Progressives, communists included, have waged a war against capitalism, technology, and individualism for many decades. Lately, they have waged that war under the false flag of “global warming.”
An estimated $4 billion a day is spent world-wide trying to slow or stop man-made global warming. Environmentalists worship a supposed “97 percent consensus” on the matter and refuse to listen to anyone who disagrees, no matter how eminent or reasonable.
Listen to Bast discuss this on Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM:
Prior to November 8, progressives were winning their war. But that changed with the election of Donald Trump, followed by his demonstrated commitment to make good on his campaign promises to rein in EPA, cut spending on global warming boondoggles, and end global warming profiteering. Trump’s Energy Independence Executive Order represents a great start on keeping those promises.
A conference last week showed just how much Trump’s election has already changed the global warming debate. The Heartland Institute, along with ten cosponsoring organizations, hosted the 12th International Conference on Climate Change, this one taking place in Washington, D.C.
Unlike the many meetings of liberal environmentalists and their rent-seeking allies in the alternative energy movement, this conference featured honest and open dialogue on the causes and consequences of climate change.
Speaker after speaker rose to tell how real science shows the human impact on the climate is small, future climate conditions cannot be predicted, and the effects of modest global warming are more likely to be positive than negative.
Other speakers demonstrated that the net effect of fossil fuels on the world is positive, not negative as claimed by the last administration and its “Baptists and bootleggers” allies in the radical environmental movement and alternative energy industry. The effects of fossil fuels on health, the natural environment, agriculture, even on world peace, were all shown to be positive, and sometimes dramatically so. (Click here to watch video of all the speakers.)
The so-called “social cost of carbon” – a computer-model-derived fake number purporting to show the negative effects of the use of fossil fuels – was shown to be almost surely negative, if such a calculation were possible in the first place.
Three hundred people attended and more than 7,000 watched online to hear some 40 speakers, including 21 with Ph.D.s and one astronaut (Walter Cunningham of Apollo 7 and Skylab fame).
Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), and several members of the Trump transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were on the program, expressing their support for “resetting U.S. climate policy.”
Unlike past conferences in the series, this one was not boycotted by the liberal media. They were all there: Greenwire, New Republic, New York Times, Time, Washington Post, Newsweek, PBS Frontline, and even Mother Jones. Another 50 journalists, bloggers, and documentary film producers from around the world covered the conference.
As I said in my opening remarks at the conference, this is a great time to be a global warming realist! After years in the wilderness, we are now in the EPA, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Energy, and coming soon to NASA, NOAA, and the rest of Washington, D.C.’s alphabet soup of regulatory agencies.
We’re in the White House.
We’ve already won the science debate: Most scientists don’t believe climate change is mostly man-made and dangerous. We’ve demonstrated beyond doubt that there is no scientific “consensus” on the most important issues in the global warming debate, and there never was. It is just one more example of fake news by advocates pretending to be experts and reporters.
We’ve already won the battle over public opinion. Recent opinion polls show fewer than half of Americans believe human activity is responsible for most global warming, this despite the most expensive and extensive propaganda campaign conducted in human history. Voters rank “stopping global warming” dead last when asked to rank problems they want government to address.
Some 42 percent of voters say they aren’t willing to spend even $1 a month to stop global warming. And only 25 percent of voters believe the scientific debate is settled.
The election of Donald Trump means we will win the political battle next. That means retracting the Clean Power Plan and endangerment finding and withdrawing from the Paris Accord and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
It means repealing regulations adopted during the past eight years, or even 12 years, that aimed at killing the coal industry and punishing the nuclear power industry. It means ending subsidies to renewable energies and replacing EPA with a “committee of the whole” composed of the 50 state natural resources agencies.
Don’t just “reform” the EPA, end it.
The last administration’s war on fossil fuels destroyed millions of jobs, cost consumers billions of dollars, and undermined American greatness. It was a crime against humanity, an awful chapter in American history that can finally be ended.
Mr. President, end this war.
Joseph L. Bast is president and CEO of The Heartland Institute, a national nonprofit research and education organization based in Illinois. He can be reached at jbast@heartland.org.
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