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First Posted: 5/16/2014
A new White House report declares that climate change is real, and that drastic (i.e. expensive) countermeasures are necessary.
The first part is correct; no educated person denies that climate change is part of Earth’s geologic history. The second part is a scam, the purpose of which is to enrich easily identifiable climate profiteers, many of whom are major donors to the current administration.
The climate profiteers’ racket is identical to that of Dust Bowl-era rainmakers, and the rock group Kansas wrote an outstanding short story about such an individual:
So the townspeople gave me money up front
To light a fire, pray and dance around.
I’d convince them it’d rain so they’d all go to bed
And I’d make my break clean out of town.
The drought was real, but the scam was the rainmaker’s claim that, if only the desperate farmers would give him what little money they had left, he could save their dying crops. The proponents of climate legislation want us to similarly believe that if we will divert hundreds of billions of dollars of our economy in their direction, they will make heat waves, hurricanes and even, per presidential science advisor John P. Holdren, our allergies, go away.
The inconvenient truth is that these phenomena all predate the large-scale generation of energy with fossil fuels. “The Great Storm of 1703” killed more people than Hurricane Katrina and wrecked a substantial part of the Royal Navy. A London pamphlet of 1667 said of hurricanes, “By these kind of Tempests the King of Spain hath lost at several times near 1,000 sail of ships.”
The Obama administration, however, wants us to believe that these disasters are somehow unique to the past several decades, and that climate legislation will make them go away. Tell that to the survivors of “The Dreadful Hurricane of 1667,” which flattened a good part of Virginia.
Now let’s meet the climate profiteers. “Cap and Trade Could be a Boon to New York,” a 2009 column written by U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY, names Obama campaign bundlers Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase as explicit beneficiaries of cap-and-trade mandates. Cap and trade also played a key role in the business plans of the late but unlamented Enron and Lehman Brothers. These are the 21st century’s rainmakers who say that, if we give them money up front, they’ll make climate change go away.
When I bought a plane ticket this winter, I was referred to a website from which I could purchase a carbon offset, or what medieval charlatans called an indulgence for sins. It’s the same old racket under a brand new name.
There is also something known as “walking the talk,” and the most vocal advocates of climate legislation have proven unequivocally that they do not believe in greenhouse gases.
In The Telegraph, a British newspaper, an article appeared in December 2009 titled “Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges.” It reported how the conference’s high rollers arrived in private planes, dined on caviar and stayed in $1,000 hotel rooms – all doubtlessly paid for by somebody else. Private planes, while suitable for high rollers on costly junkets, emit far more carbon dioxide per passenger than commercial airplanes. The next climate summit took place in the Mexican resort city of Cancun, with attendees dining on hors d’oeuvres paid for (again) with other people’s money.
China, which now emits 88 percent more carbon dioxide than the United States, meanwhile has no plans whatsoever to curtail its use of fossil fuels. It plans only to reduce the “energy intensity” of its operations, which means simply not wasting any form of energy.
Americans should embrace the same policy while we give the climate profiteers the bum’s rush to the nearest exit.