Is authoritarianism the only way to save the planet?
The reason we have a global climate crisis is that crises sell. It allows politicians to tax, spend and assert more control.
“The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and, in some places, the seals are finding the water too hot. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters, and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard‐of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Within a few years, it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable” — from an Associated Press report published in The Washington Post, Nov. 2, 1922.
According to a new study reported in the Guardian, to provide a fair transition away from fossil fuels, “rich countries must end all oil and gas production in the next 12 years and the poorest nations should be given 28 years. Wealthy countries such as the UK, US, and Australia have until 2034 to stop all oil and gas production to give the world a 50% chance of preventing devastating climate breakdown, while the poorest nations that are also heavily reliant on fossil fuels should be given until 2050” — Prof Kevin Anderson
The study found that oil and gas revenue contributed 8% to US GDP but without it, the country’s GDP per head would still be around $60,000 – the second highest globally. This claim is absurd. Without oil and gas, the U.S. economy would experience a severe depression. Extreme poverty would rise and millions would die of starvation. The majority of people would be forced to live in huts warmed by cow dung. Only the very rich and the political class would live in comfort.
This is just one more alarmist study designed to scare people. People have been ringing the save the planet alarm bell since 1922 and the doomsday predictions never materialize.
“We have ten years to stop the catastrophe,” said the UN’s environmental protection boss. This was a news story from 1972. In 1982, after the catastrophe failed to happen, the New York Times covered the second UN conference on the environment, which opened “amid gloom”: “an environmental catastrophe as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust.”
Mostafa K. Tolba, executive director of the United Nations environmental program, said that if things aren’t fixed by the turn of the century — the year 2000 — the world would face “an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust.’’
In 1989, a senior UN environmental official shaved a year off that dire prediction, saying that if we didn’t fix climate change by 1999, we would have “Global disaster, nations wiped off the face of the earth (and) crop failures.” A year later, Tolba was back saying: “We shall win — or lose — the climate struggle in the first years of the 1990s.” The 1990s passed without the End Times.
On July 5, 1989, Noel Brown, then director of the New York office of the United Nations Environment Program, warned of a “10‐year window of opportunity to solve” global warming and that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco‐refugees,’ threatening political chaos.” The U.N. forecasted disaster never occurred.
In 2004, the Guardian reported a “secret report” from the Pentagon that climate change would “destroy us.” The Guardian described this as “humiliating to the Bush administration” because it wasn’t doing enough to tackle climate change.
In 2007, the chief of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared, “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.” Ten years have passed, so it must be too late already. Why, then, spend more time and money fighting global warming? We might as well enjoy a mint julep on the beach while we sizzle in the sun.
Similarly, Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN climate panel, said, “If there is no action before 2012, that’s too late.” The good news is, the UN recently said that the planet has “only 11 years left to prevent irreversible damage from climate change.”
On Jan. 19, 2009, James Hansen, a climate expert who until last year was head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, declared that President Obama “has only four years to save the Earth.” In 2006, Al Gore told us that we had only “10 years” to solve the global‐warming problem.
A new IPCC report, as reported by the WEF, says radical climate action required
On 28 February 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report, highlighting the causes, impacts, and possible solutions to climate change.
Findings in the report show that climate breakdown is happening faster than expected and that the window to take action is closing fast.
The report is a call to governments and private sector players to take drastic action against climate change.
In November 2021, COP26 concluded in Glasgow, Scotland, with the adoption of the Glasgow Climate Pact – a commitment to reach a global net-zero emissions target by 2050. Central to the pact is keeping a 1.5℃ global warming target within reach. Glasgow made some progress, but estimates suggest that even if commitments are delivered, the world is headed for 2.4℃ warming.
This week, the IPCC reported that climate breakdown is occurring faster than anticipated and that, at current levels, many parts of the planet will become uninhabitable in the next few decades. After reading the report, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, said: “I have seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this. This is code red for humanity. We must combine forces now to avert climate catastrophe.”
The climate crisis provides cover for emergency powers
The reason we have a global climate crisis is that it allows politicians to tax, spend and assert more control. Control and power go hand in hand.
Leftist governments gin up climate fear.
It seems authoritarian power is required to ‘save the planet.’ With increased [undemocratic] power, governments can massively redistribute wealth in the name of ‘environmental justice.’
Democrat nominee Joe Biden proposed a $2 trillion plan to put the U.S. economy on track to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. With a focus on “environmental justice” – meaning “wealth transfer from one segment of society to another” – this delusional proposal imagines a carbon emissions-free power sector by 2035, the electrification of the ground-based transportation sector and net-zero emissions for commercial buildings by 2030.
Biden, who once suggested jail time for oil and gas executives, proposed a plan which demonizes our industry’s leaders by calling for a government-imposed reduction in executive pay for companies that “shift the environmental burdens of their actions onto taxpayers.” His plan included establishing an Environmental and Climate Justice Division within the Department of Justice.
Biden’s plan was shaped by a Sen. Bernie Sanders-Biden Unity Task Force co-chaired by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of the $93 trillion Green New Deal fame. House Democrats rolled out a 500-page plan to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The 120-bill proposal was really about “environmental justice” and the plan was to see the U.S. achieve net-negative emissions after 2050.
Nor is taxing windfall profits a good idea. Oil is a boom-and-bust industry. It is fantasy to believe that renewable energy can replace oil and gas overnight, and taxing windfall profits will only make investors think twice about investing in the oil we need to carry us over until clean energy arrives in abundance.
Climate change and the urgent need to ‘save the planet’ is fear-mongering to gin up support for the left’s big-government agenda to transform America. The propaganda can be harnessed to a Trojan horse of socialist policies—massive redistribution of wealth—that transforms America into big government socialism. Government must act to 'save the planet'.
If the environmental and equality justice bills become law, one-party rule and authoritarianism will surely follow. This is how the left can defeat our free enterprise capitalism once and for all.
The brand of all cultural revolutions is untruth about the past and present to control the future. The left’s cultural revolution success is based on a series of lies, misrepresentations, and distortions—propaganda—whose sheer weight would normally sink it. It stays afloat because of censorship that controls and shapes the narratives. The results of the November midterm elections will determine whether they can keep the big censorship ship afloat—or sinks.
Climate change is real, but adapting to it and mitigating it with technology is the only realistic solution. Emissions are falling in Western countries and the world is innovating. As the climate changes, let us not add to it with a lot of political hot air (a.k.a. fearmongering propaganda) that pollutes our reason.
A woman drying cattle dung for household fuel in West Bengal, India (Image by ILRI/Stevie Mann). Over two-thirds of India’s 1.3 billion people continue to rely on carbon-emitting biomass and dung-based fuel for cooking, according to a United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) report titled ‘Sustainable Energy For All.’