It is important to acknowledge another cause of wildfires in Australia, which is arson. As of January 7th, more than 180 arsonists have been arrested since the start of the brushfire season. But arson, just like faulty PG&E transmission lines in California, only starts the fires. It’s the buildup of tinder, thanks to misguided wildland management policies, that make these fires so devastating.

Environmentalist Rules Prevented Responsible Wildfire Prevention

What’s happening in Australia is preventable. The title of an article published on January 11th in The Spectator says it all, “Fight fire with fire: controlled burning could have protected Australia.” The author, Australian Tim Blair, writes “A kind of ecological fundamentalism has taken the place of common sense.”

Blair provides several examples of land owners and utilities in Australia who were fined by the government for clearing “safe space” around their homes and other structures, or for clearing firebreaks, or for setting controlled burns. The level of extremism has reached the point, where, according to Blair, you can’t even remove deadwood and fallen trees. These restrictions, aggressively enforced for over twenty years in Australia, are the reason these wildfires are now “superfires.”

Over the past few days, the debate over controlled burns has intensified, as can be seen by mainstream press publishing stories such as “Prescribed burning: what is it and will more reduce bushfire risks?,” Sydney Morning Herald, January 7th, “Would Controlled Burns Help Australia Manage Massive Wildfire?,” NPR, January 9th, and “Australia fires: Does controlled burning really work?,” BBC, January 9th.”

But at the same time, the spin merchants are out in full force, quoted in articles that suggest anyone who thinks environmentalist regulations caused tinder in Australia to get out of control are “conspiracy theorists.” For that perspective, turn to the Guardian’s January 4th article “Explainer: how effective is bushfire hazard reduction on Australia’s fires?,” where they argue that “claims of a Greens conspiracy to block hazard reduction have been rejected by bushfire experts.”

One of the more frustrating examples of green spin is the a recent opinion column in the New York Times. In a column entitled “Australia Is Burning: Hazard reduction is more complex than some would have you believe,” the New York Times has trotted out Australian bureaucrat, Cormac Farrell, who has made a career in “bush fire planning and design.” Farrell proudly describes the fire shelters he’s helped build along with designing “Asset Protection Zones” which are areas of thinned and cleared vegetation. He dismisses calls for more large tracts of the landscape to be regularly burned by quoting H.L. Mencken: “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”

Cormac Farrell is probably sincere in his views, and people like Farrell are useful to the propagandists at the New York Times. But his expertise, his informed expressions of the complexity of the problem, are examples of a greater problem, which is the paralysis that ensues when environmentalist regulations micromanage land management. Imagine the frustration that Australian landowners must have felt over the past few decades, when they wanted to burn off their land, just like their parents and grandparents had, just like the aborigines had before that, and they had to spend time and money on permit applications, and hire consultants (such as Mr. Farrell) to perform impact studies, and meanwhile the tinder accumulated?

This problem – regulatory micromanagement, and the anonymous faces of the innocent bureaucrats who can’t speed up the “process” (assuming they even want to) – can be extrapolated to every area of government overreach, from burning off brush in rural Australia to getting a building permit in California. But there is a special irony to see it happening in the context of the environment, the wildfires, and the climate “crisis,” because it is during a crisis that supposedly we do “whatever it takes, regardless of cost.” What it takes, in this case, is letting rural landowners clear firebreaks, create defensible space, and set controlled burns during the winter months. Repeal the environmentalist restrictions to what they were, say, fifty years ago, and let the work get done. Mistakes will be made, but conflagrations like the current one would never happen again.

That’s how a rational society survives a genuine crisis. But perhaps this conflagration is too convenient to ever try to prevent, insofar as it generates righteous Thunbergian green thunder across the world, solving nothing, but further empowering the bureaucrats.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Fossil Fuel Reality

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Over the weekend, the traditional Harvard versus Yale football game was interrupted during halftime by about 150 student activists, spontaneously joined by hundreds of fans, to protest climate change. Occupying the area around the 500-yard line, the protesters chanted “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Fossil fuel has got to go!” The game resumed after about 30 students were arrested and the rest left.

It would be reasonable to suppose that people who manage to gain admission to Harvard and Yale are among the most gifted students in America. But when it comes to swiftly eliminating the usage of fossil fuel, have they done their homework?

Around the world, billions of people are now convinced that catastrophic climate change is inevitable if humanity continues to rely on fossil fuel. Most developed Western nations, along with the United Nations and other supranational organizations, are promoting aggressive policies to replace fossil fuel with renewable energy. While a scientific debate remains, especially with respect to the severity of the predicted climate change, it is the economic challenges relating to rapid elimination of fossil fuel that require urgent examination.

The reason for this is simple: At this time, there is no feasible economic scenario whereby worldwide fossil fuel use does not increase steadily for the next several decades. To dispute this assertion, several indisputable facts would have to be ignored. For starters, shown below is a chart illustrating just how large a percentage of global energy remained dependent on fossil fuel over the past ten years. Using data provided by the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, which is the most authoritative source available, on this chart, the total energy consumed in all of its forms – oil, gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, and renewables – are expressed as million metric tons of crude oil (MMTO).

By converting quantities of energy from various sources into a single normalized unit – the petroleum industry uses units of crude oil, economists use BTUs, scientists use joules – it is easy to see how much each type of fuel contributed to total global energy consumption over the past decade. As shown, renewables – solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass/biofuel – only comprised 4 percent of total energy consumed in 2018.

There has been strong growth in renewable energy. But absolute values also matter. Ten years ago, in 2009, renewables only contributed 1.2 percent of global energy consumed. Between 2009 and 2018, total worldwide energy consumed rose by 22 percent, or 2,502 MMTOs. Annual consumption of renewables, on the other hand, only rose by 424 MMTOs. Renewable energy only represented 17 percent of the increase in energy consumption between 2009 and 2018.

To get a better idea of exactly what type of renewables were part of the global energy mix in 2018, the next chart provides details. As can be seen, the top producer was wind at 1.7 percent, followed by solar electricity at 0.8 percent, biofuel at 0.7 percent, and all other, mostly geothermal, at 0.8 percent.

But there are serious problems with biofuel. According to the World Bioenergy Association, biofuel crops are already consuming an astonishing 550,000 square miles of land. This already represents 5 percent of all arable land area on earth – to produce less than one percent of global energy.

Solar and wind energy, while also being huge consumers of land for the amount of energy they produce, have an additional problem; there is still no cost effective way to store the energy they produce. Not only are solar and wind energy dependent on daily fluctuations of wind and sunlight, but there are seasonal fluctuations that create even greater challenges.

To account for this, either solar and wind installations must be oversized sufficiently to generate adequate daily power during the times of the year when the hours of daylight are the shortest and wind is the least reliable, or batteries and other electricity storage solutions must be deployed. These electricity storage farms would have to be capable of storing enough energy to supply large cities for literally months at a time.

According to former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who served during the Obama Administration, California’s 2050 “decarbonizing” targets “can be met only with breakthroughs in a portfolio of affordable technologies.” Meanwhile, in California and around the world, hundreds of billions are being invested each year on technologies, such as gargantuan land based and offshore wind farms, that are extremely disruptive to ecosystems. These investments only yield adequate returns when the costs to provide grid connections and upgrades, as well as backup capacity including quick start natural gas power plants are socialized onto taxpayers and ratepayers.

Despite the incredible cost, and the likelyhood that many solutions being implemented today will be obsolete within a few decades, if not a few years, political support for decarbonization remains strong. But even if tens of trillions were spent, can it be done? Here is where the algebra of energy consumption presents challenges to the decarbonizers that may be unsolvable.

The next chart shows the average amount of energy an American consumed in 2018, compared to their counterparts in China and India. A few things immediately jump out. First, it is clear that in the past ten years, Americans did not lower their per capita energy consumption, despite driving more fuel efficient cars, deployment of mass transit options and urban densification, regardless of more efficient laptop and cell phone batteries, “smart” utility meters, “connected” appliances, etc. Can Americans significantly reduce their per capita energy consumption? The most recent data does not yet show that they can.

Turning to China and India, however, highlights just how far behind the rest of the world is in terms of average energy consumption. As shown, the average person in China consumed 539 units of energy (expressed as gallons of crude oil equivalents) in 2009, and increased that to 723 units of energy by 2018. They did this at the same time as their population increased by 62 million. India logged similar progress, going from a per capita consumption of 130 units in 2009 to 184 units in 2018, at the same time as their population grew by 135 million.Based on these facts, the global energy algebra comes down to this: In the future, how much per capita energy is it reasonable for people to expect, in order for them to fulfill their aspirations to become educated, engage in productive work, afford entertaining diversions in their spare time, and raise their families in a nation where the infrastructure – all of it, from hospitals and universities, to roads and rail, airports and seaports, to a resilient water and power grid – is robust enough to support their towns and cities?

To answer this, imagine that everyone on earth used only half as much energy as Americans use. And suppose, quite optimistically, that global population stabilizes at 8 billion. To accomplish this would require worldwide consumption of energy to grow from 13,865 MMTOs in 2019 to a staggering 34,621 MMTOs. That is, for everyone on earth, including Americans, to consume half as much energy as American’s currently consume, global energy production would have to increase to 2.5 times its current output. And would that be enough? Americans, with all the emphasis and investment in energy conservation over the past ten years, have not reduced their per capita energy consumption. Shall global energy production then quintuple, so everyone on earth can use as much energy as Americans do?

Facing this enormous challenge, investments in renewables might focus on research into leapfrog technologies. The return on that investment may enable decarbonized sources of energy to arrive sooner than anyone expects, not because they were mandated, but because they truly cost less than fossil fuel. Instead, R&D focuses too much on preposterous schemes such as “sequestering” CO2 in underground caverns, or mechanically removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

Perhaps not algebraic, but arguably axiomatic, is the following equation: Affordable energy equals prosperity equals literacy equals female emancipation equals voluntary family size reduction equals ZPG sooner rather than later. In the continent of Africa, where the population is currently projected to rise from 1.3 billion today to 2.5 billion within the next thirty years, either there will be cheap and affordable energy, or there will be a Malthusian event on that continent that will rival any similar such paroxysm in human history.

Looking forward, this is the moral case for fossil fuel. The fact that there is no choice. Humanity needs to develop every single type of energy it possibly can as quickly as it possibly can, because that is how everyone on earth will readily have the opportunity to enjoy first world lifestyles. Only then can people make first world choices to limit the size of their families and only then can they participate enthusiastically and effectively in efforts to preserve the environment around them. Only then will the allure of comfort and security outweigh the desperate imperatives of war. And soon enough, commercially competitive renewable energy – perhaps in forms we haven’t yet imagined – will supplant fossil fuel.

People who demand rapid elimination of fossil fuel need to either face the algebraic impossibility of doing that, or be honest and disclose their true motives.

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A Directory of Inconvenient Climate Information Websites

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Conservative free speech advocates have been rightly concerned about internet censorship, but the focus of those concerns has been relatively narrow. Conservatives are pushing back against big tech suppression of online critics of globalism, mass immigration, identity politics. They are pushing back against big tech suppression of pro-Trump commentators. But there is another collection of online voices that have been quietly, and very effectively suppressed; climate skeptics.

Over the past 10-15 years, at the same time as identity politics was assuming a dominant position in America’s corporate, academic and media cultures, climate alarm followed a parallel trajectory. But starting in 2017, when the social media monopolies intensified their online offensive against politically incorrect content, climate skeptic content had already dwindled. It isn’t hard to understand why.

Identity politics, globalism, and mass immigration create obvious winners and losers, with Americans bitterly and almost evenly divided over what policies represent the best moral and practical choices. Policies and principles embracing “Climate change,” by contrast, have conducted their own long, slow march through America’s institutions without encountering serious resistance. Proclaiming one’s belief in climate change dogma carries minimal downside and plenty of upside.

Embracing climate change politics enriches and empowers the same cast of characters as embracing globalism – corporations, governments, the financial sector, nonprofits, academia, and the useful idiots in media and entertainment. Meanwhile, the downside of climate change policies is harder to articulate than the downside of globalism. As a result, financial support for scientists and analysts tagged as climate change “deniers” has nearly dried up over the past 10-15 years. Whoever is left confronts an overwhelming climate alarm apparatus.

The problem, however, is that globalism and climate alarm are two sides of the same coin. Globalism requires “climate refugees” to overwhelm the cultures and transform the electorate in developed nations. It requires authoritarian rationing to “save the planet.” It requires supra-national governing bodies to cope with the “climate crisis.” And the globalist project is fatally undermined by the availability of cheap and abundant fossil fuel.

Fossil fuel will remain the most inexpensive and abundant source of energy for at least the next 20-30 years, and cheap energy is the prerequisite for prosperity, which in turn is the prerequisite for literacy and voluntary population stabilization, political stability, economic development, and world peace.

Ignoring this fact – that cheap energy worldwide can only be delivered in the near term by continuing to develop fossil fuel – is the true crime of “denial” that is being perpetrated on humanity by globalists. And yet, only a handful of online websites still seek to reopen the debate as to just how dangerous or imminent the threat CO2 emissions are to humanity and the planet. Here, sorted by viewership (most viewed on top) are some of the independent climate skeptic websites that are still active in 2019:

Climate Skeptic Websites

Watts Up With That?
Real Climate Science
No Tricks Zone
Climate Depot
JoNova
Climate Change Dispatch
Roy Spencer PhD
The Global Warming Policy Foundation
Bjorn Lomborg – Get the Facts Straight
Junk Science
Friends of Science
Climate Audit
CO2 Science
Global Warming.org
IceCap
Jennifer Marohasy
Science & Environmental Policy Project`
Greenie Watch
Global Warming Science
The Global Warming Challenge
Tom Nelson Blogspot
Science & Public Policy Institute
Australian Climate Madness
Climate Science
Climate Lessons
The Great Global Warming Hoax
CO2 Web Info
The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition

The viewership reaching these independent websites is almost negligible. Watts Up With That?, authored by Heartland Institute Senior Fellow and former television meteorologist Anthony Watt, only scores a U.S. Alexa ranking of 16,178. Following in a distant second place is Real Climate Science, with a U.S. Alexa ranking of 77,839. Sites with extraordinary work, such as Bjorn Lomborg’s Get the Facts Straight, sit at a distant 780,564.

Web viewership rises and falls based a great deal on Google search results. If a website link shows up on the first screen of Google search results, it will get traffic. And this is a self-reinforcing cycle, the more a site shows up in search results, the more it will get visited, and the more it gets visited, the higher it will go in search results. This chicken/egg process obscures the reality of biased algorithms.

Search Google under “climate skeptic websites,” and the first two results you will get take you to “SkepticalScience.com,” a website devoted to debunking climate skeptics, followed by “RealClimate.org,” produced by the IPCC. Result #4 is of marginal assistance, a Business Insider report from 2009 that provides a mostly geriatric assortment of the “10 most respected global warming skeptics.” The #5 result is WattsUpWithThat, and #4 and #5 are the only results that aren’t directing you to “consensus” material.

Nonprofit Think Tanks Still Willing to be Climate Skeptics

The most unambiguously skeptical think tank still compiling data and analysis that presents a skeptical perspective on climate change is the Heartland Institute. They refer to their position on the issue as “climate realism” and have assembled an impressive lineup of skeptical experts on climate science and climate policy. They regularly host international conferences on the topic of climate change, and sponsor the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which issues regular reports that contradict much of what comes from the mainstream IPCC.

Another consistently realist think tank on the topic of climate change is the American Enterprise Institute. The redoubtable PragerU has produced a 12 video series on climate change entitled “Climate Change: What’s So Alarming.” Useful information on the scientific debate over climate change also comes from the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, although much of their focus has shifted to the policy debate.

Climate Skeptic Videos on YouTube

Searching YouTube to find climate skeptic content yields very little. If there are dedicated video channels offering ongoing new releases of credible climate skeptic content, they’re not very easy to find. Documentaries and other stand-alone videos with a climate skeptic perspective are sparse, but those few that could be found have valuable information:

No Trend In Extreme Weather In The US – Climate Change Fraud Exposed, 2019 – 10 minutes
Is Global Warming a Scam?, 2019 – 17 minutes
Cost-Effective Approaches to Save the Environment, with Bjorn Lomborg, 2019 – 48 minutes
The truth about global warming, 2018 – 14 minutes
Nobel Laureate in Physics; “Global Warming is Pseudoscience”, 2015 – 31 minutes
The Lack of Science in the Scientific Consensus, 2013 – 1 hour, 13 minutes
Freeman Dyson: Climate Change Predictions Are “Absurd”, 2012 – 3 minutes
One climate change scientist takes on a roomful of sceptics, 2011 – 45 minutes
The Great Global Warming Swindle, 2007 – 1 hour, 15 minutes

Watching these videos, along with viewing climate skeptic websites, will present an open minded inquisitor with information, data, logic, arguments, and perspectives that are utterly absent from mainstream public dialog. It has become obligatory for any Democrat and the majority of Republican politicians in America – along with every establishment newscaster – to proclaim their adherence to the “consensus” on climate. The only debate left – not that it isn’t a big one – is how best to limit and eventually eliminate use of fossil fuel.

This is a non-debate with serious consequences. It is preposterous to think worldwide use of fossil fuel will decline by any meaningful percentage within the next 30 years. What could happen, however, is it will be restricted to the point where developing nations, especially in Africa, will be pressured into developing a “renewable” energy infrastructure that will be far too expensive to rapidly deliver the broad based prosperity that is a crucial prerequisite to population stabilization. Moreover, developing nations that are denied access to cheap fossil fuel will continue to rely on biomass to supplement inadequate or unaffordable renewable energy, stripping their forests for energy, or, worse, they will annihilate their ecosystems to plant “carbon neutral” corporate biofuel monocultures.

None of this is necessary. The only reason we are debating how best to quickly eliminate use of fossil fuel is because “the debate is over” with respect to the planetary impact of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. But that debate is not over. Read the material on these websites. Watch these videos. There is ample scientific basis for the debate to be raging, and yet the corporate globalist establishment universally declares the debate to be “over.”

Why?

The reason is because virtually all powerful vested interests in the Western hemisphere recognize climate change alarm as leverage to impose self-serving policies and garner higher profits.

  • Fossil fuel companies keep prices (and profits) high.
  • “Renewable energy” companies acquire subsidies.
  • Politicians enact new taxes.
  • Public sector entities get new tax revenue.
  • Environmentalist nonprofits have a new source of funds.
  • Left wing activists have a new basis to attack private ownership.
  • Labor unions get more jobs, especially in the public sector.
  • Lawyers have a new basis to file lawsuits.
  • Wall Street trades emissions credits, making trillions in commissions.
  • Climate researchers get more grant requests funded.
  • United Nations bureaucrats get a guaranteed revenue stream.
  • “Greentech” entrepreneurs receive subsidies for “green” products.
  • Corporations can force consumers to replace all their appliances.
  • Corporations can impose the “internet of things” to monitor household resource consumption.
  • Millions of “Climate refugees” will be transported to the developed nations who are to blame.
  • Global governance will be necessary to coordinate climate mitigation efforts.

Taken individually, each of these reasons – and this list undoubtedly omits additional special interests that benefit from climate change alarm – represent a profound shift in public policy. Each of them represent investments skewing away from optimal returns and instead towards returns that favor a politically entitled group. The overall impact of all of them is regressive, increasing the cost-of-living for the most economically vulnerable populations.

These policies also represent a profound cultural shift with consequences that extend to every corner of society. All of a sudden:

  • The litmus test for an environmentalist is whether they embrace climate change alarm and support climate change activism.
  • Elementary school children are being indoctrinated to believe the planet is in imminent danger of becoming uninhabitable.
  • Capitalism, rather than being viewed as the only practical and reasonably equitable engine for economic growth, is portrayed as the despicable cause of environmental catastrophe.
  • A life of rationed scarcity, remotely monitored and managed by algorithms, replaces the reasonable expectation that technology and capitalism will deliver increasing abundance for every generation.
  • Sovereign nations have become a toxic anachronism.
  • Developed Western nations must admit millions of destitute refugees, often coming from hostile cultures, because the states where they lived failed due to “climate change” brought on by industrial civilization.

And suddenly the madman, racing through the streets screaming that the world is about to come to an end is the sane person, and now the psychopaths are those who hold back, suggesting that perhaps the situation isn’t quite that dire.

All of this is an inversion of reality. All of this must be challenged, and challenged with the same vigor that Americans – of all backgrounds – are finally rising up to challenge identity politics. Climate change alarm, in its emotional fearmongering and scapegoating, in its reliance on authoritarian governance, and in its coopting of the industrial and financial elites, is explicitly fascist.

In George Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, the main character, Winston, worked for the “Ministry of Truth.” His job, day after day, was to systematically rewrite history. Today’s social media and search monopolies are the realized versions of what Orwell imagined. They define and redefine our reality. As credible, informed content offering a climate skeptic’s perspective disappear from search results, as the traffic to these websites dwindles into nothingness, a part of our collective consciousness is lobotomized. We lose our ability to make informed choices. Read these websites. Bookmark them. Share them. Print them. While you still can.

It is not enough to debate climate change policy. Even in the most benign forms, policies based on the premise that fossil fuel use must be swiftly eliminated represent policy choices that will magnify human suffering around the world at the same time as they disenfranchise the citizenry of entire nations.

The scientific debate must be renewed. Even if the alarmists are right, the fact that “the debate is over” is universally recited by every instrument of America’s establishment should terrify anyone concerned about free speech, if not freedom itself.

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Climate Crusaders Poised to Claim Oregon

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A drama playing out in Oregon this week exemplifies, at best, the vast and growing distance between Left and Right in America today.

At worst, it exemplifies the relentless onslaught of corporate leftist tyranny, in all things, and everywhere at once, and the rising fury of an abused population that is slowly awakening. In Oregon’s case, a handful of Republican state senators are fighting an uphill battle to protect the people they represent from yet another attack of the climate crusaders.

While the Left Coast of America may be deep blue, the disenfranchised interior is an equally deep red.  Almost invariably, to drive east from Seattle, Portland, the San Francisco Bay Area or Los Angeles, is to drive into a GOP controlled hinterland. A political map depicting Oregon’s 2018 gubernatorial election makes this plain – the entire eastern two-thirds of the state is Republican, along with the entire south coast and rural stretches of the north coast. The Democratic political machines in Portland, Salem, and a handful of college towns deliver enough votes to control the state, effectively denying a voice to everyone else.

Democrats in Oregon hold what Ballotpedia and others refer to in state politics as a “trifecta,” control of the lower house, the upper house, and the governor’s mansion. But in the Oregon State Senate, the Democrats are still one seat short of being able muster a quorum to pass legislation without Republican participation, and last week the Republicans rebelled.

The issue was proposed House Bill 2020 which would establish a “Climate Policy Office” to bring cap and trade to Oregon. The measure had cleared the House and after floor debate, was poised to pass in the Senate, wherein Oregon’s Democratic Governor would have signed it into law. But the Republicans had one option left, and they used it. All eleven Republicans are at an “undisclosed location.” Some believe they’ve gone to Idaho.

In response, Democrat Governor Kate Brown threatened to send state police to round up the absent legislators. Reacting to the Governor’s threat, Oregon State Senator Brian Boquist, a former special forces lieutenant colonel in the US Army, stated in a local television interview that “the governor better send Oregon state troopers who are ‘bachelors’ and ‘heavily armed.'” Boquist later said he will “refuse at all costs to be arrested as a political prisoner in Oregon, period.”

It’s important to recognize that these confrontations could easily move beyond rhetoric. Oregon’s Democratic Governor Kate Brown is a dangerous puppet. Shown on the CNN website flanked by, of course, children wearing tee-shirts that say “I will be 25 when my climate fate is sealed,” Kate Brown probably has no idea that she is a tool of the most anti-American, fascist gang of profiteers and power mongers in modern American history.

The climate propagandists have succeeded in brainwashing a generation of K-12 children, who now parrot apocalyptic sound bites with the same fervor that motivated China’s Red Guards back in the 1960s. Instead of Mao Tse-tung, we’ve got Al Gore, and instead of the transparent oppression of Orwell’s 1984, we have the softer fascism, the Soma induced stupor of Huxley’s Brave New World. That makes sense. Because the entire “climate” movement is being expertly marketed by multinational corporations. Behind the sincere fanatics and befuddled children, serious, powerful people are setting themselves up to make trillions in profits, obliterate all competition, turn nations into fiefdoms, and rule the world.

When you examine the “solutions” demanded by the climate change crowd, there isn’t any other logical explanation. It is impossible to replace fossil fuel with renewables, and every rational observer knows this. It is also ridiculous to expect other nations, most notably China and India, to follow America’s lead and even make the attempt, and every rational observer knows this as well. Finally, the solutions themselves are unlikely to even reduce CO2 emissions – consider the embodied energy in wind turbines and batteries, consider the ecological disaster of biofuel, consider the necessity of backup plants running on fossil fuel to compensate for darkness or lack of wind.

Moreover, if the climate crusaders were serious, why are they shutting down nuclear power plants instead of building new ones? Why are they tearing out hydroelectric dams? Why aren’t they demanding more research into commercializing fusion energy?

Yet “climate change” is the moral axe that cuts through every objection. If someone helpfully tries to point out the stupefying expense climate legislation inevitably imposes on ordinary working families, they’re called “denier” and silenced. They can lose their jobs, their reputations, their research funds, even their friends. The “denier” epithet is leveled on people merely for pointing out the impracticality of “climate change” mitigation, even if they refrain from reminding us that CO2’s alleged harm is still a theory, not a fact.

Thanks to earlier state legislation pushed by the climate crusaders, Oregon is already beginning to experience unaffordable housing because most new development must now take place within the footprint of existing cities. An in-depth study by Oregon’s Cascade Policy Institute patiently ticks through the futility of these policies in a spacious, nearly empty state. But supposedly if you have uncongested roads and people don’t live on top of each other like rats, there’s more “greenhouse gas.” Hardly anyone dares question this nonsense. Instead, people buy homes they can barely afford and become mortgage slaves. And for those who don’t work or don’t make enough to pay that mortgage, the government increases taxes so they can subsidize construction of “affordable housing.”

This is a perverse, oppressive, profiteering scam. To make housing affordable, simply permit builders to expand the urban footprint of cities. But in Oregon, the scammers were just getting started. It wasn’t enough to ruin the housing market so wealthy real estate investors could get wealthier, so government agencies could collect more property tax, and so major land developers could make more profit selling overpriced homes. Now the climate crusaders want to create a huge new state bureaucracy that will team up with Wall Street bookies to skim a few dollars off of every unit of conventional energy that’s ever bought or sold. It’s called carbon emission trading.

It’s hard to imagine a bigger scam than carbon emissions trading. The scheme relies on incredibly subjective “carbon accounting” whereby every business has to assess how much CO2 they emit each year. The bureaucrats at the “Climate Policy Office” come up with a baseline allocation for each business, which documents how much CO2 they emit in the first year. Then, systematically, these businesses have to either emit less CO2 each year, or purchase CO2 emissions permits to make up the difference. People who plant trees, or in some way come up with projects to supposedly reduce CO2 emissions, are permitted to sell “carbon credits” to the companies that are over-emitting. Are you confused yet? They’re counting on that. And through it all, the bureaucrats get their salaries, and the trading bookies on Wall Street get their commissions. Trillions are on the table.

It must be pointed out, as an aside, that the policy of “emissions trading” often seduces libertarians, especially since it is a new profit center for their donors. Libertarians view emissions trading as preferable to a simple tax on gas and oil. But when you’re infatuated with your own mind, byzantine schemes to rob the public are always more seductive than simple theft. And after all, “market forces” are harnessed. Thanks so much.

Libertarians, when it comes to borders, trade, online censorship, getting Republicans elected, and now climate change, are always there when you need them.

Meanwhile, as ordinary Americans work like dogs to pay mortgages on overpriced homes that sit on lots with yards too small to grow a tree or set up a trampoline, and spend twice as much for gasoline and electricity, and as American manufacturers relocate because of energy costs, the Chinese prepare to take over the world. Has America’s corporate Left not thought this far ahead? Perhaps we’ll fight the next war with battery operated tanks and planes.

The solutions being proposed for “climate change” are so obviously unworkable and so obviously repressive that it is terrifying that more people cannot see it. Oregon’s Republican Senators should not back down. Not this time. Not ever.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Biden’s “Climate Plan” Requires a Savvy Response

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Front running 2020 presidential contender Joe Biden has just released his “climate plan,” claiming that with a $1.7 trillion federal investment, U.S. carbon emissions will reach zero within 30 years.

You can say this for Biden, the canny old campaigner isn’t highlighting his climate plan as a cure all for social injustice. Unlike the “Green New Deal,” Biden is leaving out of his blueprint guaranteed jobs, healthcare, and housing. And while he includes the obligatory obeisance to inclusion, diversity, equity, indigenous peoples, vulnerable communities, people of color, and every other paint-by-number platitude, that isn’t his main focus.

Nope, Joe is marketing the lunch box issues. Union jobs. Infrastructure. Energy leadership. Exports. Industries of the future.

Moreover, Biden’s plan, unlike the Green New Deal, does not read like a college term paper. If you’re a climate skeptic, or if you’re skeptical that bigger government is the answer, this plan should have you worried. Because it comes very close to offering a consensus plan that even some of Trump’s swing voters might support: which is to fund technology initiatives and infrastructure projects that should be funded anyway, regardless of whether or not rising levels of atmospheric CO2 are a threat to our existence.

How Biden’s plan comes across depends on who is reading it. This ambiguity permeates the document. For example, the plan calls to “double down on the liquid fuels of the future” by developing “advanced biofuels.” But what are the details? If Biden is referring to land-dependent cellulosic ethanol, he is potentially set to fund a technology that would strip thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of square miles of land of replacement nutrients from decaying foliage, even if the expensive processes necessary to convert that foliage to ethanol were finally rendered cost-effective. If, on the other hand, he is referring to ethanol grown in tanks using genetically enhanced algae, that process, if the technology ever matures, has potential. These are very big ifs, but they’re not just plain stupid.

How the merit of Biden’s plan rests in the eye of the beholder is found repeatedly in his reliance on funding breakthrough technologies. “Grid-scale storage at one-tenth the cost of lithium-ion batteries.” “Using renewables to produce carbon-free hydrogen at the same cost as shale gas.” “Capturing carbon dioxide from power plant exhausts and using it to make alternative products.”

Is this all pie in the sky? Or are the doubters just Luddites? Shall we believe in the power of innovation except when it comes to cost effective batteries, electrolysis of hydrogen, and direct synthesis of CO2? Biden is attacking the center with this line of reasoning. It deserves a reasoned response, not ridicule.

Another area where Biden offers good sense instead of the usual nonsense is with respect to nuclear power. He calls for “small modular nuclear reactors at half the construction cost of today’s reactors.” Further in the document, he calls for an investigation into the “future of nuclear energy,” to resolve issues of cost, safety and waste disposal. This, too, is a position that is likely to earn Biden more voters than it loses. When Biden calls for spending on “climate resiliency,” he’s really just talking about infrastructure upgrades: new bridges, new levees, a hardened electrical grid. Some climate skeptics will read between those lines and see sound logic; for alarmists, it’s all good.

It’s easy to pick Biden’s plan apart, of course. There is zero chance that the U.S. will achieve zero emissions by 2050. And to-date, the environmental side effects of massive deployment of renewables technology are catastrophic. Biden’s plan calls for “conserving 30% of America’s lands and waters by 2030.” Has he thought about how much of America’s lands and waters would have to be consumed by solar farms, wind farms, and biofuel farms, if his plan is aggressively funded and implemented? Has he considered the impact of sourcing the materials for all these solar farms, wind farms and “grid-scale” battery farms, which are far more resource intensive than conventional energy?

Then there’s the money. Per the plan: “Biden’s climate and environmental justice proposal will make a federal investment of $1.7 trillion over the next ten years, leveraging additional private sector and state and local investments to total to more than $5 trillion.”

But where is this ten year budget? One might argue the U.S. economy, with a GDP of roughly $20 trillion, can absorb new government expenditures of $500 billion per year. If you like bigger government, why not shift another 2.5 percent of U.S. economic output from the private sector to the government sector? But where is the money going? Remember Obama’s “shovel ready” projects? That money bailed out the banks and the public sector pensions. Will this be more of the same?

Despite the fanatical arrogance of the environmentalist zealots and their institutional backers across every sector of America’s corporate establishment, the science of “climate change” is not beyond debate. Every premise the establishment advances as fact relating to climate change – the cause, intensity, velocity, severity, urgency, and impact (mostly good or mostly bad) – are not facts, they are theories.

But when it comes to solutions, one of the biggest establishment “facts” is actually a very big, and very obvious lie. Biden’s document is called “The Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice.” That second part, “environmental justice,” is pure BS. Biden was smart enough to not make “environmental justice” the focal point of his plan, but nonetheless, he lays it on pretty thick. He writes:

“The impacts – on health, economics, and overall quality of life – are far more acute on communities of color, tribal lands, and low-income communities.” That assertion, backed up by a handful of cherry picked statistics, leads to the following:

“He will make it a priority for all agencies to engage in community-driven approaches to develop solutions for environmental injustices affecting communities of color, low-income, and indigenous communities.”

Oh come on. What does that even mean?

Here’s the reality that Biden, Ocasio-Cortez, the establishment Bidenesque uniparty Democrats, and the insurgent “social justice” Democrats will never admit: aggressive legislation designed to move the U.S. to zero carbon emissions in 30 years will devastate low income communities. The price of every necessity will rise; housing, heating, electricity, gasoline, water, and food. The multinational corporations providing these necessities will profitably navigate the regulations, collect the subsidies, charge the higher prices, and drive out smaller competitors.

For anyone who still doubts this fact, that the cost of extreme energy efficiency, extreme land use restrictions, extreme renewables mandates, are not imposing crippling burdens on ordinary people, come to California. While there, ask why, inexplicably, California’s low income communities continue to vote, by the millions, for the Democrats who have made their lives so difficult. The answer isn’t hard to find: The Leftist oligarchs who make obscene amounts of money from unnecessarily strict “green” regulations are Democrats, who along with their token RINOs, spew the same rhetoric nonstop: “vote for us, or the planet will burn up.” It’s really that simple. And it works.

This is why fomenting climate alarmism is the top priority of Democrat controlled public schools, Democrat owned mass media and social media, and Democrat dominated government bureaucracies. Along with the obsession with “social justice” and identity politics, climate catastrophizing engages the Lizard brain in most humans. Primal fears and anxieties are stimulated by images of floods, hurricanes, and raging wildfires. The urgent need to do whatever is necessary, whatever the cost, is reinforced continuously, at every level. For far too many, emotion overwhelms reason.

Outside of California, most Americans, to their credit, remain split on the urgency of climate change. Which is why Biden’s new plan is a savvy bit of political reckoning.

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Trillions and Trillions

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If the old saying were coined today, it would be “a few trillion here, and a few trillion there, and pretty soon we are talking about serious money.” Who knows what trillions mean anymore – is the U.S. a $15 trillion economy, or are dollars fluid, and benchmarks meaningless?

Deficits are now counted in trillions of dollars, joining quantities previously ascribed only to global reserves of major commodities, or the annual output of large nations. One trillion. A thousand billion. A million million. Debts and deficits are now routinely counted in trillions with a T. Will requiring counting and auditing CO2 emissions, then taxing and assessing fees on CO2 emissions – and auctioning permits to emit CO2 – become the mechanism for governments to address their exploding debts and deficits, now denominated in trillians, and will such policies best advance the interests of humanity and the earth?

Commodities, along with the value of economic output, or economic capacity, wax and wane in the flux of the global market. If you try to completely regulate all this capitalism, if you try to eliminate all the waxing and waning, you are very likely to create a political economy resembling either fascism or communism. Enforcing a regulatory scheme so comprehensive as to encompass literally all combustion, concerned not merely about clean burning but burning itself, cannot help but require such tyranny.

“A trillion here, and a trillion there, and pretty soon we are talking about serious money.” Is the output of the entire global economy still estimated at approximately $50 trillion dollars per year, even in this slow-down, and if the dollar devalues, what does that mean in any case? And who is to say what the equilibrium price of commodities is or should be, when each of them is subject to the disruptions of entrepreunership and innovation at any time?

Transcending any quantity of currency is the innate endowment of national wealth. And wealth, in the case of nations, is valued in the extent and quality of their institutions and their assets. The wealth of nations, for example, is their ability to educate their population and provide them ample incentives to excel. The wealth of nations is also in their endowment of natural resources as well as the net worth of their already-built infrastructure.

For these reasons, despite the volatility of dollars and derivatives and related intangibles, despite its infinite diversity and that it can only be described theoretically, nonetheless wealth and wealth creation is real and absolute. Genuine wealth cannot therefore be contained or consigned or configured, much less created, via new fiat currencies and asset inventions pegged to transfers of carbon or climate models. And this is why, despite the desparate pleas of precautionary principle zealots wearing CO2 blinders, all strategies to adapt to climate change must be subjected to honest cost-benefit analysis. It is clear we are experiencing climate change, because to be experincing anything else on this water planet, blessed with a greenhouse atmosphere and teeming life, would be terribly alarming. Mars, for example, experiences minimal climate change.

Trying to mitigate the allegedly negative effects of CO2 emissions through heavily regulating and taxing all CO2 emissions is simply not effective compared to many alternative wealth-creating uses of public funds. And please note, the costs to trade the rights to emit CO2 emissions is equivalent to taxes, fees and regulations, in terms of costs to innovators, entrepreneurs, and emerging nations. Expanding the government regulatory sector, and using it to pay subsidies to fossil fuel companies to sequester CO2, or put another way, using CO2 emissions as the primary criteria for any and all environmental project merit, can completely displace basic cost-benefit analysis.

When these macroeconomic cost-benefit analyses are done, many policies that rely on CO2 emissions as a key criteria become questionable. In order to hopefully reduce CO2 emissions, should we really imprison our small property owners behind “urban service boundaries”? To allegedly lower our “carbon footprint,” should we continue to contemplate digging new scars in the earth that rival the Great Wall of China ala bullet train corridors, when instead the future may likely find bigger freeways and auto-piloting busses that navigate far more versatile upgraded roads?

If you abandon the notion that CO2, an enabler of teeming life, is actually a deadly pollutant that poses an existential threat to the planet and especially to human civilization, or that every square inch of undeveloped land is sacred and any land development must be subjected to trillions in analysis and fees and settlements and taxes, than you might support useful scars in the earth: Aqueducts, massive runoff collection basins, large scale aquifer injection and storage infrastructure, desalination plants, nuclear power plants, and an offshore liquid natural gas terminal, to name a few. Projects that create lasting regional wealth, along with jobs, which increases options.

There are many wonderful ways to adapt to fluctuations of climate while investing in genuine economic advancement that encourages individualism and pluralistic property ownership, rather than yielding to the hubristic notion that regulating and taxing CO2 emissions is our best chance to survive and thrive as a species. Specifically, developing aqueducts, aquifers, desalination plants, and diverse energy production capacity – and encouraging new private land developments connected with smart, safe, sustainable upgraded public roads and 21st century roadworthy vehicles – is the way we create genuine wealth at the same time as we best manage climate change, natural or anthropogenic, hot or cold.

The Climate Alarm Industry

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On May 22nd, 2009, in the Wall Street Journal there is a commentary by Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg entitled “The Climate-Industrial Complex,” and that description says it all. One would think Lomborg is pointing out the obvious – that climate alarm is the pretext to orchestrate a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich – but sadly, this observation is still obscured by overwhelming and terrifying visions of planetary meltdown.

Lomborg has never said global warming isn’t a reality. Like most skeptics, he acknowledges there has been about a 1.0 degree (centigrade) increase in the average temperature of the planet in the past 150 years. Lomborg doesn’t even question the latest and greatest climate models, which, despite the disastrous worst case scenarios that are constantly emphasized, only predict minor sea level rise and moderate temperature increases over the next century. Lomborg’s primary mission has been to simply perform basic cost-benefit analysis on the measures being proposed to allegedly reverse global warming, such as it is. When you do these cost-benefit exercises (read “How Much for a Degree“), the rhetoric of those who think we can actually control climate quickly is seen for what it is – misguided and often misanthropic.

In his May 22nd commentary, however, for the first time, Lomborg went a step further, and exposed the agenda of the “climate-industrial complex.” He quoted U.S. President Eisenhower, who coined the phrase “military-industrial complex,” and said of it ”the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist,” and, ”there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.”

In his commentary Lomborg cites several examples of the power of the rising climate-industrial complex – in short, the collusion of big business and politicians, with the enthusiastic support of journalists, to undertake the most “spectacular and costly action” in history. Rather than rewrite Lomborg’s article – I highly recommend you read the original – here are bullet points from an EcoWorld post of December 2007, “Global Warming Questions,” where I have listed the powerful special interests who benefit from global warming alarm:

– Insurance companies charge higher premiums
– Fossil fuel companies keep prices (and profits) high
– Politicians enact new taxes
– Public sector entities get new taxes to fund their pensions
– Environmental organizations get more funds
– Left wing activists get a new basis to attack private ownership
– More public sector funded jobs are created
– Lawyers have a new basis to file lawsuits
– CPA firms begin to audit carbon accounting
– Wall street gets to trade emissions credits
– Climate researchers get more grant requests funded
– United Nations bureaucrats get a guaranteed revenue stream

One can add to that list the incentive of massive subsidies that will flow into the coffers of major polluters to “sequester” their CO2 emissions. And the saddest example of a special interest who will benefit are the high tech entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley and elsewhere, who used to altruistically identify unmet needs, create products to fill those needs, and experience massive success in the competitive free market. These entrepreneurs created the information technology industry from scratch – and they could have done it without a dime of government subsidies or one shred of government regulation. Now this inspiring tradition is being tragically undermined, as “green” entrepreneurs turn to the government to coerce people into buying their products, to the taxpayers to fund their innovations, and to complicit journalists to foment diluvian panic that dovetails with their marketing strategy.

Every time I reveal to someone my belief there is not evidence of imminent and catastrophic climate change, nor that anthropogenic CO2 is the primary culprit, I am again struck by how incredulous they are. This point of view has successfully been cast as a grotesquely self-interested if not evil or psychotic perspective. And what happened to journalistic and scientific skepticism? It is amazing that for the first time in history, the people running around with signs saying “the world is coming to an end” are considered the sane ones, and those of us who are saying it is not are considered the lunatics.

As Lomborg pointed out, however, the reason for this inversion of logic is clear. Climate alarm is an industry, impelled by a critical mass of special interests that together quite accurately may be called the climate-industrial complex. Environmental challenges are real and require ongoing efforts to mitigate them. But to mingle special interests with environmental imperatives is to invite a public backlash. Environmentalists and entrepreneurs alike would do well to reflect on this possibility, particularly now that the global economic temperature has cooled considerably more than 1.0 degree centigrade.