The Obama Administration is using climate change to “fundamentally transform” America. It plans to make the climate crisis industry so enormous that no one will be able to dismantle it, even as computer models and disaster claims totally lose credibility — and even if Republicans control Congress and the White House after 2016.
Numerous regulators, researchers, universities, businesses, manufacturers, pressure groups, journalists, and politicians now have such strong monetary, reputational, and authority interests in climate alarmism that they will defend its tenets and largesse tooth and nail.
They are pursuing this agenda even though global warming is dead-last in the latest Gallup poll of 15 issues: Only 25% of Americans worry about it “a great deal,” while 24% are “not at all” worried. By comparison, 46% are deeply concerned about the size and power of the federal government.
As with its Arctic and Antarctic counterparts, 90% of the titanic climate funding iceberg is invisible. But Climate Crisis, Inc., is using our tax and consumer dollars to advance six simultaneous strategies.
First, the U.S. government spends $2.5 billion per year on climate research that focuses on carbon dioxide, ignores powerful natural forces that have always driven climate change, and generates numerous reports warning of record-high temperatures, melting icecaps, rising seas, stronger storms, and other “crises” that are not happening but are supposedly caused by fossil fuel use.
The deceitful claims are consistently contradicted by real-world data. So alarmists increasingly emphasize computer models
Second, renewable energy research and implementation grants, loans, subsidies, and mandates seek to replace still-abundant hydrocarbons that still provide 82% of all U.S. energy consumed. Many recipients go bankrupt despite huge taxpayer payouts, and wind turbines butcher millions of birds and bats annually but are exempt from Endangered Species Act penalties.
Corn ethanol interests spent $158 million from 2007 to 2013 lobbying for more “green” mandates and subsidies — and $6 million in campaign contributions. General Electric spends tens of millions annually lobbying for more taxpayer renewable energy dollars, as do many other companies. The payoffs add up to tens of billions of dollars a year, from taxpayers and consumers.
Third, regulatory fiats increasingly substitute for laws and carbon taxes that Congress refuses to enact, due to concerns about economic and employment impacts, and because China, India, and other countries’ carbon dioxide emissions now dwarf America’s.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s war on coal has already raised electricity costs for millions of businesses and families, claimed thousands of jobs, and adversely affected living standards, health, and welfare for millions of families. Now the Obama Administration is unleashing new standards, based on arbitrary “social cost of carbon” calculations.
Onerous new energy efficiency and emission standards will send consumer costs skyrocketing, and channel billions to retailers, installers, banks, and mostly overseas manufacturers. Water heaters, pickup trucks, microwaves, cellphones, vacuum cleaners, hair dryers, toasters, coffee pots, lawn mowers, photocopiers, televisions, and almost everything else will cost far more — to prevent perhaps 0.0001º F of warming, assuming CO2 really drives climate change.
Fifth, vicious personal attacks continue on scientists, businessmen, politicians, and others who disagree publicly with the catechism of climate cataclysm. Environmentalist pressure groups, congressional Democrats and their media allies are trying to destroy the studies, funding, reputations and careers of anyone who challenges climate disaster tautologies.
Even the Obama Federal Emergency Management Agency has become a climate propaganda shop. New FEMA rules require that states seeking disaster preparedness funds must assess how climate change threatens their communities — based on worthless computer models whose predictions bear no resemblance to reality.
Sixth, climate alarmists want to control all thinking on the subject. They refuse to debate skeptics, ignore the benefits of carbon dioxide to wildlife and agriculture, reject studies that examine the role of natural forces in climate change, dismiss the horrendous track record of garbage-in, garbage-out computer models that assume greenhouse gases now control Earth’s climate, and insist that 97% of scientists believe in man-made climate chaos.
States must refuse to play the climate crisis game. Through lawsuits, hearings, investigations, and other actions, governors, legislators, attorneys general, and other officials should delay executive branch diktats, educate citizens about solar and other natural forces, and explain the huge costs and trifling benefits of President Obama’s draconian regulations.
Congress should hold hearings, demand an accounting of agency expenditures, require solid evidence for every climate claim and regulation, and cross-examine administration officials on details. It should also slash the budgets of the EPA and other agencies so they cannot keep giving billions to pressure groups, alarmist scientists, propagandists, and attack dogs.
Honesty, transparency, accountability and a much shorter leash are long overdue.
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NOTE: A version of this article also appeared in The Washington Times.
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Seventh: the alarmists are now incorporating the Vatican into the great lie.
The Pope is about to instruct the world’s 2 billion Catholics by an
Encyclical declaring belief in Mann Made Global Warming to be
a matter of faith and morals. As a Catholic I will have to declare
my dissent from this heresy, and ignore this anti Christian edict.
Interesting sentence, “Honesty, transparency, accountability and a much shorter leash are long overdue.” I have been calling for this for many years myself now. In fact, many people have been calling for this for many years now. But nothing is ever done.
The real question you should be asking is this, “How do you get honesty, transparency, and accountability from people who are dishonest to begin with, conniving in everything they do, and do everything they can to put in structures to evade accountability?”
You are basically asking thieves to become honest, when those same thieves, have never been honest in their lives, and do not know how to live, work and function in a world by being honest.
Accountability can NEVER come from the top, or should I say from the powerful. Accountability is always enforced upon the unaccountable leaders, by the people who are being led. That’s why we have wars, revolutions and upheavals in society, to enforce accountability on those whom refuse it.
Accountability of our elected officials must come from the grassroots of society. Elected politicians will never bring laws that will tie their hands to proper codes of conduct and behaviour. The only way this can be done is forcing democratic processes on those who want to subvert the Liberty, Freedoms and Destines of the People.
People need to be educated. People need to be shown the truth. People need to demand greater input in deciding government policy. The solution is not with the elites of society, it is with the People. Congress, or the Patricians if you will, will only talk and talk and then in the end do nothing for the People but just for their own patrician friends.
Government is broken. Instead wasting your breath on dishonest, conniving, unaccountable disreputes, focus on the people. You can’t have change at the top, unless the people at the bottom demand it.
If you believe in Democracy and seek to fight Patriocracy, then educate the People. At least try and educate as many of the People you can, before those bastards in government come after you and arrest you on some sort of trumped up charge, like sedition.
Its not easy fighting for just causes, just look at Voltaire, who spent much of his life in prison and then eventually exiled from his beloved France, and when he died, even the Catholic Church refused to bury him, all because he wrote about the injustices that were occurring in the French Palace and Catholic Church. Ghandi, Mandela,Aung San Suu Kyi, Andrei Sakharov, and many others sacrificed a lot so their country’s people could have greater freedoms; truth, justice and democracy is costly, and somebody always has to pay a heavy price.
The battle with the Patrician elites will not be won in Congress. It will be won with the People, it will be won with Democracy, and sometimes Democracy demands a great price of the People too, war.
The question is not what you can demand from Congress, Mr. Driessen, but what can you do to help the People so that they, The People, can demand Congress to become accountable? And there lies the dilemma, for you see, the People will never go up against their government unless enough of them are hurting. Just before the French Revolution, the people of France suffered for decades. Voltaire spent all his life writing about the injustices in France, and in all that time, the people read his commentaries and raged along with him, but nothing ever changed. It wasn’t until some year after Voltaire’s death, when things got so bad, as in the people were starting to starve, that they were prepared to change things in Paris by going crazy, and many people resulted in losing their heads over things, figuratively and literally!
Americans are not hurting enough yet. Life is still pretty good, and that’s where we are today, Mr. Driessen. This may not be a time for change in DC, like it wasn’t time for change in Paris during Voltaire’s day. But for every coming revolution, there is always a lead up. And now we finally come to message of this commentary by me, like the courageous and self-sacrificing Voltaire, who will be the thankless Voltaire for the People today? Voltaire didn’t live long enough to see the benefits of his work, so sad that is to say. But the world and forth coming revolutions do need the likes of Voltaire, especially now more than ever now.
So Mr. Driessen, ask for your accountability all you like from Congress, but it will take more than just words. Voltaire, Ghandi, Mandela,Aung San Suu Kyi, Andrei Sakharov, and Dostoevsky, all knew this, and look at what they endured. People with greater power and public awareness than myself need to lift to the occasion, and they, all of us, need to fight for what is right and just and not be swayed by the Patricians.
In ending, I will just let Dashiell Hammett say it in his most imitable best, who was locked up for refusing to give information against a group of innocent communists, he said, and I quote,
“I don’t let cops or judges tell me what democracy is!”
and then he went to prison.
If one remembers a little bit about the starvation that took place in France before the Revolution, it was those in positions of Authority that stock piled the wheat away from the citizens that helped the peoples starvation.
The Flour War refers to a wave of riots arising from April to May 1775, in the northern, eastern, and western parts of the Kingdom of France. It followed an increase in grain prices, and subsequently bread prices, because police withheld grain from the royal stores in addition to poor harvests in the summers of 1773 and 1774. This revolt, remarkable in its scale, was settled by wheat price controls (before the supply recovered) and the intervention of troops. The wheat rebellion during the Ancien Régime manifested a social and political crisis.
Restricting the EPA’ internal financing would in this case be equivalent to affected a reduction in the controls on American Citizens, and would give time to begin to politicize the overreach of the EPA liken to the IRS’s recent overreach with the controls on Conservative Non-Profit Organization.
A superb piece of writing by Paul Driessen: many thanks indeed.
You can dismantle it with one stroke of the legislative pen. Or, just don’t give them any money. When you stop paying them people don’t come to work anymore. Make it gigantic so we can fire larger numbers of people! “Dep’t of Silly Walks,…..gone!” I hope the next president comes into town with a *WRECKING BALL*