“Green” Hoax-Mongers Dupe Major Media (Again)
By Mary Theroux • Monday October 19, 2009 4:03 PM PDT • 10 Comments
Charlatans posing as representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a press release, sent out emails, and held a press conference at the Washington, D.C. National Press Club today, announcing the Chamber’s new “Free Enterprise Climate Policy” pushing for “strong climate legislation.”
One mystery is how Reuters and other news agencies could have been taken in by a statement (also posted on a fake webpage, here) peppered with such fractured logic and head-scratchers as:
The Chamber believes that if we do not help to prepare a strong climate change bill for the President, we will face a new foreclosure crisis, due once again to the shortsightedness of a few, and their quest for immediate lamb at the expense of long-term wool.
Presumably it’s because the media—and teachers, students, and the general public—have been trained to accept without question endlessly repeated but unsubstantiated proclamations, such as:
Climatologists tell us that if we don’t enact dramatic reductions in carbon emissions today, within 5 years we could begin facing the propagating feedback loops of runaway climate change. That would mean a disruption of food and water supplies worldwide, with the result of mass migrations, famines, and death on a scale never witnessed before.
The release fails, however, to disclose the predicted disruptions to a continuation of current historically high life expectancy rates and global food production that enacting Al Gore-enriching “cap and trade” legislation and the China-enriching Copenhagen treaty would result in.
Instead of facts that might actually feed informed decision-making—including temperature data from the government’s own National Space Science and Technology Center showing that global temperatures peaked with 1998′s el Nino and have been falling ever since; the squelched internal EPA report skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government; and evidence that polar bear populations are rising—anti-human “environmentalists” can only resort to ever-more bold campaigns of disinformation and outright lies to further their one-world-government, Copenhagen treaty agenda.
As the historical record shows, the Malthusian activists’ solution—more control of the world’s resources by governments—has resulted in far greater environmental degradation than the “business” interests they villify. Alternatively, when individuals have been free, they have, time and again, devised innovative solutions that no central planner could ever imagine.
Yet lies continue to sell, and facts continue to be buried and apparently largely unread in musty tomes as the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, such as this easily-accessible and readable article, “Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” —a virtual goldmine of data, detailing everything from the correlation between solar activity and global temperatures, to actual data on severe storms in the 20th century, sea levels, and CO2 levels, to analyses of the IPCC computer models underlying the hypothesis of anthropomorphic global warming, to the increase in U.S. forests in the past 50 years, the relative costs and benefits of alternative energy forms, and much more. As the scientist authors point out:
Across the globe, billions of people in poorer nations are struggling to improve their lives. These people need abundant low-cost energy, which is the currency of technological progress.
In newly developing countries, that energy must come largely from the less technologically complicated hydrocarbon sources. It is a moral imperative that this energy be available. Otherwise, the efforts of these peoples will be in vain, and they will slip backwards into lives of poverty, suffering, and early death.
Energy is the foundation of wealth. Inexpensive energy allows people to do wonderful things. For example, there is concern that it may become difficult to grow sufficient food on the available land. ...
Energy provides ... an even better food insurance plan. Energy-intensive hydroponic greenhouses are 2,000 times more productive per unit land area than are modern American farming methods. Therefore, if energy is abundant and inexpensive, there is no practical limit to world food production.
Fresh water is also believed to be in short supply. With plentiful inexpensive energy, sea water desalination can provide essentially unlimited supplies of fresh water.
During the past 200 years, human ingenuity in the use of energy has produced many technological miracles. These advances have markedly increased the quality, quantity, and length of human life. ...
Were this bright future to be prevented by world energy rationing, the result would be tragic indeed. In addition to human loss, the Earth’s environment would be a major victim of such a mistake.
The Copenhagen treaty—which today’s merry pranksters hope to foist upon their duped audience—would directly result in such world energy rationing, making victims of the environment, and especially the world’s poor. So why, if the Truth will set us free, are we so eager to instead be enslaved by lies?
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See also Re-Thinking Green: Alternatives to Environmental Bureaucracy, edited by Carl Close and Robert Higgs.
Tags: Business, Corruption, Disaster Management, Education, Energy, Environment, Food, Free Market, Global Warming, Media, Personal Liberty, Religion, Science, Taxation, Technology, Trade 
This article is just more tendentious propaganda from the Energy Institute. Much like the nonsense that spews forth from the Discovery Institute about “creationism,” it studiously avoids the overwhelming and ever growing consensus of scientists that anthropogenic global warming is upon us and we need to act rapidly to avoid cataclysmic changes.
While the flat earthers are busily burning effigies of Al Gore, they, like the I.D’ers, are using their own “Wedge strategy,” trying to “teach the controversy” as if one actually existed among scientists.
Time for a name change: The “Not Quite So Independent Institute.”
Rubbish!
Frank | Oct 20, 2009 | Reply
My Goodness, Frank!! Calling a scientist who disagrees with your opinion on a dubious hypothesis a “flat-earther” says much more about your scientific expertise than the author’s. The decisions made in Copenhagen could be critically important to humanity, particularly if they impose use restrictions or huge new taxes on energy. It is time for rationale minds to critically examine the best available data, lay aside our environmentalist religions and political agendas so we do not burden ourselves with ineffective, cumbersome regulations addressing a nonexistent problem.
Ken McCorkle | Oct 20, 2009 | Reply
Hi, Frank.
I don’t even know where or what the Energy Institute is, much less am I in receipt of their propaganda. I am perfectly capable of reading and thinking for myself, and have lived long enough to have learned that there’s a lot of hubris that doesn’t equate with reality.
See, for example, Time Magazine, June 24, 1974: “Another Ice Age?” http://tinyurl.com/3xfoak
“...a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.” The article concluded with an “expert” pronouncing: “I don’t believe that the world’s present population is sustainable if there are more than three years like 1972 in a row.”
Question: Are the National Space Science and Technology Center; the EPA center director whose report was quashed; polar bear biologist Mitch Taylor; the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons; the Polish Academy of Sciences; the new French minister of industry and innovation (and former head of the department of geochemistry at the Paris Geophysical Institute); New Zealand (long lauded as the “greenest nation”); Joanne Simpson, the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology; Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics; John Christy (Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a member of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change); Princeton physicist and former DOE head Will Happer; and countless other scientists with impeccable, independent credentials under the control of the Energy Institute?
Question 2: If there isn’t controversy among scientists, is science happening?
Question 3: Was Hitler democratically elected? Was slavery accepted as the destiny of the black man — and long before black slavery, nearly universal slavery of some by others? Did the Western intelligentsia, led by such luminaries as George Bernard Shaw, laud Stalin’s “new” Soviet society, with “hope everywhere in Russia”? Is “overwhelming and ever growing consensus” a measurement for Truth?
Perhaps a little more skepticism could save us — and especially the least-fortunate of the world — a lot of pain and suffering.
Thank you,
Mary
Mary Theroux | Oct 20, 2009 | Reply
Mary,
I too was confused by Frank’s use of “Energy Institute”. Still don’t know what he’s talking about. Notice the lack of any substantial argument just name calling and the ever present “consensus of scientists meme”. In fact, I’m seeing more and more scientists question the AGW science. That’s a good thing.
Also, I’m always fascinated to see people immediately question scientists’ motives who work in the private sector but give a free pass to scientists who work for governments or even international organizations like the U.N. If the notion is that the science is going to be subverted to fit corporate desires, why would it be different for government scientists? It reminds me of the following quote from Mises:
“If one rejects laissez faire on account of man’s fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reasons also reject every kind of government action.”
Thanks
RickC | Oct 20, 2009 | Reply
Thanks, RickC.
Good Mises quote. I’ll keep it at hand!
C.S. Lewis wrote a great essay on the topic of calling names rather than refuting arguments, titled “Bulverism:”
Best wishes,
Mary
Mary Theroux | Oct 20, 2009 | Reply
whenever i hear the “consensus” idea i like to reply with this:
In this respect, going along with the “scientific consensus” of the day can prove dangerous in some situations: nothing looks worse on a record than making drastic decisions based on theories which later turned out to be false, such as the compulsory sterilization of thousands of mentally ill patients in the US during the 1930s under the false notion that it would end mental illness.
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Scientific-consensus
also, there was a “scientific consensus” that black were inferior to whites.
redbone | Oct 21, 2009 | Reply
The most worrying aspect is the total absence of debate in both the “quality” and “popular” media.
Such is the power of the media that the one sided fashionable and ignorant reporting (it’s much easier that way!)has convinced the general public that amongst all kinds of untested misinformation, CO2 is now a pollutant! Kids are learning this at school.
Do the media not have any qualified science journalists or reporters who can open up the debate?
Peter Auld | Oct 21, 2009 | Reply
Frank does bring up a point. How do you tell when you are are on the wrong side of the facts. With creationism it is easy to see the nit picking over whether a transitional fossil is really showing a transition as silly. Especially in light of the overwhelming fossil, genetic and molecular evidence of evolution. But global warming science seems to be so mired in political agendas that it is hard to tell if the alarmists have science on their side. At one point the evidence seemed to be overwhelming for man caused global warming. But is this still true? And is it nit picking to get upset when original data is destroyed, when the hockey stick graph is debunked, when warming stopped 9 years ago? Where is the science really?
Mike Spalding | Oct 21, 2009 | Reply
Frank’s resurrecting an old bit of name-calling. The name “not-quite-so-independent-institute” was first used to smear the Independent Institute by claiming that the fact that Microsoft was among its corporate contributors was the real reason for its stance on antitrust, even through it had been making the same critique long before the Microsoft antitrust issue came up. At least try being original, Frank.
GaryM | Oct 29, 2009 | Reply