Climate Alarmists’ Chutzpah

The climate alarmists, whom I call the Climate-Industrial Complex or CIC in my new book, Environmentalism Gone Mad (available from the book website), have built their own fantasy world, and have many of the characteristics of a cult. In addition, they have repeatedly shown considerable chutzpah. Here are a few particularly egregious examples:

o If attacked on scientific grounds, the CIC attacks the attacker personally and ignores the substance of the attack.
o If an American state refuses to enact a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) requiring that a specified percentage of electricity be generated using “renewable” sources, or if the RPS is not adequate in their view, the CIC arranges to have EPA force it on them using the so-called “Clean Power Plan” or CPP, which I call the Skyrocketing Rates Power Plan or SRPP. So much for environmental federalism, long the basis for US environmental policy, as well as states’ rights.
o CIC claims that a scientific “consensus” exists that humans are causing “climate change” (previously global warming) and it is the task of skeptics (always referred to as “deniers” [as in holocaust]) to prove the “consensus” wrong even though it is the CIC that wants governments to impose economic and legal preferences to insure that only their favored means of electricity production are used.
o Recently EPA and the rest of the US CIC has taken to blaming extreme weather on human emissions of CO₂, for which they have provided no evidence whatever. Even the UN disagrees.
o CIC claims that their wind electricity generation preference is the “wave of the future” when it is actually a reversion to technology long ago abandoned as impractical, unreliable, and high cost.
o CIC claims that they are on the moral high ground since they believe they are “saving the world” when all they are doing is slowing economic growth and development, primarily at the expense of the poor and less wealthy, who pay dearly for the resulting far higher electricity rates/taxes.
o Claims that their electricity generation ideology is “green” and “clean” when it disfigures the landscape and kills enormous numbers of birds and bats and too often results in a huge mess for others to clean up when the subsidies give out.
o Claims that CO₂ emissions are “carbon pollution” when the main effect of higher CO₂ levels is to provide better nourishment for plants, which are currently starved for it. It is a combustion product when fossil fuels are used to assist humans with their daily tasks, which makes possible much greater human welfare and economic development.
o Obscures the fact that use of non-hydro “renewables” cost users much more, are very unreliable, will result in much higher electric rates and taxes, and provide no measurable actual benefits to anyone except the CIC.
o Claims that EPA has the power to rewrite the Clean Air Act and even the Constitution to force states to change their laws and regulations concerning electric generation and use to implement CIC ideology.

So although their chutzpah may be good public relations, it should raise questions about the CIC’s integrity and intent.

Much of this is discussed in more detail and with extensive references in Environmentalism Gone Mad.