said all that subversive stuff about the earth revolving around the sun. What could be more narcissistic than that?
Ironically, almost all off this occurred after Richard Nixon, of all seemingly unlikely people, signed the National Environmental Policy Act on January 1, 1970. This act did more than any legislation ever had to clean up the air and water in our country—clearly a good thing. Nixon also created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, which must have seemed good at the time, but only at the time. It was a bureaucracy and like almost all bureaucracies an entity whose own survival became its primary goal, no matter what its members said or thought. Cheered on by that growing claque for whom the environment had become the new religion, the EPA did its best to extend its power under many administrations. It was soon to be out of control, regulating with less and less oversight. In today’s world it behaves like a kingdom unto itself, almost no one knowing what it is doing or why until it makes its decrees, upending industries to avert catastrophes real or imaginary in the name of biodiversity or, worse, the latest ecological fad. Like so many idealistic movements, environmentalism was beginning to recapitulate the French Revolution, starting as a positive force and then never putting a brake on itself, continuing on almost entropically until it began to destroy the very things it was intended to save.
I’m not suggesting that Al Gore or anybody else connected with environmentalism is the living embodiment of Robespierre. The only beheadings going on these days are Islamist in nature. We should all be concerned about being good stewards of the planet we live on, at least that should be our intention. But when our moral narcissism runs away with itself, we go blind. The pattern of idealism gone sour, writ so large in the French Revolution, reappears in many—one is tempted to say all—situations on multiple fronts and issues. That is because the thing itself—the idealistic goal—is almost always ultimately subsumed to the needs and projected self-image of the people having those goals. Thus it frequently provides an excuse for outrageous behavior in complete contradistinction to the pronounced intention, like Leonardo DiCaprio circling the globe on a private jet while telling the hoi polloi to restrict their carbon usage, or “working class spokesman” Michael Moore living in nine homes. Slate reported several hundred of the delegates to 2015’s World Economic Forum arrived in Davos for climate change day in private jets.2 The examples of wretched excess are endless in a veritable “Lifestyles of the Rich and Environmental.” It’s as if saying you’re Green gives you permission to litter on an exponential scale.
You could say this hypocrisy is finally irrelevant—that it doesn’t matter if Al Gore has the biggest houseboat in Tennessee as long as he’s on the right side, if his “intentions are good.” But excuse me if I’m a little suspicious. What if those intentions really were primarily money and power and the liberal idealism was just a masquerade? Or if it started off innocently enough, with at least the pretense of idealism, and became more sinister? After all, at one point Robespierre was on the right side of things too—or we think he was. Further to the French Revolution analogy, those symbolic (for now, anyway) beheadings were and are used to read people out of the discussion permanently on a subject like global warming/climate change, to smear them in news reports, deprive them of academic appointments and research grants and, most of all, keep them away from the levers of control. That is being done now without the guillotine. You are, in Huey Newton’s words, either part of the solution or part of the problem. If you’re part of the problem, you are a denier and shouldn’t be heard. That this is inherently antiscience is clear, but it is also equally evidently totalitarian in its essence.
What I discovered to be the true motivations behind the snowbound UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
What this leads to is a world where actual ideals and even truth are beside the point. People are either in or out of the game. It’s a conspiracy for fun and profit. I was reminded of this while covering the 2009 UN Copenhagen Climate Change Conference at which Obama appeared briefly and gave a speech. Nothing much really occurred there that was substantive other than delegates and press spending a few days in one of Western Europe’s most beautiful cities, schmoozing and drinking aquavit. (Climate conferences tend not to happen in Dubuque.) Half the US Congress seemed to be there on a taxpayer-funded junket. When I ran into Rep. Charlie Rangel in the gift shop of the Marriott where most of the delegation was staying and asked the New York congressman whether he believed in anthropogenic global warming, he looked at me as if I were joking. When he realized I might be serious, he waved me away as some kind of crank and returned to the important business of examining the expensive Danish jewelry on display.
More interesting (and telling) was an encounter I had the next day with the delegate from the island of Tuvalu—a tiny place in the Pacific said to be about to disappear under water from the predicted ocean rise due to global warming. We were sitting next to each other waiting for one of these lectures that never seemed to get started, so I commiserated with the poor fellow about the sad fate of his country. He started laughing and tapped me on the arm in a friendly way very unlike Rangel. I suddenly got suspicious and asked hesitantly “You don’t believe it’s happening?” The man grinned and nodded affirmatively. “Then why are you here?” I continued.
“For the money,” he said, as if it were the most evident thing in the world.
You couldn’t but like him for his honesty. Half a decade later nothing much has happened to Tuvalu but that hasn’t stopped its prime minister, Enele Sopoaga, from warning the world at yet another conference in New York in 2014 that climate change was “like a weapon of mass destruction.”1 Sopoaga, who is seeking cash for the repatriation of his sinking citizens to other countries, further said of his island nation, “We are very, very worried—we are already suffering.” How, he doesn’t specify, but he did provide a few photos of a few sandbags stacked along the oceanfront. Actual climate data for the island is sparse but records from nearby American Samoa indicate virtually no change for decades.2
Tuvalu, of course, is not alone in working the climate change side of the street from a developing world perspective. But the amount of money involved here is the proverbial peanuts compared to the big league game going on in the background at Copenhagen. A new market had recently been formed to trade so-called credits for the use of the supposedly evil carbon, the cap-and-trade strategy. And as with most markets, the numbers of zeros involved boggled the mind and brought out the 3.0 reading glasses—for good reason. According to a December 10, 2009, report in the Telegraph,
Carbon trading fraudsters may have accounted for up to 90pc of all market activity in some Europeans countries, with criminals pocketing an estimated five billion Euros mainly in Britain, France, Spain, Denmark and Holland, according to Europol, the European law enforcement agency. The revelation caused embarrassment for European Union negotiators at the Copenhagen climate change summit yesterday, where they have been pushing for an expansion of their system across the globe to penalize heavy emitters of carbon dioxide. Rob Wainwright, the director of the Interpol serious crime squad, said large-scale organized criminal activity has “endangered the credibility” of the current carbon trading system.3
These “embarrassing” carbon exchanges have, not surprisingly, largely disappeared. And if you mention them at a cocktail party to your average climate change true believer—most of whom would be likely to have heard, at most, only vaguely of these exchanges—it is almost certain they will dismiss them with a laugh. After all, bad people can take advantage of all manner of good things. But what if those same people were actually the initiators of those good things in the first place? Here’s Maurice Strong—Canadian oil and mining businessman, former undersecretary general of the United Nations, unanimously-elected head of UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme), secretary general
