The U.S. government dedicates millions of tax dollars every year to send its representatives to climate change conferences across the world. It makes little difference who is in power. In 1997, the Clinton administration sent 47 representatives to the two-week United Nations meeting in Japan where the Kyoto Protocol was created. Ten years later, the Bush administration sent the same number to the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia.
President Barack Obama doubled down on this tradition, sending 124 representatives to the U.N.’s Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009 and 79 reps to the 2014 conference in Peru. With basic travel and living expenses of over $10,000 per participant for the ten-day yearly event, costs easily exceeded a million dollars per meeting.
The Trump Administration’s approach to these events is nearly as ridiculous, sending 42 representatives to the Katowice (Poland) Climate Change Conference in December 2018.
In fact, there are dozens of climate change conferences that administration officials attend around the world each year. Clearly, the sky is the limit when it comes to covering costs for America’s high-flying climate bureaucrats. While we are advised to walk, bicycle, and take the bus to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, hundreds of civil servants regularly enjoy tax payer funded flights to exotic locations across the globe to take part in negotiations to save the world by eliminating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels.
To balance their knowledge of the climate change issue, how many of the current administration’s staff are scheduled to attend the most important climate change conference of the year that is being held a mere 0.8 miles from The White House?
Perhaps you have guessed; it is zero.
That’s right, no one from the Trump administration will be in attendance at the 13th International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-13) being held on July 25th at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.
That is a huge loss since ICCC-13 will reveal that neither science nor economics back up the climate scare. Speakers will explain that this is one of the greatest scandals in history.
ICCC-13 is the latest in a series of conferences held across the world by The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank which is based in Arlington Heights, Illinois. The first ICCC conference (ICCC-1) was held in New York City in 2008 and resulted in the release of “The Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change”, which was endorsed by 114 climate experts who were in attendance at the conference as well as 712 qualified endorsers not at the conference. ICCC-1 speakers provided compelling evidence in support of the conclusions of the Manhattan Declaration, which stated:
“That current plans to restrict anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a dangerous misallocation of intellectual capital and resources that should be dedicated to solving humanity’s real and serious problems.
“That there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.
“That attempts by governments to inflict taxes and costly regulations on industry and individual citizens with the aim of reducing emissions of CO2 will pointlessly curtail the prosperity of the West and progress of developing nations without affecting climate.
“That adaptation as needed is massively more cost-effective than any attempted mitigation, and that a focus on such mitigation will divert the attention and resources of governments away from addressing the real problems of their peoples.
“That human-caused climate change is not a global crisis.”
The Declaration recommended:
“That world leaders reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular, but misguided works such as ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.
“That all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith.”
In the years that followed, many of the world’s leading experts in climate and energy science, policy, and economics spoke at ICCC events. In every case, they delivered realistic views of these disciplines, completely at odds with the alarmist stance promoted at virtually all of the other climate conferences around the world. Presenters at ICCC events hailed from major universities such as Princeton, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Alabama, and Canada’s University of Victoria. The U.S. Senate, state governments, and prominent international think tanks provided speakers, and dozens of U.S. state legislators attended as observers.
Yet federal administration after administration continued to ignore the conferences. In fact, not once in the twelve ICCC events held to date did a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator bother to attend. Even when the 2015 Tenth International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-10) was held at Washington Court Hotel, 1.1 miles from EPA Headquarters, neither EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy nor any of her representatives bothered to walk down the street to hear that much of what their agency was saying about climate change is completely wrong. McCarthy would have heard William Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, now President Trump’s primary advisor on climate change, tell the audience that the forecasts of models on which the climate scare is based diverge widely from real world observations. “The models don’t work at all,” said Happer at ICCC-10, “and yet we’re supposed to believe them and think that this is an existential threat to the world” (and alter our economy accordingly).
The Administrator and her staff would have learned from University of Pennsylvania forecasting expert Professor J. Scott Armstrong that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts are untrustworthy since they violate almost all relevant forecasting principals. They would have learned from the late Professor Bob Carter, former Head of the Department of Earth Sciences at Australia’s James Cook University, that the announcements of national science academies supporting climate alarm “are based, not on the views of the expert members of the societies involved, but on the views of a small cadre of politically active executives. It is a political consensus. It is not a scientific consensus.”
Similarly, if today’s EPA Administrator, Andrew Wheeler, and his staff were to attend ICCC-13 on July 25th (none are scheduled to attend) they would learn that the EPA’s recently released Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule is fundamental misguided. This is because, like the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan that it replaces, the ACE rule is based largely on the mistaken idea that CO2 emissions from industrial activities need to be controlled due to their supposed impact on the thermostat of our planet. EPA continues to consider CO2 as a pollutant, when, in fact, it is the exact opposite. Were it not for life-giving CO2, Earth would be a dead world. Its recent increase has produced a 24% increase in the green areas of Africa.
If EPA officials were to attend ICCC-13, they would hear from PhD scientists Nir Shaviv, David Legates, Roy Spencer, and others about:
- the huge impact the Sun has on climate change, an effect too often ignored by climate activists
- how climate model results compare with observed temperature data
- the science presented in Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, the latest volume of peer-reviewed research by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC)
- the real-world benefits of CO2 and a warmer climate.
They would also hear from Dr. Kevin Dayaratna, Dr. Roger Bezdek, and Dr. Benjamin Zycher, about the latest in energy and climate economics and the societal benefits of fossil fuels. They would learn from policy experts Myron Ebell, Douglas Pollock, and James Taylor about the “Political suicide of CO2 taxes, the Green New Deal, and renewable mandates.”
And Wheeler and his staff would be present when awards are given to some of the most courageous scientists on the planet, people who have risked their career, and even their lives, to stand up for good science and honest debate on one of the most important policy issues of our age.
Although administration officials are apparently too concerned with political correctness to dare attend ICCC-13, let’s hope they are at least watching on line, which anyone can do at www.heartland.org starting at 8:00 am ET on July 25.
Future generations will not look kindly on today’s leaders for paying attention to only one side of the climate debate. By then, trillions of dollars will have been wasted trying to accomplish the impossible – controlling the climate of our planet – while numerous critical real-world issues remain improperly funded. With over $1 billion U.S. dollars now spent every day across the world on climate finance, it is a disgrace that this administration, like all those before it, will not be in attendance at the most important climate change conference of the year.
About Dr. Jay Lehr & Tom Harris
Dr. Jay Lehr is Senior Policy Analyst with the International Climate Science Coalition and former Science Director of The Heartland Institute. He is an internationally renowned scientist, author and speaker who has testified before Congress on dozens of occasions on environmental issues and consulted with nearly every agency of the national government, as well as many foreign countries. After graduating from Princeton University at the age of 20 with a degree in Geological Engineering, he went on to receive the nation’s first Ph.D. in Groundwater Hydrology from the University of Arizona. He later became executive director of the National Association of Groundwater Scientists and Engineers. Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition. He has 40 years experience as a mechanical engineer/project manager, science and technology communications professional, technical trainer and S&T advisor to a former Opposition Senior Environment Critic in Canada’s Parliament. He is currently a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute.
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