They’re gaslighting voters and consumers – when the real mass killers are environmentalists
By Paul Driessen
We’re constantly told fossil fuel use is
causing an existential climate crisis, extreme weather, worsening
wildfires, and more frequent and intense hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts.
Actual temperature, storm and other records provide no
support for these claims. They certainly don’t back up ludicrous
assertions that burning coal, oil and natural gas – and even human breathing and baking pizzas in wood-fired ovens – are causing countless alleged calamities: such as slowing Earth’s rotation, thereby affecting scientific time clocks (by one second).
The
claims are based primarily on computer models that erroneously assume
carbon dioxide and a few other “greenhouse gases” (0.05% of Earth’s
atmosphere, in total) control the climate, while the sun plays virtually no role, urban heat islands are inconsequential, and incompetent forest management is irrelevant.
It’s
gaslighting: perversions of truth designed to make us guilt-ridden,
willing to slash our living standards, and happy to keep poor countries
energy-deprived and impoverished.
In the USA and worldwide, fossil fuels still provide 80% of total energy. They’re also the foundation
for our economy, living standards, health and longevity – and over
6,000 vital products, including plastics, paints, pharmaceuticals,
cosmetics, cell phones, eyeglasses, fertilizers and wind turbine
blades.
“Earth-friendly” wind and solar installations
would blanket millions of acres of farmland, scenic areas and wildlife
habitats; require billions of tons of ores; generate billions of tons of
toxic water and air pollution from mining and manufacturing; and send
electricity prices skyrocketing to pay for expensive battery or gas
backup systems, and extensive new transmission lines and grid upgrades.
Climate Defiance, Extinction Rebellion and other radical
groups nevertheless block pipelines, rant and rampage through our
streets, deface priceless artwork, and glue themselves to roads and
statues, to intimidate legislators and regulators.
Others
file endless lawsuits to bankrupt fossil fuel projects and promote
their twisted views about “climate justice.” Their latest scheme could
be viewed as the culmination of their self-indoctrination.
A recent Harvard Environmental Law Review article proposes prosecuting major oil companies for “climate homicide”
and “mass murder” – for supposedly killing people, by raising global
temperatures and sea levels, and causing deadlier hurricanes, tornadoes,
floods, droughts, heatwaves, blizzards and wildfires.
Media outlets eagerly promoted the claims
– and Soros-funded prosecutors will undoubtedly be thrilled to indict
ExxonMobil and other companies, once they’ve put more flash-mob thieves
back on our streets.
But not even these prosecutors –
or any judge, jury or “expert witness” – can separate natural from human
causes of modern climate change. Nor can they calculate fractions of
manmade-climate-change-induced disasters attributable to coal, oil, gas,
dung, or “renewable” energy mining and manufacturing; to China and
India versus Europe and the United States; or certainly to specific
energy companies.
What they really don’t want addressed
in this “climate homicide” discussion, however, is who is actually
committing mass murder, especially of women and children, people with
disabilities, people of color and other “particularly threatened” groups
so supposedly beloved by climate justice warriors.
My book, Eco-Imperialism: Green power · Black death, forcefully demonstrates that it is these self-righteous climate and environmental activists, and those who fund them,
that are callously causing the eco-murder deaths of millions every year
– and setting the stage for dramatically more in the future.
These
environmentalist death tolls have worsened, as greens became wealthier,
more powerful, more fanatical, and more influential with and within US,
EU and UN government agencies.
More than 750 million people
still have no access to electricity; nearly 2 billion have only
sporadic access to barely enough electricity to charge cell phones and
power a lightbulb or 1-cubic-foot refrigerator – and no juice for modern
homes, schools and hospitals, water purification, or factories and
other job-creating businesses.
These people are forced
to heat and cook with wood, charcoal or animal dung, inhaling noxious
fumes that cause millions of deaths annually from respiratory diseases.
Millions more die annually from intestinal diseases due to contaminated
water and spoiled food, due to energy deprivation.
Green fanatics perpetuate the death tolls, by battling anything except grossly insufficient, weather-dependent
wind and solar power. (In European and other modern countries, people
die of heatstroke when they cannot get or afford air conditioning; nine times more die from cold – from hypothermia and illnesses they’d normally survive if they could afford to heat their homes properly.)
The fanatics also wage campaigns to deny Third World people access to insecticides and spatial insect repellants that would control disease-carrying flies and mosquitoes and even modern farming practices and technologies.
Millions more thus die every year from diseases that are readily
preventable or could be cured in modern hospitals (that don’t exist).
No wonder developing nations increasingly reject Western carbon colonialism.
Radical food groups
despise genetically engineered crops that multiply crop yields, survive
droughts and slash pesticide spraying by 75% or more. They vilify Golden Rice, which enables malnourished children to avoid Vitamin A Deficiency, blindness and death.
They demand “AgroEcology,” which rejects virtually everything that helps modern farmers feed billions more people
with less acreage and water, and could largely eliminate hunger and
malnutrition worldwide. The perverse movement rabidly opposes
biotechnology, chemical insecticides, nitrogen fertilizers, and even hybrid seeds, monoculture farming and mechanized equipment like tractors.
It
demands “food sovereignty” for impoverished, malnourished Africans,
Asians and Latin Americans – the right to “define their own food and
agriculture systems” and have “healthy and culturally appropriate” food
produced through “ecologically sound and sustainable methods.”
Even more bizarre and frightening, major philanthropies like the Rockefeller Foundation and Walton Family Foundation support this craziness! So do the World Bank and many UN agencies.
They
say the world’s food production systems should be “aligned” with the
purely arbitrary goal of preventing more than 1.5ºC of global warming
since 1850, by “phasing out fossil fuel use, especially
fossil-fuel-based chemicals in industrial agriculture.”
Farmers
who want to “define their own food and agriculture systems” by choosing
modern technologies and practices get ostracized instead of supported.
It’s increasingly obvious that climate fear-mongering and
GIGO computer models have replaced evidence-based science, history,
human nutrition needs and traditional ethical principles.
But
on a more positive note, climate cultists chomping at the bit to see
oil companies prosecuted for climate murder should be careful what they
wish for. Such a precedent could put eco-imperialists and their
financiers on trial for manslaughter on a truly horrific scale.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of articles and books on environmental, climate and human rights issues.
