No global warming in 18 years, no category 3 to 5 hurricane hitting the US in ten years, seas rising at barely 15cm a century: computer models and hysteria are consistently contradicted by Real World experiences.
So how do the White House, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), UN, EU, Big Green, Big Wind, liberal media and even Google, General Electric (GE) and Defense Department officials justify their fixation on climate change as the greatest crisis facing humanity? How do they excuse saying the government must control our energy system, our economy and nearly every aspect of our lives – deciding which jobs will be protected and which ones destroyed, even who will live and who will die – in the name of saving the planet? What drives their intense ideology?
The answer is simple. The climate crisis and renewable energy industry has become a $1.5 trillion (R20.8 trillion) a year business! That’s equal to the annual economic activity generated by the entire US non-profit sector, or all savings over the past ten years from consumers switching to generic drugs. By comparison, annual revenues for much-vilified Koch Industries are about $115 billion, for ExxonMobil around $365bn.
The Big Green industry
According to a 200-page analysis by the Climate Change Business Journal (CCBJ), this Climate Industrial Complex can be divided into nine segments: low carbon and renewable power; carbon capture and storage; energy storage; energy efficiency; green buildings; transportation; carbon trading; climate change adaptation; and consulting and research. Consulting is a $27bn per year industry that handles “reputation management” for companies and tries to link weather events, food shortages and other problems to climate change. Research includes engineering research and development and climate studies.
The $1.5 trillion price tag appears to exclude most of the Big Green environmentalism industry, a $13.4bn per year business in the US alone. The MacArthur Foundation just gave another $50 million to global warming alarmist groups. Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chesapeake Energy gave the Sierra Club $105m to wage war on coal (shortly before the club began waging war on natural gas and Chesapeake Energy, in what some see as poetic justice). Warren Buffett, numerous “progressive” foundations and countless companies also give endless millions to Big Green.
Our hard-earned tax dollars are likewise only partially included in the CCBJ tally. As professor, author and columnist Larry Bell notes in his new book, Scared Witless: Prophets and profits of climate doom, the US government spent over $185bn between 2003 and 2010 on climate change items – and this wild spending spree has gotten worse in the ensuing years of President Barack Obama. We are paying for questionable to fraudulent global warming studies, climate-related technology research, loans and tax breaks for Solyndra and other companies that go bankrupt, “climate adaptation” foreign aid to poor countries, and much more.
Also not included: the salaries and pensions of thousands of EPA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Interior, Energy and other federal bureaucrats who devote endless hours to devising and imposing regulations for Clean Power Plans, drilling and coal mining bans, renewable energy installations, and countless Climate Crisis Inc handouts. A significant part of the $1.9 trillion per year that American businesses and families pay to comply with mountains of federal regulations is also based on climate chaos claims.
Add in the state and local equivalents of these federal programmes, bureaucrats, regulations and restrictions, and we’re talking serious money. There are also consumer costs, including the far higher electricity prices families and businesses must pay, especially in states that want to prove their climate credentials.
The impacts on companies and jobs outside the climate crisis industry are enormous, and growing. For every job created in the climate and renewable sectors, two to four jobs are eliminated in other parts of the economy, studies in Spain, Scotland and other countries have found. The effects on people’s health and welfare, and on overall environmental quality, are likewise huge and widespread.
But all these adverse effects are studiously ignored by climate crisis profiteers – and by the false prophets of planetary doom who manipulate data, exaggerate and fabricate looming catastrophes, and create the pseudo-scientific basis for regulating carbon-based energy and industries into oblivion. Meanwhile, the regulators blatantly ignore laws that might penalise their favoured constituencies.
In one glaring example, a person who merely possesses a single bald eagle feather can be fined up to $100 000 and jailed for a year. But operators of the wind turbine that killed the eagle get off scot-free. Even worse, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) actively helps Big Wind hide and minimise its slaughter of millions of raptors, other birds and bats every year. It has given industrial wind operators a five-year blanket exemption from the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, Migratory Birds Treaty Act and Endangered Species Act. The FWS even proposed giving Big Wind a 30-year exemption.
Thankfully, the US District Court in San Jose, California recently ruled that the FWS and Interior Department violated the National Environmental Policy Act and other laws, when they issued regulations granting these companies a 30-year licence to kill bald and golden eagles. But the death tolls continue to climb.
Bell’s perceptive, provocative, extensively researched book reviews the attempted power grab by Big Green, Big Government and Climate Crisis Inc. In 19 short chapters, he examines the phony scientific consensus on global warming, the secretive and speculative science and computer models used to “prove” we face a cataclysm, continuing collusion and deceit by regulators and activists, carbon tax mania, and many of the most prominent but phony climate crises: melting glaciers, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, disappearing species and declining biodiversity. His articles and essays do likewise.
Scared Witless also lays bare the real reasons for climate fanaticism, aside from lining pockets. As one prominent politician and UN or EPA bureaucrat after another has proudly and openly said, their “true ambition” was to institute “a new global order”… “global governance”… “redistribution of the world’s resources”… an end to “hegemonic” capitalism… and “a profound transformation” of “attitudes and lifestyles”, energy systems and “the global economic development model”.
Complete control
In other words, these unelected US, EU and UN bureaucrats want complete control over our industries; over everything we make, grow, ship, eat and do; and over every aspect of our lives, livelihoods, living standards and liberties. And they intend to “ride the global warming issue” all the way to this complete control, “even if the theory of global warming is wrong”.
If millions of people lose their jobs in the process, if millions of Africans and Asians die because they are denied access to reliable, affordable carbon-based electricity – so be it. Climate Crisis Inc doesn’t care. Free market principles do not apply, and free marketers need not apply. The global warming industry survives and thrives only because of secretive, fraudulent climate science; constant collusion between regulators and pressure groups; and a steady stream of government policies, regulations, preferences, subsidies and mandates – plus taxes and penalties on its competitors.
Climate change has been “real” throughout Earth and human history – periodically significant, sometimes sudden, sometimes destructive. It is driven by the sun and other powerful, complex, interacting natural forces that we still do not fully understand… and certainly cannot control. It has little or nothing to do with the carbon dioxide that makes plants grow faster and better, and is emitted as a result of using fossil fuels that have brought countless, wondrous improvements to our environment and human condition.
* Paul Driessen is a senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow in Washington DC, and the author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power – Black Death.
** The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Media.
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