Green Energy Train to Energy Poverty: How Environmental Activists and Liberal Politicians Are ‘Grubering’ America on Climate and Energy

Guest essay by Joseph D’Aleo, CCM

MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, who was an advisor to Obama on the Obamacare Act mocked the “stupidity” of American voters and boasted of the Obama Administration’s ability to take advantage of it. They did that for Obamacare but also, in partnership with the environmental left for their regulatory siege, the Clean Power Plan (CPP) and the Paris treaty. The latest act from the last administration was the National Climate Assessment Climate Science Special Report (NCA CSSR) atrocity.

The global warming agenda has nothing to do with science and everything to do with politics and ideology. Nearly 6 decades ago, President Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address to the nation, in which the president famously warned of the danger to the nation of a growing armaments industry, referred to as a “military-industrial complex,” and talked about the risks posed by a scientific-technological elite.

He noted that the technological revolution of previous decades had been fed by more costly and centralized research, increasingly sponsored by the federal government. Eisenhower warned:

“Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” While continuing to respect discovery and scientific research, he said, “We must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

The Club of Rome was an organization formed in 1968 consisting of heads of state, UN bureaucrats, high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists and business leaders from around the globe. It raised considerable public attention in 1972 with its report The Limits to Growth.

The Club’s mission was “to act as a global catalyst for change through the identification and analysis of the crucial problems facing humanity”. They decided that more centralized control was needed under one world government. In their book “The First Global Revolution” in 1991, they wrote:

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming…would fit the bill….It does not matter if this common enemy is “a real one or…one invented for the purpose.”

172 countries attended the Rio Summit in 1992 and agreed on the Climate Change Convention, which in turn led to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the failed Kyoto Protocol and then the Paris Agreement.

The former head of the National Oceanic and Aeronautics Administration (NOAA), Dr. Jane Lubchenco, proved Eisenhower correct in his warning that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. In her 1999 address to the American Association for the Advancement of Scoemce (AAAS) when she served as its president:

“Urgent and unprecedented environmental and social changes challenge scientists to define a new social contract. This contract represents a commitment on the part of all scientists to devote their energies and talents to the most pressing problems of the day, in proportion to their importance, in exchange for public funding.”

Former Washington State Democratic governor Dixy Lee Ray saw the second Treaty of Paris coming. “The future is to be [One] World Government with central planning by the United Nations,” she said. “Fear of environmental crises – whether real or not – is expected to lead to compliance.”

One World Government under the auspices of the UN is now called Agenda 2030.

It is favored by the Democrats and establishment Republicans. UN Sustainable Development Goals aim to reduce inequality worldwide by forcing individual governments and citizens alike to share their wealth. Western (US) taxpayers are targeted and their wealth would be redistributed internationally while their economies are cut down to size. Big government would control all aspects of life, where people can live, how many children couples could have, energy used, the food supply, even some have proposed how much money we could keep for the work we do, etc.

UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres stated bluntly: “Our aim is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to change the global economic system…” In simpler terms, she intends to replace free enterprise, entrepreneurial capitalism with UN-controlled centralized, One World government and economic control.

UN IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer presented an additional reason for UN climate policies. “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy, it is not”. It is actually about how “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”

H.L. Mencken also was prophetic in his statements “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary” and “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it.”

The scientific elite, housed in the professional societies, our government agencies and the universities teamed with politicians, educators and the media have created what may be the greatest hoax in the history of civilization. The latest NCA CSSR Report is perhaps the most egregious example of advocacy science in history assembling a series of wild though easily refuted claims.

They even invented a new science of “attribution without detection” (when you can’t find signs of trends you expect, you claim you can read between the lines and see them anyway). This should remind you of Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow who explained to the editorial board of the Detroit News her support for carbon dioxide restrictions designed to fight global warming. “Climate change is very real. Global warming creates volatility and I feel it when I’m flying. The storms are more volatile. We are paying the price in more hurricanes and tornadoes.”

As Detroit News contributor Henry Payne noted: “And there are sea monsters in Lake Michigan. I can feel them when I’m boating.”

Contradicting Stabenow’s claims, however, NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center reported that the number of F3 or stronger tornadoes has been declining since the early 1970s and 2013 had 142 fewer tornadoes reported than any year on record. Before this top ten Atlantic hurricane season, we had a record near 12-year period without any major hurricane landfall, beating out the 1860s by almost 4 years.

Our biggest challenge is as Mark Twain observed “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

The saddest result of policies based on bad science to achieve environmental dreams of a fossil fuel free world is the effects of high energy costs that inevitably follows on the poor and middle class families.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiatve (RGGI), which the Northeast Democratic governors claim has been a great success has the region paying the highest electricity prices in the nation (along with green California). Lower gasoline prices and heating fuel prices thanks to the fracking boom has eased the pain for now. But the environmentalists and green politicians want to stop that. It is already forbidden in New York State despite the rich Marcellus shale field that Pennsylvania is tapping into.

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Wherever the environmental lobby wins, people lose. Power prices in the Australian renewable energy paradise of South Australia have driven 102,000 South Australians to beg for help from food charities, according to a major South Australian newspaper. Those people have been forced to skip meals so that they can pay their soaring electricity bills.

In Europe, the rapid growth of generously subsidized renewable projects has left end users, taxpayers or energy companies with steeper bills while private investors have secured lucrative profits. Over 25% of the UK households, especially pensioners are in what is called energy poverty, having to choose between heating and eating.

The result of these policies in Germany, businesses and families now pay the second highest electricity price in Europe, after Denmark: 45 cents per kilowatt-hour – five times what Americans pay for coal and gas-fueled electricity and nearly three times what they pay in California, Connecticut and New York. The more wind and solar, the higher the electricity prices.

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As pundits have asked: How many workers would be laid off in America’s factories, refineries, and other businesses if electricity prices double, triple or quintuple? How many families would be driven into severe energy poverty? How many businesses or entire industries would have to close? How many people would die every winter, because they could no longer afford to heat their homes properly, especially in frigid northern states?

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