Let me tell you the worst thing about the climate change scam. It’s not the lies, not bullying, not the perversion of the scientific method, not the establishment cover-ups, not the needless scaremongering, not the wasted money, not the nannying overregulation, not the destroyed wildlife and ruined countryside, not the stymied economic growth — bad though all these things are. No one what really sticks in the craw is that the people making money out of it are the scum of the earth.
The other day, while out hunting, I met a man who ran a brothel. (Till he got busted, anyway). I liked and respected him for brothel-keeping is an honourable profession which supplies a vital need and makes the world a happier place.
This is something that never could be said of a single person working in the climate change industry. It is now worth an eyewatering $1.5 trillion per annum — not a penny of which goes on anything remotely useful. As I argue here at the Spectator, it is a Potemkin industry, a racket, a form of state-sanctioned organised crime.
No one, in a free market, would spend a penny of their earnings on wind turbines, solar panels, research grants for dubious climate science projects, local council sustainability officers, et al: the industry is entirely dependent for its existence on favours granted to rent-seeking troughers by the political class.
If you build a giant trough, the pigs will come. And they have. (No insult to real pigs, by the way. Bacon! Mmm)
I’m thinking, for example, of wind farm entrepreneurs like Dale “dog on a rope” Vince — the former new age traveller whose £100 million fortune derives from carpeting the British landscape with gigantic bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes.
Rajendra Pachauri, the bearded, yogic railway engineer with wandering hands who, largely because he fitted the right ethnic profile, managed to parlay his way into heading the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, jetting round the world for a succession of climatological shindigs in exotic locations, as well as making a tidy bit on the side thanks to his TERI research institute.
Al Gore, the climate huckster who was worth less than $2 million when he failed to become US president, but has since made another $300 million with anti-carbon investment hype, benefiting from regulations that he helped create.
Tom “rhymes with liar” Steyer — and the rest of the Billionaires’ Club — of mostly left-leaning green crony capitalists.
Jagadish Shukla, a George Mason University climate professor with a rare aptitude for snaffling millions of dollars in taxpayer funded grants but rather less of a skill — you suspect — when it comes to producing research of any damn use to anyone.
You get the idea. Climate change is a racket — a make work scheme created by and for “the Clerisy” (all those overeducated, undertalented middle-class wasters with crappy degrees in non-subjects like ecology, climatology, sociology, environmental sciences, environmental law, sustainability, and the rest) but also feasted on with relish by scavenging crony capitalists, enviro-charity fundraisers, crapster journalists too ideologically blinkered or too financially vulnerable to do their due diligence, sinister technocrats, corrupt and greedy politicians, etc.
And we’re not talking a cottage industry, here, remember. $1.5 trillion a year is a serious amount of money. It’s the same, approximately, as the value of the entire global online shopping industry. This is a business that keeps a lot, lot, LOT of people in work. Every man jack of them — did I say this already? — an unconscionable, weapons-grade, copper-bottomed tosser.
But enough rage. How do we get back all that money we’ve had taken from us by our governments and spunked on their cronies at Solyndra and BrightSource or thrown casually into grants for junk science research like “ocean acidification” or squandered on shysters at tainted institutions like NASA, NOAA and the Royal Society or wasted on anti-capitalist bureaucracies like the EPA and the Department of Energy and Climate Change? How do we extract value and justice from a financial system which has been rigged over a period of decades in favour of the bad guys?
How do we get our revenge?
If you’ve read Michael Lewis’s Big Short — or seen the movie — you’ll know that similar questions went through the minds of a few canny investors in the run up to the 2008 crash. They worked out a way of betting against a corrupt system which they knew was doomed to collapse and ended up making money out of it. I wish I’d been one of them. So I’m sure do you. Well now — albeit on a smaller scale — there’s maybe a chance that we can.
Have a look at this website. You may know some of the people involved: its chief scientific advisor, Dr David Evans is the former Australian government climate modeller who went to the dark side and is married to blogger Jo Nova. Basically their plan is to set up a hedge fund whose raison d’être is to bet against the ‘climate consensus’: instead of global warming, they’re expecting the planet to cool; instead of renewables being our energy future, they’re betting on the subsidies drying up and the whole industry collapsing; instead of fossil fuels being left in the ground as “stranded assets”, they’re expecting them to go on satisfying the world’s energy needs for many generations to come. That’s why they’re called the Cool Futures Fund.
I don’t know whether it will make any money – or whether it will even get off the ground. But I’ve just made a “donation” on its crowdfunding site. For $75 (Australian — less than US) you get a certificate and a symbolic single share in the management company. Obviously it’s not going to make me rich, but it’s the principle of the thing that counts.
First, it feels right to be backing the only investment vehicle in the world explicitly geared to calling the Climate Scam’s bluff.
Second, now I’m a ‘hedge fund manager’ not only will my friends respect me more but I’ll almost certainly be invited to join the Soros party in their private volcano in Davos next year — and I just can’t wait to tell them where to shove it.