The much-hyped Green New Deal (GND) is being pushed by a rump group of progressive-socialists in the Democratic Party, including prominent members of the Senate with stated presidential aspirations. If enacted, GND would constitute a complete socialist makeover/takeover of the economic system of the United States.
With costs in its first 10 years estimated at nearly $50 trillion dollars, GND would be by far the most costly social and economic experiment in U.S. history. For comparison, the United States has accumulated $21 trillion in debt over its 241-year history.
While recognizing GND would destroy the economy if adopted, I think is it much less dangerous as a proposal than the much more modest and varied iterations of a carbon dioxide tax that have been floated by various members of the Democratic and Republican parties. Why? Simply because GND is so far-reaching and economically wrenching, so enormous in scope and intrusive into peoples’ lives and livelihoods, it is far less likely to be enacted - at least in whole, in one massive piece of legislation- than a tax on fossil fuel use. The public is already used to paying gasoline taxes at the pump, along with surcharges on electric power bills and to airlines. Imposing a percent charge or dollar fee on fossil fuels, allowing its costs trickle down throughout the economy in the form of higher prices for goods and services, would allow politicians to escape the blame for the enormous damage the tax would do.
Most people complaining about the higher costs will mistakenly blame businesses for the raising prices, leaving the politicians and bureaucrats whose actions actually necessitated the higher costs scot-free. And if the past is any guide, the mainstream media will eagerly promote this false view of who is really to blame for higher prices.
GND, by contrast, is in your face. Voters will know whom to blame when it all goes wrong, costs skyrocket, unemployment rises, and electricity reliability declines. Given that the United States has regular, relatively free and fair elections, huge vested economic interests, and a history of periodic political whiplash in response to much more modest policy changes in the past, it would be virtually impossible to pass GND. That is why even the vast majority of the Democratic caucus is not yet supporting it.
In short, although taxing carbon dioxide emissions would cost billions of dollars, increase unemployment, hurt the economy, and limit personal freedom, it is entirely possible a carbon dioxide could pass. It’s unlikely with the current split Congress and with Donald Trump as president, but some relatively near-future Congress and president could certainly take the plunge.
GND, by contrast, would impose dramatic, wrenching changes that are simply not politically possible. (For the purposes of this essay, I’m limiting my discussion to the energy and environmental transformation that would be necessary to end fossil fuel use by 2030, though GND is also chock-full of social-justice and engineering wish list items.)
Although it is possible to draw up a scenario in which GND could happen, with the stars aligning perfectly and every policy and economic change necessary to meet the goal of eliminating fossil fuels accomplished successfully, the real world is messy. People, politicians, and countries have differing, often competing, aspirations and visions of what the good life entails, and they make mistakes, fail to find expected and desperately needed resources, and miss deadlines. Those factors and the simple physical requirements of eliminating fossil fuels in 11 years mean GND is impossible, for all practical purposes.
Consider, for example, the massive change to the electric power grid and the U.S. transportation system necessary to replace fossil fuels with renewable power plants and electric vehicles in just 11 years. The electric grid and the transportation system were built up over 80 years or more. GND calls for replacing all of this in just a decade.
To meet current electric power needs, estimates are millions of wind turbines would have to be erected, millions of solar panels installed, and billions of battery packs stored in millions of homes or at tens of thousands of centralized battery farms that would have to be built. Wind turbines would have to cover one-third of the continental United States, or solar panels would probably have to cover more than 20 percent of the countryside, just to meet current demand. We would also have to erect thousands of additional electric towers and string thousands of additional miles of transmission lines to get the power from the locations where the wind blows and sun shines regularly - which is where the wind and solar farms will have to be built, of course - to the cities and towns where the power is needed. Talk about a devastating impact on wildlife and wilderness!
Of course, that’s just to meet the current demand for electric power. If domestic demand grows, we will need even more turbines, panels, and transmission lines than estimated. More likely, the havoc GND is almost certain to cause in the economy would result in the largest sustained depression and economic decline in the history of the United States, causing energy demand to fall as it has consistently done during previous recessions and depressions. For GND proponents, that might be a feature and not a bug, though they certainly aren’t going to tell you that.
Consider also the billions of dollars cities and investors would lose when the coal and natural gas powered municipal power plants and those operated by investor-owned utilities were idled prematurely by force of law. Stock portfolios would plunge, blowing a gigantic hole in retirees’ pension payouts. Taxpayers would likely be on the hook for billions of dollars to companies and investors when they are forced to close fossil fuel power plants before they are paid off and before the end of their productive lives - facilities which various state public utility authorities licensed and approved. The cost to taxpayers to pay off these stranded assets would be astronomical. Residents of cities with municipal power systems would still be paying off the debt for the bonds used to build their publicly owned power plants idled by GND long after the federal government stopped them from generating power.
And that’s just the effect on electric power. All gasoline, diesel, biodiesel, ethanol, and natural gas powered vehicles would have to be replaced with electric vehicles. A lot of people would surely object to being forced to mothball their vehicles, especially because the electric vehicles they would be forced into would be smaller, less powerful, less comfortable, more expensive, and unable go long distances without frequent recharging. People care about these factors more than fuel economy, which is why electric vehicle sales still make up less than 2 percent of the car and truck market despite more than a decade of generous government subsidies.
Transforming the automobile market would require a total revamping of the supply chain from factories to subcontractors. Foreign cars manufacturers would have to buy into GND also, if they wanted to keep selling cars in the United States. Because other countries wouldn’t be bound by GND strictures, foreign auto manufacturers might decide to abandon the U.S. market for China, India, and elsewhere rather than going through the expensive restructuring and supply chain changes necessary to build only or primarily electric vehicles.
Proponents of GND admit the technological transformation required to hit the zero fossil fuel target by 2030 would be akin to a wartime effort. As in World War II but on an even larger scale, all manufacturing would have to be directed away from whatever products we build now - blenders, pump jacks, computers, etc.- to the production of millions of wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, transmission towers and power lines, rail tracks, cars, engines, and associated technologies for our new green economy. The government would be conscripting all factories, and by extension their workers, into GND’s warlike crusade against chimeric climate change. And it would all be for naught, because global greenhouse gas emissions would continue to rise as a result of economic growth in developing countries that are not foolish enough to impose GND on themselves.
Meeting GND’s goals for home energy efficiency and resource use would require an unprecedented intrusion of government agents into our homes. They would have to come into almost every home to ensure each is fitted with the latest in energy efficient appliances, insulation, home heating and cooling systems, and windows. Say good-bye to your gas-powered stove, dryer, water heater, or fireplace, and toss out that propane grill. Those luxuries would have to be sacrificed under GND.
Under GND, the government would have to get up close and personal in everyone’s life, requiring, for example, people to purchase government-approved TVs, phones, refrigerators, and other home goods that use less energy. The government would regulate what kinds of houses and neighborhoods people live in, with energy use being the prime factor federal agents will consider in assessing each home or business. Factors such as picture or sound quality, load capacity, the ability to clean clothes or plates quickly, square footage, styles of windows and doors, drivability of neighborhoods, or any other personal considerations - criteria that are often more important to people than how much energy an appliance or home uses when they buy homes and products-would have to take a back seat to the government’s energy-use mandates.
Then there are the labor and foreign relations impacts of GND.
Even if all the millions of truck drivers, gas station and convenience store employees, oil and gas field workers, coal miners, workers at chemical refineries and power stations, and others put out of work by the Democrats’s GND could seamlessly transition to jobs building, installing, and maintaining renewable energy technologies, the United States would have to open its borders to millions of additional migrant laborers in order to get the job done in the truncated timeline required. Perhaps this is why many of the same people pushing GND also favor an open-border policy and amnesty for illegal immigrants. We simply could not build, manage, and maintain the equipment, tools, vehicles, and appliances needed with the labor force currently residing in the United States. The United States did something similar in the nineteenth century when we imported Chinese laborers to help build the transcontinental railway. In immigration terms, GND would be the transcontinental railway on steroids.
Of course, the United States would not have to manufacture all the renewable energy equipment and new technologies required domestically. We could import much of it, as we already do, and likely would be forced to do so because of resource constraints and labor limitations. Importing more batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, and appliances, however, would make our trade deficit vastly bigger than it already is. In doing so, moreover, the United States would simply be offshoring its carbon dioxide emissions instead of reducing them. In fact, that would very likely increase global carbon dioxide emissions and production of various air and water pollutants as countries with lower environmental standards than our own ramp up production to meet the large increase in U.S. demand for renewable power technologies.
The GND would also undermine U.S. national security.
The technologies required to implement GND require tons of minerals and rare earth elements currently unavailable in the quantities required for this transition. Although the United States has many of these critical metals and rare earth elements, federal regulations make mining them virtually impossible. Proponents of GND show little recognition of the limited ability to access these minerals, or indeed, even that they are necessary components of the green technologies the proposal mandates the United States switch to. Under GND, mining is likely to become more difficult, and this is a serious problem from a national security perspective.
Currently, the United States is 100 percent import-dependent on China, Russia, and other nations for more than half of the critical minerals that are the foundation of green technologies. There are competing uses for these minerals. They are not just necessary for the powerful magnets used in wind turbines and to create thin films for solar panels. They are also used in our country’s advanced defense systems, such as jets, missiles, and radar and guidance systems, as well as more mundane consumer items such as televisions, cell phones, computers, and gaming systems.
China and Russia, among the United States’ top geopolitical rivals, have in the past used their control of critical minerals to extort economic concessions from businesses and countries and political concessions from governments. The United States fought hard to reduce its dependence on foreign oil, seeing such dependence as an economic and national security threat. Thanks to fracking, the United States has become virtually energy-independent, yet GND would once again subjugate Americans to the whims of often-hostile foreign regimes for our energy supply. This would have catastrophic effects on America’s economic health and domestic security.
For all of these reasons, even if GND were logistically possible, it would be a hard sell politically. Homeowners, drivers, businesses, workers, national security hawks, and those few politicians still truly concerned about government deficits would likely work together to defeat it. Politically and practically, GND is effectively DOA.
Most politicians probably aren’t abjectly stupid, and thus they must know GND is impossible. Therefore, one must assume those pushing it have an ulterior motive for doing so. To wit, they are proposing the radical GND to make costly carbon dioxide taxes, increased subsidies for green energy technologies, stricter fuel mandates for cars and trucks, stricter energy requirements for appliances, and more stringent emission restrictions on power plants look moderate by comparison. Any gains they make on these fronts show they are willing to compromise to get things done, they’ll say. They’ll take credit for imposing purportedly environmentally beneficial policies, blame businesses for the price increases and increased unemployment the policies cause, all the while shedding crocodile tears over the fact recalcitrant, environmental blackguards in Congress kept them from enacting the true reform needed, the Holy Grail: the Green New Deal.
By Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge
U.N. Official Admits Global Warming Agenda Is Really About Destroying Capitalism
A shocking statement was made by a United Nations official Christiana Figueres at a news conference in Brussels.Figueres admitted that the Global Warming conspiracy set by the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, of which she is the executive secretary, has a goal not of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity, but to destroy capitalism. She said very casually:
“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.”
She even restated that goal ensuring it was not a mistake:
“This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”
I was invited to a major political dinner in Washington with the former Chairman of Temple University since I advised the University with respect to its portfolio. We were seated at one of those round tables with ten people. Because we were invited from a university, they placed us with the heads of the various environmental groups. They assumed they were in friendly company and began speaking freely. Dick Fox, my friend, began to lead them on to get the truth behind their movement. Lo and behold, they too admitted it was not about the environment, but to reduce population growth. Dick then asked them, “Whose grandchild are we trying to prevent from being born? Your’s or mine?”
All of these movements seem to have a hidden agenda that the press helps to misrepresent all the time. One must wonder, at what point will the press realize they are destroying their own future?
Investors.com reminds Figueres that the only economic model in the last 150 years that has ever worked at all is capitalism. The evidence is prima facie: From a feudal order that lasted a thousand years, produced zero growth and kept workdays long and lifespans short, the countries that have embraced free-market capitalism have enjoyed a system in which output has increased 70-fold, work days have been halved and lifespans doubled.
-------------
Global warming activists argue carbon-dioxide emissions are destroying the planet, but the climate impacts of carbon dioxide are minimal, at worst. Activists would also have you believe fossil-fuel emissions have driven carbon-dioxide concentrations to their highest levels in history. The Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency went so far as to classify carbon dioxide as a toxic pollutant, and it established a radical goal of closing all of America’s coal-fired power plants.
Claims of unprecedented carbon-dioxide levels ignore most of Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history. Relative to Earth’s entire record, carbon-dioxide levels are at historically low levels; they only appear high when compared to the dangerously low levels of carbon dioxide that occurred in Earth’s very recent history. The geologic record reveals carbon dioxide has almost always been in Earths’ atmosphere in much greater concentrations than it is today. For example, 600 million years ago, when history’s greatest birth of new animal species occurred, atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations exceeded 6,500 parts per million (ppm) - an amount that’s 17 times greater than it is today.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide is currently only 410 parts per million. That means only 0.04 percent of our atmosphere is carbon dioxide (compared to 0.03 percent one century ago). Only one molecule in 2,500 is carbon dioxide. Such levels certainly do not pose a health risk, as carbon-dioxide levels in our naval submarines, which stay submerged for months at a time, contain an average carbon-dioxide concentration of 5,000 ppm.
The geologic record is important because it reveals relationships between carbon-dioxide levels, climate, and life on Earth. Over billions of years, the geologic record shows there is no long-term correlation between atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels and Earth’s climate. There are periods in Earth’s history when carbon dioxide concentrations were many times higher than they are today, yet temperatures were identical to, or even colder than, modern times. The claim that fossil-fuel emissions control atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations is also invalid, as atmospheric concentrations have gone up and down in the geological record, even without human influence.
The absurdity of climate alarmism claims gets even stranger when you consider there are 7.5 billion people on our planet who, together, exhale 2.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year, which is almost 10 percent of total fossil-fuel emissions every year. However, we are but a single species. Combined, people and all domesticated animals contribute 10 billion tons.
Further, 9 percent of carbon-dioxide emissions from all living things arise not from animals, but from anaerobic bacteria and fungi. These organisms metabolize dead plant and animal matter in soil via decay processes that recycle carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. The grand total produced by all living things is estimated to be 440 billion tons per year, or 13 times the amount of carbon dioxide currently being produced by fossil-fuel emissions. Fossil-fuel emissions are less than 10 percent of biological emissions. Are you laughing yet?
Every apocalyptic pronouncement you hear or read is nothing short of insanity. Their primary goal is not to save plants, humans, or animals, but rather to use climate “dangers” as a justification for centralizing power in the hands of a select few.
Note: Portions of this article have been excerpted with permission of the publisher and author of the 2018 book, “The Mythology of Global Warming” by Bruce Bunker, Ph.D. (Publisher: Moonshine Cove). For more information on this topic, the authors strongly recommend this book, which provides some of the very best information about the climate change debate.
Jay Lehr, Ph.D. (jlehr@heartland.org) is science director of The Heartland Institute. Tom Harris is executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition.
A co-founder of Greenpeace and a PhD Ecologist Patrick Moore told the US senate, “It is a powerful convergence of interests among a very large number of elites, including politicians who want to make it seem as though they’re saving the world, environmentalists who want to raise money and get control over very large issues like our entire energy policy, media, for sensationalism, Universities and professors for grants. You can’t hardly get a science grant these days without saying it has something to do with climate change.
It is a kind of nasty combination of extreme political ideology and a religious cult all rolled into one, and it’s taken over way too much of our thought process and way too much of our priorities.” See his talk on his journey to honest credible science.
-----------
Empty catchwords reveal a mind that’s unwilling to analyze and debate.
By Thomas Sowell
In this era when there has been more information available to more people than at any time in the past, it is also true that there has been more misinformation from more different sources than ever. We are not talking about differences of opinion or inadequate verification, but about statements and catchwords in utter defiance of facts.
Among the most popular current catchwords are “climate change deniers.” Stop and think. Have you ever - even once in your entire life - seen, heard or read even one human being who denied that climates change?
It is hard even to imagine how any minimally knowledgeable person could deny that climates change, when there are fossils of marine creatures in the Sahara Desert. Obviously there has been quite a climate change there.
The next time someone talks about “climate change deniers,” ask them to name one - and tell you just where specifically you can find their words, declaring that climates do not change. You can bet the rent money that they cannot tell you.
Why all this talk about these mythical creatures called “climate change deniers”? Because there are some meteorologists and other scientists who refuse to join the stampede toward drastic economic changes to prevent what others say will be catastrophic levels of “global warming.”
There are scientists on both sides of that issue. Presumably the issue could be debated on the basis of evidence and analysis. But this has become a political crusade, and political issues tend to be settled by political means, of which demonizing the opposition with catchwords is one.
It is much the same story on economic issues. Any proposal to reduce income tax rates is sure to bring out claims that these are “tax cuts for the rich,” based on the “trickle-down theory” that reducing the taxes collected from the rich will cause some of their wealth to “trickle down” to people with lower incomes.
Here, yet again, all you need to do is think back over your own life, and ask yourself if you have ever - even once in your entire life - seen, heard or read a single human being who advocated this “trickle-down theory.”
Certainly none of the innumerable fellow economists I have encountered in my 88 years ever advocated any such theory. Nor am I aware of anyone else, in any other walk of life, who has done so.
Yet there are ringing denunciations of the “trickle-down theory” in books, articles, and in politics and the media. That theory has been denounced as far away as India.
The next time someone talks about the “trickle-down” theory, ask them to tell you where specifically you can find the writings, videos, or any other evidence of someone advocating that theory. You may get some very clever and creative evasions of your question, but no actual answer.
One of the best-selling history textbooks did name Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon as having said in the 1920s that letting the rich pay less taxes would allow their wealth to “trickle down” to others. It was one of the very rare examples that actually named a name.
Unfortunately, what this widely used history textbook attributed to Andrew Mellon was the direct opposite of what he actually said. In Mellon’s own book, Taxation, he said that wealthy people were not paying enough tax revenue to the government, because they put their money into tax-exempt securities.
Mellon called it “incredible” that tax laws allowed someone making a million dollars a year to pay not a cent in taxes, and an “almost grotesque” consequence that people of more modest incomes had to make up the shortfall.
He understood, however, that higher tax rates did not automatically mean higher tax revenues. So when the tax law changes that he advocated cut tax rates, the income tax revenues actually hit a record high at that time. Moreover, the rich paid more tax revenue and a much higher percentage of all income tax revenues than before.
Issues in both economics and science can get complicated. But when one side of those issues has to resort to demonstrably false catchwords, that should give us a clue.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
The climate crisis industry claims 24/7/365 that fossil fuel emissions are causing unprecedented temperature, climate and weather changes that pose existential threats to human civilization and our planet. The only solution, Climate Crisis, Inc. insists, is to eliminate the oil, coal and natural gas that provide 80% of the energy that makes US and global, possible.
Failing that, CCI demands steadily increasing taxes on carbon-based fuels and carbon dioxide emissions.
However, as France’s Yellow Vest protests and the latest climate confab in Poland demonstrated, the world does not accept CCI’s assertions. Countries worldwide are expanding their fossil fuel use, and families are refusing to reduce their living standards or their aspirations for better lives.
Moreover, climate computer model forecasts are completely out of touch with real-world observations. There is no evidence to support claims that the slight temperature, climate and weather changes we’ve experienced are dangerous, unprecedented or caused by humans, instead of by the powerful solar, oceanic and other natural forces that have driven similar or far more serious changes throughout history.
More importantly, the CCI “solutions” would cause unprecedented disruption of modern industrialized societies; permanent poverty and disease in poor countries; and serious ecological damage worldwide.
Nothing that is required to harness breezes and sunshine to power civilization is clean, green, renewable, climate-friendly or sustainable. Tens of billions of tons of rock would have to be removed, to extract billions of tons of ores, to create millions of tons of metals, concrete and other materials, to manufacture millions of wind turbines and solar panels, and install them on millions of acres of wildlife habitats - to generate expensive, intermittent energy that would still be grossly insufficient for humanity’s needs. Every step in this process requires fossil fuels - and some of the mining involves child labor.
How do CCI alarmists respond to these points? They don’t. They refuse to engage in or even permit civil discussion. They rant that anyone “who denies climate change science” is on the fossil fuel industry payroll, thus has a blatant conflict of interest and thus no credibility, and therefore should be ignored.
“Rebuttals” to my recent ‘We are still IN” article cited Greenpeace and DeSmogBlog as their “reliable sources” and claimed: I’m “associated with” several “right-wing think tanks that are skeptical of man-made climate change.” One of them “received $582,000 from ExxonMobil” over a 14-year period, another got “$5,716,325 from Koch foundations” over 18 years, and the Koch Brothers gave “at least $100,343,292 to 84 groups denying climate change science” in 20 years, my detractors claimed.
These multi-year contributions work out to $41,571 annually; $317,574 per year; and $59,728 per organization per year, respectively - to pay salaries and overhead at think tanks that are engaged in multiple social, tax, education, medical and other issues....not just energy and climate change.
But let’s assume for a moment that money - especially funding from anyone with a “special interest” in the outcome of a research project - renders a researcher incapable of analyzing facts fairly and honestly.
Then apply those zero-tolerance, zero-credibility Greenpeace-DeSmogBlog-CCI standards to those very same climate alarmists and their allies - who are determined to shut down debate and impose their wind, solar and biofuel policies on the world. Where do they get their money, and how much do they get?
Billionaire and potential presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg gave the Sierra Club $110 million in a six-year period to fund its campaign against coal-generated electricity. Chesapeake Energy gave the Club $26 million in three years to promote natural gas and attack coal. Ten wealthy liberal foundations gave another $51 million over eight years to the Club and other environmentalist groups to battle coal.
Over a 12-year period, the Environmental Protection Agency gave its 15 Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee members $180.8 million in grants - and in exchange received quick rubberstamp approvals of various air quality rules. It paid the American Lung Association $20 million to support its regulations.
During the Obama years, the EPA, Interior Department and other federal agencies paid environmental pressure groups tens of millions in collusive, secretive sue-and-settle lawsuit payoffs on dozens of issues.
Then we get to the really big money: taxpayer funds that government agencies hand out to scientists, computer modelers and pressure groups - to promote global warming and climate change alarmism.
As Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore noted recently, citing government and other reports:
* Federal funding for climate change research, technology, international assistance, and adaptation has increased from $2.4 billion in 1993 to $11.6 billion in 2014, with an additional $26.1 billion for climate change programs and activities provided by the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
* The Feds spent an estimated $150 billion on climate change and green energy subsidies during President Obama’s first term.
* That didn’t include the 30% tax credit/subsidies for wind and solar power: $8 billion to $10 billion a year - plus billions more from state programs that require utilities to buy expensive “green” energy.
* Worldwide, according to the “progressive” Climate Policy Initiative, climate change “investment” in 2013 totaled $359 billion but this “falls far short” of the $5 trillion per year that’s actually needed.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change echoes those greedy demands. It says the world must spend $2.4 trillion per year for the next 17 years to subsidize the transition to renewable energy.
Bear in mind that $1.5 trillion per year was already being spent in 2014 on Climate Crisis, Inc. research, consulting, carbon trading and renewable projects, according to the Climate Change Business Journal. With 6-8% annual growth, we’re easily looking at a $2-trillion-per-year climate industry by now.
The US Government Accountability Office puts United States taxpayer funding alone at $2.1 billion per year for climate change “science” ... $9.0 billion a year for technology R&D ... and $1.8 billion a year for international assistance. Total US Government spending on climate change totaled $179 billion (!) from 1993 through 2017, according to the GAO. That’s $20 million per day!
At the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit, 29 far-left foundations pledged to give $4 billion over five years to their new Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming campaign. Sea Change Foundation co-founder Nat Simons made it clear that this “is only a down payment”!
And I get pilloried for working with organizations that received $41,571 to $59,728 per year from fossil fuel interests ...questioning claims that fossil fuels are causing climate chaos...and raising inconvenient facts about wind, solar and biofuel replacements for coal, oil and natural gas.
Just as outrageous, tens of millions of dollars are squandered every year to finance “studies” that supposedly show “surging greenhouse gases” and “manmade climate change” are creating dangerous hybrid puffer fish, causing salmon to lose their ability to detect danger, making sharks right-handed and unable to hunt, increasing the number of animal bites, and causing US cities to be overrun by rats.
Let’s apply the Greenpeace-DeSmogBlog-Climate Crisis, Inc. standard to them. Their massive multi-billion-dollar conflicts of interest clearly make them incapable of analyzing climate and energy matters fairly and honestly - and disqualify them from participating in any further discussions about America’s and the world’s energy and economic future.
At the very least, they and the institutions that have been getting rich and powerful off the catastrophic manmade global warming and climate hustle should be cut off from any future federal funding.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT.org). He has written numerous studies and articles on energy, climate change, human rights and other topics.
------------
Comments by Ken Haapala of SEPP
Selling Fear: Michael Connoly, Roman Connoly, and Imelda Connoly, and Willie Soon and Patrick Moore have issued a report on the Greenpeace business model, which one can interpret as selling fear. (Patrick Moore was a founder of Greenpeace and departed some years ago.) The model can be summarized as:
1. “Invent an ‘environmental problem’ which sounds somewhat plausible. Provide anecdotal evidence to support your claims, with emotionally powerful imagery.
2. Invent a ‘simple solution’ for the problem which sounds somewhat plausible and emotionally appealing, but is physically unlikely to ever be implemented.
3. Pick an ‘enemy’ and blame them for obstructing the implementation of the ‘solution’. Imply that anybody who disagrees with you is probably working for this enemy.
4. Dismiss any alternative ‘solutions’ to your problem as ‘completely inadequate’”.
According to the authors:
“This model has been very successful for them, with an annual turnover of about $400 million ($0.4 billion). Although technically a “not for profit” organization, this has not stopped them from increasing their asset value over the years, and they currently have an asset value of $270 million ($0.27 billion) - with 65% of that in cash, making them a cash-rich business. Several other groups have also adopted this approach, e.g., Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, WWF and the Union of Concerned Scientists.”
The report goes through several campaigns by Greenpeace such as Climate Change, Forests & Oceans, and Plastics. The overall purpose is not to educate, but to persuade. Understanding and details may restrict the goals of persuading others and raising money.
The entire report is a valuable guide to how organizations can profit by selling fear. The appendices give further detail, especially the highly influential writings of Chris Rose on “How to Win Campaigns.” Parts of the writings by Rose reminded Ken Haapala of the 1928 book by Edward Bernays, “Propaganda.” Bernays was called the “Father of Modern Advertising.” But after WWI, Bernays did not sell fear.
--------
Billionaire and potential presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg gave the Sierra Club $110 million in a six-year period to fund its campaign against coal-generated electricity. Chesapeake Energy gave the Club $26 million in three years to promote natural gas and attack coal. Ten wealthy liberal foundations gave another $51 million over eight years to the Club and other environmentalist groups to battle coal.
Over a 12-year period, the Environmental Protection Agency gave its 15 Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee members $181 million in grants - and in exchange received quick rubberstamp approvals of various air quality rules. It paid the American Lung Association $20 million to support its regulations.
During the Obama years, the EPA, Interior Department and other federal agencies paid environmental pressure groups tens of millions in collusive, secretive sue-and-settle lawsuit payoffs on dozens of issues.
Then we get to the really big money: taxpayer funds that government agencies hand out to scientists, computer modelers and pressure groups ‘ to promote global warming and climate change alarmism.
* Federal funding for climate change research, technology, international assistance, and adaptation has increased from $2.4 billion in 1993 to $11.6 billion in 2014, with an additional $26.1 billion for climate change programs and activities provided by the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
* The Feds spent an estimated $150 billion on climate change and green energy subsidies during President Obama’s first term.
* That didn’t include the 30% tax credits/subsidies for wind and solar power: $8 billion to $10 billion a year - plus billions more from state programs that require utilities to buy expensive “green” energy.
Overall hundreds of billions are routinely spent, with the UN demanding we ramp up climate spending to $3.5 trillion per year!