Against 'Climate Change,' Week One

Jun 14, 2023

In the last edition of this newsletter, we announced our Against “Climate Change” series. We’re now one week into it — with plenty more to come — and what follows are the contributions of our various writers thus far.

Our editor, Michael Walsh:

Waiting for GODot

What do the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) have in common with each other? Besides some form of putative monotheism, quite a bit, as it turns out. Each relies on "prophecy" to justify the validity of its teachings. Each has a canon of sacred scriptures, dictated by the Almighty whether directly or through human intermediaries, which its scholars and adherents pore over in order to discover hidden meanings and glean new insights into the human condition. Each regards itself as the sole repository of truth, to the exclusion of all other rites and practices. Each, in its own way, believes that it alone is God's prescription for the good and moral life, handed down on high via (pick one) Moses, Jesus of Nazareth, or Muhammad. Each anathematizes heretics. Each defines sin and regards its expiation as essential to eternal salvation. And while they share many of the same cast of characters, each is dogmatically exclusionary of the others.

Let us now add a fourth faith to this trinity: "man-made climate change." Its professed goals might be quite different, but in practice, it is indistinguishable from the other three. Computer projections forecasting certain doom are its "prophecies" and climatologists are its Hoseas, Jeremiahs, and Isaiahs. Apocalyptic books such as Al Gore's Earth in the Balance and his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, are Holy Writ. And Greta Thunberg, the Swedish school striker, is its embodiment of Bernadette and Joan of Arc. It is not enough to believe in some of what its votaries say: one must believe in all of it, and the only way to salvation is through its teachings. Time, of course, is of the essence.

From Steven Hayward:

The Persistent Appeal of the 'Climate Apocalypse'

The fundamental appeal of environmentalism, and especially the "climate change" cult, is related directly to its central defect: the Malthusian view that humans are a pestilence on the planet, doomed to self-extinction—if, that is, we don’t turn over our lives wholly to a politically powerful (meaning tyrannical) elite. It is a perverse paradox that if you demonstrate to an environmentalist that the environmental apocalypse is not coming, it makes them very sad and angry. What explains this demented state of mind?

The neo-Malthusianism of modern environmentalism was riding high in the 1970s when an artificial, government-caused “energy crisis” combined with government-caused inflation to lend verisimilitude to the media-driven narrative that we were running out of everything and were hard up against the “limits to growth,” as one famous study of the era proclaimed on the basis of a garbage-in/garbage-out computer model. And who can forget the Carter Administration’s Global 2000 report released in 1980, which predicted, among other resource disasters, an acute global scarcity of oil by the year 2000 that would drive its price up to $200 a barrel.

Malthus’s thesis that human population growth would outstrip available food and resources leading to catastrophic collapse has been repeatedly refuted. Virtually every environmentalist prediction of imminent doom over the last 50 years has been proven wrong, often by an order of magnitude, such that even environmentalists are occasionally embarrassed and promise to swear off the dismal Malthusian malt. But the environmentalist embarrassment never lasts long. They are like Alcoholics Anonymous drop-outs, who ditch their 12-step program and go on a bender at the next well-lit Malthusian tavern they wander by.

Rather than change their mind, environmentalists change the subject, invent new terms for their old-time religion, and grab at any issue that comes to mind to keep their apocalyptic narrative going. With the “limits to growth” thesis thoroughly debunked by the 1990s, environmentalists pivoted to a new model, ostensibly compatible with economic growth: “sustainable development.” The problem with “sustainable development” is that despite extensive intellectual effort (and even a presidential commission during the Clinton Administration), the idea ironically proved too flabby to sustain itself, never mind its openly anti-growth policy. Environmental scientist Timothy O’Riordan warned early on:

It may only be a matter of time before the metaphor of sustainability becomes so confused as to be meaningless, certainly as a device to straddle the ideological conflicts that pervade contemporary environmentalism.

But climate change became the ideal solution for the defects of their previous anti-growthism and dismal record at predicting a near-term apocalypse. First, "climate change" has a long timeline, and a distant apocalypse relives environmentalism of the failure of their imminent predictions, like Paul Ehrlich’s absurd pronouncement in 1968 that by the mid-1970s hundreds of millions would die from famine.

Second, it solved the stumbling block of resource abundance. In the 1970s, we were told that we had to embrace conservation and “renewable” energy like wind and solar power because we were rapidly running out of fossil fuels, arable farmland, and other resources. Today we are told that we have to embrace conservation and renewable energy because we aren’t running out of fossil fuels, farmland, and other resources fast enough! And the population bomb has fizzled out, too. It turned out to be a wet firecracker at worst.

Environmentalists thought climate change would be their ticket to ultimate power for the simple reason that energy is the master resource, and thus getting control of the planet’s energy systems would enable control of everything. While 30-plus years of climate policy has wreaked economic havoc (with worse to come), it has actually not made a dent in the ultimate goal of eliminating fossil fuels for the simple reason that fossil fuels are the only energy sources that work right now on a sufficient scale and reasonable cost—full stop.

From our Founding Editor, John O’Sullivan:

After 'Net-Zero,' A Different Kind of Deluge

When The Pipeline was launched more than three years ago, it was among a small minority of websites specializing in energy topics that warned the world it was heading for catastrophe in embracing the dogma of Net-Zero carbon emissions by 2050. We pointed out that even if one were to accept the belief that the world is facing a “climate emergency”—it isn’t—moving from a world eighty percent reliant on fossil fuels for energy to a world reliant to the same extent on renewables such as wind and sun would impose a drastic collapse in the world economy and living standards far worse than the impact of “climate change.”

Such arguments almost never got a serious government response or public attention. Mostly they were ignored—but not entirely. One occasional response was to concede that implementing Net-Zero would require some sacrifice on the part of ordinary people which, however, would be compensated for by a new Green Industrial Revolution, green jobs, and various environmental benefits.

But the degree of sacrifice required of everyone if we were to abandon fossil fuels entirely was never made clear. Financial estimates of its costs in higher taxes and energy prices were hard to find, and when found they were either unreliably low or so vast as to be hard to grasp. Undeterred, however, the Net-Zero caravan moved impressively forward from Copenhagen to Cairo to Glasgow with the U.N. and the world’s governments at its head, corporations, and investment houses dragged along in regulators’ wagons behind them, and loud angry crowds of NGOs and activists shouting “faster, faster” if anyone paused or questioned the direction of travel. Not many did. It was, after all, an inevitable matter of saving the world.

That was only yesterday. But with every revolution of the 24-hour news cycle, it seems more and more remotely in the past. “’Outraged and furious’: Germans rebel against gas boiler ban,” proclaimed a recent Financial Times headline on a story that householders were being forced by Germany’s energy transition policy —dubbed die Energiewende— “to install hearing systems power by renewables dubbed the ‘heat hammer.’”

“Treasury idiocy is killing North Sea Energy,” was the title the U.K. Times’s editors put on a column by the paper’s economic columnist, Juliet Samuel, that went on “The North Sea is critical to British energy security. Oil and gas supply more than two thirds of our overall energy. If the government has its way, North Sea industry will soon be in irreversible decline.”

It takes time for such stories to fight their way to the top of editorial agendas in major newspapers. But the technical and specialist media are full of them. Here, for instance, is Reinsurance News: “German reinsurance giant Hannover Re has opted to leave the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance, making it the third high profile re/insurer to leave the U.N.-convened alliance in less than a month. Unravelling, step by step...”

Unraveling? Maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but the discipline that the U.N. and government regulators have been able to exert over Wall Street and U.S. corporations in the form of ESG and fossil fuel disinvestment is certainly coming under pressure. Exxon is a fossil fuel company, which might cast doubt on the importance of the slow turning of its tanker towards defending its core business. As the website ZeroHedge grasps, Exxon’s pushback against the financial regulations designed to suppress fossil-fuel investment sounds unusually firm: Exxon “said the prospect of the world achieving net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 is remote and should not be further evaluated in its financial statements.”

And Exxon is not alone. Other oil and gas corporations—notably Beyond Petroleum—are scaling back their climate policy commitments to reflect the fact that they are in the oil business, not climatology, and that high and rising energy prices have been signaling the need for more investment in energy—and were doing so before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.

Jack Dunphy:

'Climate Change': A New Form of Paganism

“The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything,” wrote Belgian author Emile Cammaerts in The Laughing Prophet: The Seven Virtues & G.K. Chesterton. The line, in one form or another, is often attributed to Chesterton himself, but regardless of its provenance, it is especially apt in these times when so many of our fellow citizens have abandoned the Judeo-Christian tradition that for centuries underlay Western society. In its stead we witness the rise of a neo-paganism, the tenets of which are untethered from any reality as it was recognized only a few years ago.

Like any religion, this neo-paganism has its sacred texts, among which are the New York Times and its imitators, conveying to the faithful the latest version of accepted dogma. And as in many religions, adherents have divided themselves into sects, placing varying degrees of emphasis on any single tenet of dogma while taking care to stay faithful to all of them, lest they be branded as heretics and cast into the howling darkness.

“Climate change” is of course a key tenet of this new religion, as is the phantasmagorical notion that a man, through surgery, medication, or even by simply declaring it so, can become a woman or vice versa. My colleagues here at The Pipeline address these issues elsewhere in this series while I, from a vantage point afforded by more than 40 years as a police officer, address another, equally pernicious aspect of this modern cult: the deliberate destruction of civil society in the name of “social justice.”

Consider: in 1990, more than 2,200 people were murdered in New York City, the high-water mark for homicide in the five boroughs. Owing to political will and innovative police work, the yearly totals declined almost every year thereafter, reaching 295 in 2018, a period in which the city’s population grew by 1.4 million.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, this decline in murders and the accompanying decline in other crimes can be attributed to an enlarged police force and a manifest determination to arrest lawbreakers. The NYPD grew by 35 percent in the 1990s while the New York state prison population grew by 24 percent, figures that were welcomed at the time but arouse today’s social-justice neo-pagans to apoplexy.

They are thus aroused because the demographics of those imprisoned do not mirror those of New York City as a whole, this owing to the fact that blacks commit a far greater share of crime – especially violent crime – than other racial groups. Any effort to drive down crime will therefore fall most heavily on those most responsible for it, which, in New York City and any other American city one can name, happens to be young black males.

This is anathema to the neo-pagans who, as indicated by their unquestioning devotion to “climate change” and “trans rights,” choose to ignore reality while adopting the altered version of it as presented in their sacred texts or simply adopted as tribal folklore. A 2021 poll found that 53.5 percent of respondents who describe themselves as “very liberal” believed that police in the United States killed 1,000 or more unarmed black men every year. According to the Washington Post, the actual figure was 18 in 2020, 11 in 2021, and 12 in 2022. As we near the halfway point in 2023, the number stands at 5. And bear in mind that even someone who is technically “unarmed” can in some circumstances still be subjected to a lawful use of deadly force, which was the case in nearly all of these incidents.

The neo-pagans, like many primitive cults of the past, occasionally demand sacrifices be made to appease their gods. For example, Europe's "climate change" sect has called for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of cows in Ireland over the next several years, thereby eliminating their emissions and allowing that country to meet some bureaucratically invented "climate target."

So too does the social justice sect demand its sacrifices, the latest of whom is Daniel Penny, the former Marine now accused of manslaughter in the death of homeless drug addict and career criminal Jordan Neely. He joins Ashli Babbitt, who was killed by a police officer without legal cause during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, and the four former Minneapolis police officers whose misfortune it was to arrest George Floyd, another drug-addicted career criminal, as he was in the midst of dying from a drug overdose.

David Cavena:

The 'Climate' Cult vs. Humanity

The common thread linking the members of the Malthusian “Climate Change” cult leadership across the West is the rejection of Western civilization and modernity – for others. The modern world for me but not for thee. The common thread linking “Climate Change” voters is their rejection of reality: Does Anthropogenic Climate Change exist? No. If it did, are any of the steps being demanded sufficient to fix the problem as they have defined it? No. Is modern life even possible if the Climate Cult gets what it demands? No.

But do they care? Not in the least. Because the final thread linking these climate Malthusians is their disdain for humanity.

Farms in the Netherlands are being confiscated and livestock killed for no scientific reason. The Netherlands is the second-largest food exporter on the planet. How many will starve without these exports? The climate cult neither knows nor cares. The Netherlands is also the global leader in sustainable farming practices. If the cult were about sustainability, climate and humanity, the World Economic Forum and the U.N. would focus on spreading Dutch farming technology and techniques around the world, especially to the poorest nations, rather than shutting it down and banning these efficient farmers from re-locating to farm elsewhere.

And now in the U.S.A., Joe Biden's "climate czar" and well-known normalcy denier John F. Kerry is telling Americans that he is coming for our farms, too. So it's food scarcity all around then. And if you somehow manage to get your hands on some chow in their Green Utopia, the Climate Cult will ensure you aren’t allowed to refrigerate it or cook it.

A strategy focused on the destruction of food sources, food storage and preparation, and food processing plants across the planet isn't a strategy for saving the climate. It's a strategy for striking out at human life. And food is only one front in their nihilistic war on humanity. Energy is another. They are dead set on ending the energy sources which allow us not just to live but to thrive.

When we planned this project, we didn’t know that we’d have some straight-from-the-headlines environmental news requiring a response, but our contributors were up to the challenge. Here were two posts on the Canadian wildfires from Tom Finnerty and Elizabeth Nickson respectively: