My new book “Scared Witless: Prophets and Profits of Climate Doom” exposes powerful players and agendas behind climate industry fearmongering.
Abundant evidence clearly reveals the politicization of science by some of the world’s most influential institutions to demonize CO2 as a planet-ravaging “pollutant,” greatly exaggerate capacities and sustainability benefits of “alternative” energy sources, and foster alarmist claims to support U.N. anti-capitalist global wealth redistribution purposes.
But don’t just take my word for such accusations. As U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) official Ottmar Edenhofer advised in 2010, “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”
Even the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres admitted that its goal is to destroy capitalism . . . not to save the world from ecological calamity.
Referring to a new international treaty that is likely to be adopted at November-December Paris conference, she said, “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”
Never mind that capitalism is the only economic model that has worked over those past 150 years. As societies get wealthier, they can afford to invest in cleaner, more efficient technologies which benefit the environment and lift people out of poverty.
The U.N.’s socialist model, on the other hand, regards prosperity as a condition that provokes excess consumption of resources which if unfair to poor populations.
Their solution to this global disparity is to replace fossil energy with anemic, intermittent windmills and sunbeams; penalize and redistribute the unfair wealth of prosperous nations; and set the world’s clock back to pre-industrial times.
Climate alarm premised upon fossil-fueled CO2 emissions has no scientific or rational basis. Students of climate history are aware that global temperatures were as warm or warmer during the “Medieval warm period” 1,000 years ago and the “Roman warm period” a millennium before that.
U.S. temperatures were also at least equally as warm as now during the 1930s through mid-1940s when atmospheric CO2 concentrations were lower. Three decades of cooling then followed (a full climate cycle), provoking leading scientific “authorities” and news publications to trumpet the coming of the next ice age according to a natural timetable.
Only slightly more than a decade following those dire ice age predictions, then-Sen. Al Gore’s congressional 1988 climate hearings proclaimed a new and opposite crisis.
Remarkably, not only was it already determined that Earth was at a catastrophic global warming “tipping point,” but also that human-caused fossil CO2 emissions were to blame.
The answer, of course, was to implement an international carbon-capping treaty (the U.N.’s Kyoto protocol) which our Congress had the good sense to unanimously reject in principle.
And while climate obviously does change, it just hasn’t cooperated with theoretical model projections that “record high” fossil-fueled CO2 emissions would drive temperatures way off a hockey stick-shaped chart by now. Satellite records show that global mean temperatures have been flat now over the past 18 years and counting. Today’s high school students have never experienced global warming.
Whether various climate alarm factions are motivated by ideological desires to replace our entire free market economic system, to redistribute global wealth, to expand government regulatory authority and budgets, or to promote advantages for otherwise uncompetitive non-fossil energy “alternatives,” the results will bring true social and economic disasters.
The heaviest burdens of such costly agendas will fall on frail backs of those who can least afford them.
The flow of many billions of those taxpayer dollars used to fund the growth of EPA and other government alphabet soup programs depends upon fomenting public fear.
They, in turn, sponsor university departments that bend objectivity to secure research grants; support activist environmental groups that rely on crisis-premised donations for their lobbying and media programs; promote anti-fossil alternative energy interests seeking special subsidies; and empower a wide range of politicians, prophets and profiteers who cash in on save-the-world hype.
What redemptive solutions are urgently implored? All come straight out of the U.N.’s playbook. We must curb unfair excesses of capitalist prosperity, give lots of money for the U.N. to redistribute in retribution for causing climate damage, and abandon fossil fuel use in favor of costly, anemic and unreliable energy sources advocated by subsidy rent-seekers and powerful green activist groups.
No . . . none of this is really about protecting the planet from man-made climate change. It never was.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA) and the graduate program in space architecture. He is the author of “Scared Witless: Prophets and Profits of Climate Doom”(2015) and “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax” (2012). More articles here.
