By Paul Driessen

Last week’s elections resoundingly affirm that America’s top priorities are economic growth, job creation and less Washington control of our lives. The elections are likely the final nail in the cap-and-tax coffin.

However, even before close contests could be decided, President Obama announced that he will be “looking for other means” besides cap-and-tax to address the “problem” of carbon emissions and what the White House now calls “global climate disruption.” His top priorities include using the “lame duck” session and administrative actions to implement his “climate control” and renewable energy agenda:

* Environmental Protection Agency regulation of hydrocarbon energy, based on the assertion that carbon dioxide “endangers human health and welfare,”

* Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rules that will force all consumers to subsidize new transmission lines from wind and solar projects;

* millions of dollars in last-minute grants to scientists, companies and activist groups that support the Administration’s agenda; and

* supporting state and regional legislative, tax and regulatory actions to restrict hydrocarbon use and mandate “renewable energy standards” and “greenhouse gas” reductions.

These actions underscore the need to reexamine the supposed science behind “dangerous global warming” and “sustainable renewable energy” claims. If the science is bad, the policies will be awful.

Thankfully, most Republicans remain opposed to any actions that would make energy less reliable and affordable. More importantly, next year’s likely House committee chairs have served notice that they will carefully examine EPA’s alleged scientific evidence for its job-killing “endangerment” decision - and investigate the data manipulation and other irregularities in climate change research conducted under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and various government and university labs.

The world is finally catching on to the junk science and is no longer willing to give up dreams of electrified homes, shops and offices, jobs, and improved health and nutrition. Many incoming senators and congressmen openly challenged climate chaos claims and voiced deep concern that cap-and-tax and its bastard offspring would further traumatize our economy (for no environmental gain).

These are ominous developments for individuals, institutions and companies that derive their legitimacy, prestige, influence and financing from the “climate chaos” hypothesis. Thus segments of the American Geophysical Union oligarchy are running a campaign to get alarmist members to confront and attack “catastrophic warming” skeptics. Two prominent Penn State University alarmists also went on the warpath, in recent newspaper columns that reveal their growing anxiety and desperation.

Aware that he could be compelled to testify under oath (and pain of perjury) regarding emails, research methods, and efforts to stigmatize and marginalize scientists who disagree with him, Dr. Michael Mann devised a clever diversion. Certain politicians, he told Washington Post readers, are trying “to mislead and distract the public.” Penn State, he claimed, “exonerated” him of any wrongdoing. Investigators simply want to “assault” climate research.

“Burying our heads in the sand [about carbon dioxide] would leave future generations at the mercy of potentially dangerous” climate change, he continued. A “good-faith debate is essential” and “welcome,” he self-righteously declared, but challenges to his views are “anti-science.” Questioning the alleged CO2-global warming link is akin to questioning “the link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer.”

It’s amazing how many false or misleading assertions he was able to jam into such a short column.

No one questions “the reality of climate change,” as Mann alleges. Earth’s climate changes constantly and has throughout the eons. We “skeptics” simply point out that no one has yet proffered convincing, replicable evidence that human CO2 emissions have replaced the complex natural forces that drove past storm, flood and drought cycles, ice ages, Little Ice Ages and Dust Bowls. Assertions, computer models, doctored temperature data, pal-reviewed papers, and pseudo-consensus IPCC reports are not evidence. Catastrophic manmade climate change is not the same as catastrophic Mann-made climate change.

(How does he explain stable 1995-2010 global temperatures, in the face of rising carbon dioxide levels?)

Penn State’s in-house “investigation” and “exoneration” was a whitewash, as was its East Anglia counterpart. No adverse witnesses were allowed to testify, not one skeptic was permitted to ask a question. How different a congressional inquiry will be! No wonder Mann is hyperventilating.

As to debating the dangerous manmade global warming (aka “global climate disruption") issue, the world is still waiting for Messrs. Mann, Hansen, Gore, Schmidt, Jones or Trenberth to display the cojones to debate anyone. All have dodged every debate opportunity, and Gore refused even to testify before a friendly House committee if Lord Christopher Monckton was allowed to speak or even be in the room.

Helping to circle the wagons and protect the university’s multi-million-dollar annual climate funding stream, PSU “environmental ethics” professor Donald Brown waded in with rants via London’s Guardian and his personal blogspot. Skeptics must publish in “peer-reviewed scientific journals” (which systematically exclude their papers), he demanded - or shut up.

The fossil fuel industry, Brown continued (citing the unimpeachable New York Times), “lavishly financed...anti-global warming studie...and websites.” One presumes he means the $23 million ExxonMobil allegedly gave non-alarmists over the decade before it succumbed to eco-activist pressure and cut off the funding. That “lavish” funding is not to be confused, one supposes, with the “trivial” billions per year that alarmists and renewable energy aficionados receive. (Imagine the “consensus” those sums could buy.)

Then Dr. Brown played his trump card. “Disinformation” about Earth-on-the-brink climate science, he intoned, is “morally reprehensible” - “if not criminally irresponsible.” Or even a “crime against humanity,” because “climate-change impacts are potentially catastrophic for many of the poorest people around the world.” Climate change could cause floods, droughts, and disease, he suggested, or even prevent indigenous people from using “sleds in cold places.”

Sorry, Doctor. On your virtual-reality planet, your litany of horrors could maybe happen if CO2 continues to rise. But we live here on the real Earth, where a CO2-climate link is still speculative, at best, and where real horrors already kill millions of real people:  lung infections, 1.4 million ...intestinal diseases, 700,000...malaria a million more mothers, fathers and children - year after year.

They are dying because they don’t have access to the hydrocarbon energy you want to consign to the ash heap of history. That hydrocarbon energy could purify water; replace open fires to heat homes and cook food; fuel cars, trucks and buses that carry people, food and consumer products; and generate electricity to power homes, hospitals, schools, factories, offices and shops - to create jobs, hope, opportunity, prosperity, and infinitely better health than people in those impoverished nations have ever known.

So Dr. Brown, if you’re going to talk about crimes against humanity, please don’t engage in the climate equivalent of North Korea criticizing US voting machines. The real crime against humanity is elitist professors, politicians, pressure groups, UN panels and policies guarding against speculative and fabricated risks - and preventing the world’s poor from gaining access to modern technologies that could improve and save their lives, and enable them to adapt to climate change, whether regional or global, natural or manmade.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.