Speaking of self-righteous busybodies – which we were below, see On our masters and commanders – one of the most egregious is Greenpeace. Wielding  amazing power to influence political decisions internationally, these bigoted prigs cause millions of the world’s poorest to die by preventing them from having the means to save themselves. Their unproven and in any case imbecilic excuse is that the marvelous saving products of science and technology are harmful to Nature.

It could be argued – and we do – that they are committing mass-murder by moral arrogance.

Who makes it possible for them to work their evil?

For one, the Obama administration.

Paul Driessen writes at Townhall:

Climate-Czar Carol Browner and other federal agency heads continue to fork over large sums of taxpayer money to Greenpeace and similar eco-activists, to subsidize their anti-corporate, global warming, “sustainable” energy and regulatory thumbscrew campaigns… [Greenpeace’s] truly odious ethical violations, however, involve activities that directly damage the livelihoods and lives of innocent people, particularly in impoverished countries.

Greenpeace justifies its anti-energy ideologies by claiming they are preserving rivers, avoiding dangerous radiation and preventing “runaway” global warming… Even in the midst of a global cooling period and widening Climategate scandal, Greenpeace is still clinging to its tired fabrications and storylines…

In Britain, France and elsewhere, Greenpeace vandals have destroyed bio-engineered crops, wiping out millions of dollars in research to develop food plants that require fewer pesticides, are more nutritious, reduce dangerous mold toxins, withstand floods and droughts, and increase crop yields. The people who would benefit most from this research are the poorest, most malnourished on Earth. They could improve their lives, simply by planting different, better corn, cotton or soybean seeds..

In fact, Bt corn [where it has been used despite Greenpeace’s opposition] has enabled farmers [eg in South Africa] … to cut pesticide use and expenses by 75%, triple their profits, save 35-49 days per season working in fields, and save enough to buy a refrigerator or even a new house. And yet rich-country Greenpeace activists oppose the technology.

Greenpeace campaigns against insecticides and insect-repelling DDT are even more lethal. These chemicals could prevent malaria, which kills a million people annually and leaves millions more brain-damaged…

But Greenpeace claims “some researchers think” DDT “could be inhibiting lactation because of its estrogen-like effects and may be contributing to lactation failure throughout the world.” No peer-reviewed medical studies back up these claims, and lactation problems are definitely associated with the malaria and malnutrition that would be reduced by technologies the Warriors oppose.

Worldwide, 1.5 billion people still don’t have electricity for lights, refrigerators, stoves, schools, shops, hospitals and factories that would bring health, opportunity and prosperity. Yet Greenpeace continues to battle hydrocarbon, hydroelectric and nuclear power, telling people they should be content with solar panels or wind turbines that provide intermittent, insufficient energy – and guarantee sustained poverty.

It was Paul Driessen’s Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) that last December, during the farcical UN climate conference in Copenhagen, ‘unfurled a “Propaganda Warrior” banner from the rails of the Rainbow Warrior ship, and a “Ship of Lies” banner from Greenpeace’s other vessel, the Arctic Sunrise, as they lay anchored in Copenhagen harbor’.

We enraged a Greenpeace supporter with our posts The evil that Greenpeace does (1/16/2010) and The vast left-wing conspiracy (1/18/2010).

May this post horrify as many people of common sense as it can reach, even if it infuriates Greenpeace supporters to the point of apoplexy, exposing as it does the persistent, atrocious evil that Greenpeace continues to do, motivated by sheer doctrinaire bigotry, through decade after decade, in conspiracy with governments.

Denis Avery, who is Director for Global Food Issues with the Hudson Institute, and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State, writes here:

We do know how to prevent 500,000 kids from going blind every year—and even dying—due to severe Vitamin A deficiency (VAD). But we’re not preventing the blindness or the deaths. Instead, we’re accepting the tragedy of millions of blind kids, plus the deaths of hundreds of thousands of pregnant women who die from needless birth complications, also due to VAD. …

We started trying to cure Vitamin A deficiency 20 years ago, after a Swiss government researcher bioengineered “golden rice”. The new rice contained a gene from the daffodil that codes for beta-carotene. The human body can then make Vitamin A out of the beta carotene. Kids in rich countries get most of their Vitamin A from meat, milk and eggs, but poor-country kids live mainly on such plant foods as rice, cassava and sweet potatoes. None provide much bio-available Vitamin A.

But Greenpeace and its eco-allies claimed — without evidence — that such genetic engineering is a “danger to the planet”.

Even after Syngenta developed a corn-based “golden rice II” with vastly more beta carotene — and offered it free to the Third World — Greenpeace still said no.

Only now, after 20 years of blockade and delay, are we finally seeing the dramatic benefits of growing Vitamin A crops in the local fields. In the Mukono District of Uganda, they’re growing bio-fortified sweet potatoes. Here, about 25 percent of the children used to be wan and sickly, prone to severe diarrhea, pneumonia, eye inflammations and blindness. Most of the kids are now healthy and vigorous. Pregnant women are thriving, along with their babies.

The difference? Orange-colored sweet potatoes, supplied by Uganda’s national agricultural research organization. They’re rich in beta-carotene, and they produce high yields because they resist local crop diseases. The germ plasm for the new sweet potatoes originated at HarvestPlus — Norman Borlaug’s international farm research organization that saved a billion people from starving in the Green Revolution of the 1960s.

“A danger to the plane”, of course, is what Greenpeace has called virtually every recent advance in global food production. At the same time, they claim the earth cannot sustainably feed the people already here. The European Union, to its shame, has backed up Greenpeace with threats to boycott the farm exports of any country which allows biotech plantings. In India, rice farmers protested plantings of the new rice, for fear the EU’s ban on biotech foods would block their exports of high-value basmati rice.

HarvestPlus finally decided to breed around the Greenpeace blockade. It took more than a decade of laborious test plots and back-crossing, but now cross-bred beta-carotene is being planted in farmers’ fields—and the Mukono mothers say their kids have become remarkably healthier. All it cost was 20 more years, 10 million more blindings, and millions of maternal deaths.

… through the institutions and beyond.

Who was behind the “March For Our Lives”, into which schoolkids were launched by the tens of thousands? And even more women, according to Dana R. Fisher at the Washington Post:

Like other resistance protests, and like previous gun-control marches, the March For Our Lives was mostly women. Whereas the 2017 Women’s March was 85 percent women, the March for Our Lives was 70 percent women. … Contrary to what’s been reported in many media accounts, the D.C. March for Our Lives crowd was not primarily made up of teenagers. Only about 10 percent of the participants were under 18. The average age of the adults in the crowd was just under 49 years old, which is older than participants at the other marches I’ve surveyed but similar to the age of the average participant at the Million Moms March in 2000, which was also about gun control.

The occasion for the march was the shooting on February 14, 2018, of 14 students and three adults at a Florida high school by a 19-year-old mass murderer.

The pretext for it was to protest against the ownership of guns by citizens of the United States on the grounds that if the gun-ownership were to be made illegal such mass murders would not happen.

The real aim of it was to advance the cause of the Left – unarmed populations dependent solely on government for protection.

Who organized the march and who paid for it?

Breitbart reports:

The March for Our Lives Action Fund, for example, was registered with the District of Columbia Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs on Feb. 21, 2018 as a Deleware-based organization with a business address in Encino, California.

The agent for the fund is listed as CT Corporation System, a D.C.-based firm that handles compliance issues. Jeri Rhodes is listed as the executing officer for the filing.

Rhodes is the Associate Executive Secretary for Finance and Administration for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, which is a Quaker lobbying group with the goal to “advance peace and justice.”

The Quakers, famous for being pacifists, have for some time now been aiders and abettors of tyranny and terrorism. For instance, they run collective farms in North Korea, and strongly support the BDS movement and Hamas.  

Rhodes’s LinkedIn profile states that she once worked for Greenpeace.

For the evil Greenpeace does, see our post here.

Major players and organizations — including Everytown, Giffords, Move On, and Women’s March LA — told BuzzFeed News they are helping with logistics, strategy, and planning for next month’s March for Our Lives rally and beyond. Much of the specific resources the groups are providing to the Parkland students remains unclear — as is the full list of supporting organizations — but there are broad outlines.

Giffords,  an organization started by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) that fights gun violence, is working with Everytown and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America to plan the main march on Washington — as well as sister rallies across the country. A spokesperson for Giffords told BuzzFeed News that it is “lending support in any way the students need, especially helping to operationalize these marches from logistics to programming”. …

Planned Parenthood and the George Soros-funded Move On are also in the mix of left-wing groups behind the march.

BuzzFeed News reported, “MoveOn said it will encourage its millions of members to follow and promote the March for Our Lives movement on social media and attend the rally” and would help with security and other logistics.

A spokesperson for Planned Parenthood said it is “teaching and hosting trainings” for teens “to keep momentum going so they don’t get burned out,” BuzzFeed News reported.

The NPS [National Park Service] permit reveals “persons in charge” of the D.C. event, including Deena Katz, the co-executive producer of Dancing with the Stars who helped organized the Los Angeles Women’s March. …

March for Our Lives also started a GoFundMe page that has raised $3.3 million. The text on the page states:

The funds will be spent on the incredibly difficult and expensive process that is organizing a march like this. We have people making more specific plans, but for now, know that this is for the march and everything left over will be going to the victims’ funds.

… The NPS permit reveals more about the event, including the “event overview”, which states:

Approximately (500,000) student participants and adults from across the country, will no longer risk their lives waiting for someone else to take action to stop the epidemic of mass school shootings that has become all too familiar. In the tragic wake of the seventeen lives brutally cut shot in Florida, politicians are telling us that now is not the time to talk about guns. March for Our Lives believes the time is now.

The permit also says that the organizers have to spend millions on insurance for the event.

Procure public and employee liability insurance from responsible companies with a minimum limitation of $2,000,000 per person for any one claim and an aggregate limit of $5,000,000 for any number of claims arising from any one incident. The United States of America shall be named as an additional insured on all such policies. The permit number will be included on said policy. …

Nonetheless, the Florida students who are credited with organizing the march insist it is teens, not adults, who are in charge, while admitting adults are involved.

Cameron Kasky, 17, acknowledged that the anti-Trump group Indivisible is helping and said that their assistance is necessary because of the role race allegedly plays in school shootings.

Kasky said in an interview on Friday with National Public Radio:

You know our story was told because we are an affluent white community and we have to shine the spotlight that was given on us on everybody in the world that has to deal with this on a daily basis. So people like Indivisible, who represent students who are in lower-income communities and don’t get to speak out the way we do because people don’t listen — we have to connect with these students.

The March for Our Lives Twitter account also features a video with students stating the anti-gun talking points used by left-wing groups regularly, including blaming the National Rifle Association [NRA] for school shootings.

The March for Our Lives website states that 840 marches are planned in the U.S. and around the world.

Not planned by schoolkids, we may be sure.

Bruce Thornton writes at Front Page:

Last Saturday hundreds of thousands of high schoolers gathered across the country in a “March for Our Lives” rally. Organized and financed by anti-gun nuts and other left-wing outfits, and ornamented with Hollywood celebrities like George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey, the spectacle was filled with the emotional exhibitionism and juvenile policy recommendations one would expect from the most pampered and worst-educated cohort of young people in American history – the perfect shock troops for progressive propaganda. …

The author carries on a bit about the kids having no “faith”, meaning that he thinks being Christian would keep them from this sort of thing. He might note that the Quakers, who are intensely Christian, supported the march. And as to faith – the organizers and paymasters, and all too many of the indoctrinated students themselves, have faith in “progressivism” (aka communism). We do not agree with him about that, but what we like of what he says, we quote:

We have been witnessing for some time [a] combination of adolescent immaturity and therapeutic leftism in the college “snowflake” and “safe-space” phenomenon, and in the intolerance of dissent and willingness to use tantrums to shut up anybody challenging the self-importance of pampered, privileged college students. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that now high school students are being recruited by the left to “march” against the wicked NRA, which stands in the way of the longtime leftist goal of gutting the Second Amendment.The progressive goal of centralized and concentrated power, and the transfer of all authority and autonomy from the citizens and states to the federal Leviathan, is challenged by the right of citizens to own a means of self-protection that guards against the monopoly of force, historically the foundation of tyrannical power. And what better occasion for chipping away at the citizens’ right to keep and bear arms than the telegenic sentimentalism of a school shooting? And what better cat’s paw for achieving change than innocent high school kids and their trauma – carefully selected, of course, to bring the right message? The drama and pathos of victims, particularly when they’re young, is a great vehicle for peddling incoherent and useless policies – and for camouflaging the truth that those recommendations are basically misdirection from the progressives’ political goals.

Take David Hogg, who was present during the attack last month on the high school in Parkland. The seventeen-year-old appears with four other Stoneman Douglas students on the cover of Time, and has become a darling of the anti-gun crowd for his profanity-laced tantrums that demonstrate perfectly the portrait sketched above: “The pathetic f***ers that want to keep killing our children, they could have blood from children splattered all over their faces and they wouldn’t take action because they all still see those dollar signs,” he said of the NRA and other lawmakers defending the Second Amendment.

Notice how this callow youth simply regurgitates the stale clichés of the gun-control fundamentalists. He obviously has no clue that the NRA has political clout not because of the pittance it gives politicians compared to, say, public-employee unions, but because millions of Americans support its mission to defend a Constitutional right they hold dear. … He has no clue that the demonized, perfectly legal AR-15 was already banned from 1994-2004, without lowering gun-deaths even as the number of guns increased. Like his equally addled elders, he can’t fathom that more regulations of guns do nothing to keep them out of the hands of thugs and psychopaths, but do complicate and limit the rights of law-abiding citizens.

No thought, no empirical evidence, no respect for facts, no reasoned arguments, just the potty-mouth, hysterical emotion, bathetic drama, and attention-getting antics of an immature child who thinks his feelings are the world’s highest priority. …

But we can’t blame the young. The progressive transformation of our culture has been directed at creating just such students, whose natural inclinations to self-drama and emotion rather than thinking make them perfect constituents for an ideology that flourishes among those who obsess over their feelings … 

And whatever is said of the youths applies equally to the women.

But there are youths of another sort.

Of course, there are millions of young people who somehow have managed to avoid this progressive siren song. … But they are demonized and scorned by the progressive pundits and politicians who distrust anyone who challenges their narrative. This silent cohort of the young is the true resistance against an ideology that prefers them to be robotic shock troops.

Here is a student, Kyle Kashuv, from the  school that was attacked, who feels the horror of the mass shooting and the sadness of the loss of lives as much as any other, but has thought about the event intelligently, and puts forward common-sense and practical ideas that could really work to  keep schools safe from such an attack. He points out that government – in particular the “cowards of Broward” meaning the progressive Sheriff and his cowardly underlings – failed in its duty, yet the protesters want to put more power in government hands. Because his ideas, including a refusal to blame gun-ownership, do not fit with the ideological aims of the organizers, they would not allow him to speak to the marchers from the platform.

He speaks here:

Speaking of self-righteous busybodies, one of the most egregious is Greenpeace. Wielding  amazing power to influence political decisions internationally, these bigoted prigs cause millions of the world’s poorest to die by preventing them from having the means to save themselves. Their unproven and in any case imbecilic excuse is that the marvelous saving products of science and technology are harmful to Nature. It could be argued – and we do – that they are committing mass-murder by moral arrogance. Who makes it possible for them to work their evil? For one, the Obama administration.

That is a quotation from one of our own posts: The evil that Greenpeace does, January 16, 2010.

What we asserted about Greenpeace doing evil applies to the environmentalist movement in general.

Now one of the many changes for the better that we expect President Trump to effect, is a shifting of funds from “climate change” programs to – say – crushing ISIS.

James Delingpole has similar hopes and expectations. He writes at Breitbat:

Donald Trump really is going to make America great again. It wasn’t just a campaign slogan: Trump is for real — and one of the great pleasures in the coming years is going to be the joy of watching all those pundits who think he’s going to be a disaster being proved wrong again and again.

Nowhere will this be more evident than in his policies on energy and the environment. …

I made a trip to Washington, D.C. just before Christmas to check out the lie of the land. What I wanted to find out was just how serious Trump is about slaying the Green Blob which has caused so much misery and expense in the U.S. and across the world for the last thirty or forty years. And after a series of private briefings with administration insiders and members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, I came back heartened.

Here’s how one of them put it:

Trump is going to send his tanks into the swamp from Day One. He knows there isn’t time to lose and he knows that every day that passes those tanks are going to get sucked deeper into the slime…” [by ‘the slime’ my anonymous informant meant, of course, the liberal/DC establishment which will do everything in its power to frustrate Trump] We’re going to go in fast and we’re going to go in hard. They won’t know what hit them.

And let’s make something clear to all those “sensible” conservatives — the centrist squishes who supported #NeverTrump and who will insist, even now, on telling us how uncomfortable they feel about the new regime, as though having a left-wing, establishment crook like Hillary would have been preferable — Trump is the ONLY Republican candidate who would have made this stuff happen.

Compare and contrast what would have happened if  a “safe” GOP candidate like Jeb Bush was now on his way to the White House.

During the presidential campaigns, Jeb Bush was asked what his policy on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would be if he got elected: “I’ll hire the best people. And I’ll do the right thing,” he said.

In other words, Jeb Bush would have done precisely zilch to rein in one of the most destructive, overbearing and uncontrollable agencies within the U.S. government.

Trump is different because, unlike his mainstream GOP former rivals he feels absolutely no need to compromise or to green virtue-signal. He has never made any bones about his conviction that “climate change” is a con and that the US economy has been held hostage by eco-loons and that blue-collar Americans have been denied jobs because of the environmental policies imposed on them by uptown pajama boys.

So what are his plans for energy and the environment?

Well in fact, it’s no secret. He set them out very clearly in the speech he gave on May 26, 2016 in North Dakota.

Here is my 100-day action plan:

• We’re going to rescind all the job-destroying Obama executive actions including the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule.
• We’re going to save the coal industry and other industries threatened by Hillary Clinton’s extremist agenda.
• I’m going to ask Trans Canada to renew its permit application for the Keystone Pipeline.
• We’re going to lift moratoriums on energy production in federal areas
• We’re going to revoke policies that impose unwarranted restrictions on new drilling technologies. These technologies create millions of jobs with a smaller footprint than ever before.
• We’re going to cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.
• Any regulation that is outdated, unnecessary, bad for workers, or contrary to the national interest will be scrapped. We will also eliminate duplication, provide regulatory certainty, and trust local officials and local residents.
• Any future regulation will go through a simple test: is this regulation good for the American worker? If it doesn’t pass this test, the rule will not be approved.

What’s so brilliant about this — and why Trump’s critics underestimate him at their peril — is that it expresses more clearly than any leading conservative politician has ever done before that environmentalism is essentially an attack on jobs and growth.

At one point, it states it more explicitly still:

Here’s what it comes down to.

Wealth versus poverty.

And:

It’s a choice between sharing in this great energy wealth, or sharing in the poverty promised by Hillary Clinton.

Trump gets it in a way that more “sophisticated” conservative leaders have failed to do for four decades: greens are the enemies of prosperity; they are most especially the enemies of people like the non-liberal Americans who live outside the big cities.

“Democrats have been waging a war on rural Americans for years. And the Bushes didn’t do a damn thing to help them. Trump actually promised he would do something and the voters got that. These are his people and he gets the problem,” says one of my informants.

“If you dig up stuff, if you make stuff, if you grow stuff then for the first time since Reagan you have a president who has actually got your back.” …

The Trump presidency will mark a turning point in global energy policy and in our attitude to the environment in general and policies like renewables in particular.

One thing we can confidently predict in the next few years is that the Greenies are in for a world of pain and disappointment. And it really couldn’t happen to a bunch of more deserving people.

Applause! Standing ovation!

This is about the criminalization of doubt.

The US Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that not only has she discussed internally the possibility of pursuing civil actions against “climate change deniers”, but she has also “referred it to the FBI to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for which we could take action”. 

Some Environmentalists are so absolutely convinced that human activity is really changing the climate of the planet, is really making it dangerously hotter, that they think big rich companies who deal in fossil fuels – the burning of which, they say, causes the alleged hotting up – simply must know this; must have done their own research and discovered it for themselves; and are hiding the documentation, which must exist, and which proves they know it; are deliberately concealing their knowledge and its proofs so that they can go on selling their “evil” product for the “evil” motive of profit, uncaring that it is “doing harm to the planet”, and continuing to deny that there is such a thing as man-made global warming; so they are criminals who need to be prosecuted and punished.

Just think what a heap of suppositions is being compiled here:

1. That the earth is heating up.
2. That  human activity is heating up the earth.
3. That the earth’s heating up is dangerous to human health.
4. That the burning of fossil fuels is one of the chief human activities to blame for the earth’s heating up.
5. That the fossil fuel companies have done their own research into these “facts”.
6. That their research proves – must prove – that their products are much to blame for the earth’s heating up and damaging human health.
7. That despite having found out all that for themselves they choose to lie about it and say that they do not know these “facts”.
8. That they are lying when they say they do not have the documentation of their research which “proves” that they do know; and furthermore
9. That they are doing all this lying and concealing and deceiving in order to be able to continue to sell their products while knowing that they are damaging human health.
10. That therefore they are committing a variety of crimes including a crime against humanity in general.

We quote from an article at Watts Up With That?:

This is in the news today via “Climate NEXUS”, which is a Madison Ave. PR firm:

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced that he is launching a legal probe into Exxon’s climate denial. The inquiry will look into both consumer and investor protection laws, covering the oil giant’s activity dating back to the 1970s. Schneiderman’s investigation could open “a sweeping new legal front in the battle over climate change”, says the New York Times, which broke the story. Two separate reports by InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times uncovered that Exxon has known about the dangers of climate change since the 1970s but sowed doubt by funding climate change skeptics to preserve its business. Exxon has been compared extensively to the tobacco industry, which was convicted of racketeering in 2000 for deliberately deceiving the public about the dangers of its products.

Behind all that is an orchestrated plan; a nasty, spiteful. wholly unjustifiable conspiracy.

So where do these strange ideas come from?

Step forward “Climate Accountability Institute”.

The Climate Accountability Institute (CAI) is …  attempting to marry “climate concerns” to environmentalism and tobacco prohibitionist tactics. …

In 2012 the CAI held a “workshop” in La Jolla California. It was “conceived” by Naomi Oreskes and others, and called Establishing Accountability for Climate Change Damages: Lessons from Tobacco Control.

So from the beginning, these persecutors, these witch-hunters, these self-righteous busybodies had it fixed in their heads that, as with smoking, human health is at issue.

Stanton Glantz, a prominent tobacco control activist scientist was present as were a clutch of lawyers, climate scientists, communication professionals, PR agency heads, bloggers and journalists.

They released a report:

The workshop was an “exploratory, open-ended dialogue” on the use of  “lessons from tobacco-related education, laws, and litigation to address climate change“.

A key breakthrough in the public and legal case for tobacco control came when internal documents came to light showing the tobacco industry had knowingly misled the public. Similar documents may well exist in the vaults of the fossil fuel industry and their trade associations and front groups…

Why do these mythical documents need to be unearthed?

While we currently lack a compelling public narrative about climate change in the United States, we may be close to coalescing around one. Furthermore, climate change may loom larger today in the public mind than tobacco did when public health advocates began winning policy victories.

The reader should take a moment to grasp the momentous logic: We know legally “incriminating documents” (their choice of words) “may” exist, because tobacco activists had a breakthrough with such documents. They need to be found in order to make climate change a “looming threat”  in the public mind.

Try thinking of a more reverse-engineered form of activism.

The first chapter in the report is Lessons from Tobacco Control. It is mainly one section called The Importance of Documents in Tobacco Litigation.

We learn next to nothing about these supposed “documents” from the report. After all, they haven’t been released or even found.

… many participants suggested that incriminating documents may exist that demonstrate collusion among the major fossil fuel companies …

But “the documents” were very valuable. … Since they were so sure they exist, careful plotting was needed on companies whose vaults to raid. …

Stanton Glantz was a vocal workshop participant. … [He] was so excited he proposed using the tobacco archives platform at the University of California San Francisco for climate documents (which were yet to be found). …

In what mode were the documents to be used?

Most importantly, the release of these documents meant that charges of conspiracy or racketeering could become a crucial component of tobacco litigation

Having firmly established that documents convenient to their strategy existed, the delegates moved on to discussing how to obtain them.

The answer was once again clear: “lawsuits”. It was not just lawsuits, it was “Congressional hearings”, “sympathetic state attorney generals” and “false advertising claims”.

State attorneys general can also subpoena documents, raising the possibility that a single sympathetic state attorney general might have substantial success in bringing key internal documents to light

The would-be litigators were inspired to think of other grounds for lawsuits: “False advertising”. “Libel suits”.

Now you know where the line on how “fossil fuel companies ‘knew’ they were doing wrong but yet did it” comes from.

The cries of “it’s a conspiracy!’”are planned and pre-meditated, on lawyers’ advice.

There certainly is a conspiracy underway – of these climate-change fanatics to do as much damage as possible to the fossil fuel industry.

This is where RICO [the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act] came in:

Richard Ayres, an experienced environmental attorney, suggested that the RICO Act, which had been used effectively against the tobacco industry, could similarly be used to bring a lawsuit against carbon producers. ... 

[He] knew starting lawsuits against productive companies wouldn’t look good. They needed to be spun … By dressing [the lawsuits] up as injury “compensation”.

Even if your ultimate goal might be to shut down a company, you still might be wise to start out by asking for compensation for injured parties.

The conspiracy plot thickened:

The suggestions appeared to grow outlandish at every turn. Richard Heede, one of CAI’s members, had come up with a system for blaming individual companies … [His] bizarre formulas, we learn, were received “positively” by “most of the workshop’s participants”. One UCS participant felt that “it could potentially be useful as part of a coordinated campaign to identify key climate ‘wrongdoers'”. Another felt it was useful in blaming faceless corporate entities instead of countries thereby bypassing provoking patriotic impulses in international negotiations.

Heede’s work was funded by Greenpeace. Of note, Greenpeace counsel Jasper Teulings was present at the meeting.

Greenpeace is a profoundly evil organization, as we have explained here.

… Naomi Oreskes suggested that some portion of sea level rise could be attributed to the emissions caused by a single carbon-producing company.

The oil company Exxon made its appearance in her example:

She suggested, “You might be able to say, ‘Here’s Exxon’s contribution to what’s happening to Key West or Venice’.” 

So now we see how they suck statements of “scientific fact” out of their thumbs. 

This was a strategy Glantz liked:

…Stanton Glantz expressed some enthusiasm about such a strategy, based on his experience with tobacco litigation. As he put it, “I would be surprised if the industry chose to attack the calculation that one foot of flooding in Key West could be attributed to ExxonMobil.”

We cannot resist repeating that: They expect that “the industry” will not “attack the calculation that one foot of flooding in Key West could be attributed to ExxonMobil”. !

The conspiratorial tide did not recede. Former computer scientist John Mashey claimed collusion between “climate change deniers” and fossil fuel companies:

[Mashey] presented a brief overview of some of his research, which traces funding, personnel, and messaging connections between roughly 600 individuals …

The penultimate section in the report is on how delegates planned to win “public opinion”.  … (“RICO is not easy. It is certainly not a sure win” – Ayres) and others were wary of drawing the attention of “hostile legislators who might seek to undermine them”.

With public opinion, the delegates were clearly divided. PR mavens, lawyers and activists wanted to cry fraud, paint up villains and create outrage:

To mobilize, people often need to be outraged.

Daniel Yankelovich a “public opinion researcher” involved in “citizen education” appears to have balked at the “sue, sue, sue” chanting. Court cases are useful only after the public had been won over, he said. …

The workshop ended and there was “agreement”. “Documents” needed to be obtained. Legal action was needed both for “wresting potentially useful internal documents” and ‘maintaining pressure on the industry’.

A consensus had emerged.

… an emerging consensus on a strategy that incorporates legal action with a narrative that creates public outrage.

The participants, we learn

…made commitments to try to coordinate future efforts, continue discussing strategies for gaining access to internal documents from the fossil fuel industry and its affiliated climate denial network …

Why is the report important? Because climate activists have done everything the delegates said they wanted done, in the report.

[This includes] the latest letter from US Senators to Exxon, the conspiratorial ‘Exxon Knew’ campaign with the portrayal of old Exxon reports by InsideClimateNews as “internal documents”, the RICO letter from scientists and much more.  … It is almost as if climate activists have willed [incriminating] “documents” into existence – just as they were advised.

Almost as if? That’s exactly what they have done.

And the campaign to criminalize the businessmen who run the fossil fuel industry is gathering pace.

Matthew Vadum writes at Front Page:

Led by agenda-setting New York State and radical left-winger Al Gore the progressive persecution of climate change skeptics by the states is underway.

Top law enforcement officers in several states are joining with the Chicken Littles of green activism to weaponize the scientifically dubious argument that human activity is not only changing the earth’s climate but that unprecedented world catastrophe awaits unless draconian, economy-killing carbon emission controls are imposed more or less immediately.

The litigation offensive has nothing to do with justice. It is aimed at forcing those few remaining holdouts in the business community who stubbornly cling to science to confess their thought crimes and submit to the know-nothing Left’s climate superstitions. It is part of modern-day environmentalism’s ongoing assault on knowledge, human progress, markets, and the rule of law.

Repent and embrace the true green faith or else you’ll be investigated and denounced as a climate criminal, is the message of “Inspector Gotcha,” New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman.

“It’s too early to say what we’re going to find,” he said of the five-month-old witch hunt aimed at his current target, the gigantic ExxonMobil, at a press conference this week in Lower Manhattan. “We intend to work as aggressively as possible, but also as carefully as possible.”

The New York Times previously reported that Schneiderman is looking into “whether the company lied to the public about the risks of climate change or to investors about how such risks might hurt the oil business. … For several years, advocacy groups with expertise in financial analysis have been warning that fossil fuel companies might be overvalued in the stock market, since the need to limit climate change might require that much of their coal, oil and natural gas be left in the ground.”

“The First Amendment, ladies and gentlemen, does not give you the right to commit fraud,” Schneiderman said this week.

Of course that assertion is true on its face but that doesn’t necessarily mean whatever he’s calling fraud is actually fraud. How can rejecting a theory – a wild, unproven, apocalyptic theory based on creative computer modeling and little else – about future climate conditions constitute fraud?

The New York Times now reports that the attorneys general of Massachusetts and the Virgin Islands said this week they would join Schneiderman’s politically motivated so-called investigation into whether ExxonMobil lied to investors and the public for years about the alleged threat posed by climate change. California opened its own investigation into the company last year. …

At Schneiderman’s press conference, former Vice President Gore, whose understanding of science roughly mirrors that of the Unabomber, was in attendance along with the attorneys general of Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Vermont, Virginia, and the Virgin Islands.

Gore implied ExxonMobil was just as bad as the tobacco industry which allegedly denied risks posed by its products for years. State attorneys general were an important part of the effort to nail Big Tobacco, he said.

“I do think the analogy may hold up rather precisely,” said Gore whose longtime meal ticket has been global warming. … Gore reportedly had a net worth of about $1.7 million at the turn of the century. But global warming hysteria cultivated by Gore grew over the years and by 2013 his fortune had grown to more than $200 million.

Schneiderman, a left-wing fanatic, is gearing up for what amounts to political show trials to enforce the Left’s party line on anthropogenic global warming. …

This radical inquisitor whom Politico reported had “spent his career building an ideological infrastructure for the left,” is building a gallows for those with the temerity to reject the lies of the misanthropic global-warmist agenda.

And what is his deep, emotional, fanatical motive?

Schneiderman is a leftist’s leftist, a zealous true believer intent on, in his own words, “slow[ing] down the bone-crushing machinery of the contemporary conservative movement.” …

The business community is wary of Schneiderman — and for good reason. …

It needs to be said that Schneiderman’s pursuit of ExxonMobil sure smells like political payback.

As Dr. Steven J. Allen, my learned Capital Research Center colleague, has reported, ExxonMobil used to be a major contributor to the scandal-plagued Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, as well as a sponsor of the annual meetings of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). But as the foundation became inundated by adverse publicity related to the fact that it functions as a clearinghouse for future presidential favors from Hillary Clinton, ExxonMobil reportedly stopped giving it money.

It’s no coincidence that Secretary Clinton turned on the company last fall, demanding it be investigated for giving grants to warming-skeptic organizations. “There’s a lot of evidence that they misled the public,” she declared.

Allen writes:

“In November, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman — a top supporter of Clinton — launched an investigation into the company that, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, ‘marks a dangerous new escalation of the Left’s attempt to stamp out all disagreement on global-warming science and policy … demanding Exxon’s documents on climate research from 1977 to 2015’.”

Was Schneiderman’s newfound interest in ExxonMobil piqued by green idealism?

The question answers itself.

We would say, “Let that be a lesson to all companies that bribed, or were subjected to extortion by the Clintons!” – but we know it won’t be. Only if Hillary Clinton fails to win the presidency will companies (and foreign governments) even consider turning their backs on the Clintons and closing their purses.

Is it not passing strange that such monuments of capitalism as Exxonmobil, so likely to be targets of the Left, habitually give huge donations to leftist politicians like the Clintons? Does it never strike them that in the long run – though the short-term benefits they buy may be sweet – they are paying for their own destruction?

Some 40,000 believers in the science of extracting moonbeams from cucumbers (a long endeavor, first made known to the world three hundred years ago by Gulliver) and other such sages met in Paris to change the climates of the world, and have announced a great success.

Paul Driessen and Roger Bezdek question their triumph.

They write at CFACT:

Paris climate talks this week descended into madcap all-night negotiations, as delegates desperately tried to salvage some kind of agreement beyond empty promises to do something sometime about what President Obama insists is the gravest threat to our planet, national security and future generations.

He gets far more energized about slashing energy use than about Islamist terrorism, even after the Paris and San Bernardino butchery. Determined for once to lead from upfront, he took a 500-person greenhouse gas-spewing entourage to the City of Light, to call for preventing increasing droughts, floods, storms, island-swallowing rising acidic ocean levels and other disasters conjured up by alarmist computer models.

Legally binding carbon dioxide emission targets were too contentious to pursue. So was modifying the concept of “differentiated responsibilities”. It holds that countries that historically caused the recent atmospheric carbon dioxide build-up must lead in cutting their emissions, while helping developing countries eventually do likewise, by pouring trillions of dollars in cash and free technology into the Green Climate Fund for supposed climate change adaptation, mitigation and compensation. Developing countries had insisted on that massive wealth redistribution as their price for signing any binding document.

Although China now emits far more CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHG) than the USA or EU, it refused to fast-track reducing those emissions. China and wealthy petro-states also opposed paying into the Climate Fund. Other major bones of contention were likewise never resolved.

Thus, in the end, what we apparently got out of Paris is voluntary emission caps, voluntary progress reviews, no international oversight of any voluntary progress, and voluntary contributions to the Fund.

Of course, the entire climate cataclysm mantra is based on the claim that carbon dioxide has replaced the solar and other powerful natural forces that have driven climate change throughout Earth and human history. Now, merely tweaking CO2 emissions will supposedly stabilize climate and weather systems.

President Obama fervently believes this delusion.

He will likely use the voluntary Paris gobbledygook to say America somehow has a “moral obligation” to set an example, by de-carbonizing, de-industrializing and de-developing the United States. Thankfully, Congress and the states will have something to say about that, because they know these anti-fossil fuel programs will destroy jobs and living standards, especially for poor, working class and minority families.

The impacts would be far worse than many news stories and White House press releases suggest. Those sources often say the proposed climate treaty and other actions seek GHG reductions of 80% below predicted 2050 emission levels. The real original Paris treaty target is 80% below actual 1990 levels.

That means the world would have to eliminate 96% of the greenhouse gases that all humanity would likely release if we reach world population levels, economic growth and living standards predicted for 2050. The United States would likely have to slash it CO2 and GHG reductions to zero.

Moreover, current 2050 forecasts already assume and incorporate significant energy efficiency, de-carbonization and de-industrialization over the next 35 years. … Further CO2 reductions beyond those already incorporated into the forecasts would thus be increasingly difficult, expensive, and indeed impossible to achieve.

As we explain in a MasterResource.org analysis, there is a strong positive relationship between GDP and carbon-based energy consumption. Slashing fossil energy use that far would thus require decimating economic growth, job creation and preservation, and average per-person incomes. In fact, average world per capita GDP would plummet from a projected $30,600 in 2050 to a miserable $1,200 per year. 

Average per capita GDP in 2050 would be less than what Americans had in 1830!

Many futuristic technologies would still exist, but only wealthy families and ruling elites could afford them.

That would be catastrophic for jobs, health and welfare in developed countries – and lethal to millions in poor nations, who would be denied the blessings of electricity and fossil fuels for decades to come. That is indefensible, inhumane and immoral. And for what?

Mr. Obama and the alarmists in Paris insisted that drastic GHG reductions will hold global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius (3.5 F) and prevent climate and weather disasters. Now some even claim that the upper safety limit is actually 1.5 degrees C (2.7 F), which would require even more draconian energy and emission cutbacks. Otherwise, Earth could become uninhabitable, they assert. Nonsense.

EPA’s own analyses suggest that its fully implemented Clean Power Plan would bring an undetectable, irrelevant reduction of perhaps 0.02 degrees Celsius (0.05 F) in average global temperatures 85 years from now – assuming carbon dioxide actually does drive climate change.

Which is not just disputed but flatly denied even by a co-founder of Greenpeace.

(We are speaking of Patrick Moore, who has parted company with that increasingly evil organization. For the evil it does, see our posts: The evil  Greenpeace does, January 16, 2010; The blind cruelty of Greenpeace, January 20, 2010; How environmentalists are committing mass murder on a vast scale, July 6, 2014.) ).

In the Real World, climate changes regularly, and recent climate and weather trends and events are in line with historic experience. In fact, average global temperatures haven’t risen in nearly two decades; no category 3-5 hurricane has struck the USA in a record ten years; Greenland and Antarctic ice are at record levels; and still firmly alkaline sea levels (8.1 pH) are rising at barely seven inches per century.

Many scientists believe the sun and other powerful natural forces may soon usher in a new era of colder temperatures, regardless of whether atmospheric CO2 rises above 0.40% (400 ppm). That would pose much greater threats to human health, agriculture and prosperity (and wildlife) than global warming.

We must never forget: Fossil fuels facilitated successive industrial revolutions and enabled billions to live better than royalty did a century ago, helped average incomes to increase eleven-fold, and helped average global life expectancy to soar from less than 30 in 1870 to 71 today.

Carbon-based energy still provides 81% of world energy, and supports $70 trillion per year in world GDP. It will supply 75-80% of global energy for decades to come, Energy Information Administration, International Energy Agency and other studies forecast. Carbon-based energy is essential if we are to bring electricity to the 1.3 billion people who still do not have it, and end the rampant poverty and lung, intestinal and other diseases that kill millions of people in poor countries every year.

Furthermore, thousands of coal-fired power plants are built, under construction or in planning around the world. China and India will not consider reducing GHG emissions until 2030, and even then it will be voluntary and dependent on how their economies are doing. That means atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will continue to climb, greening the planet and spurring faster crop, forest and grassland growth. …

President Obama and the 40,000 climate alarmists gathered in Paris ignored these inconvenient realities, and whitewashed the adverse consequences of anti-hydrocarbon policies. …

Even binding targets would have … horrendous adverse effects on human health and environmental quality, while doing nothing to prevent climate change or extreme weather events. What alarmists wanted in Paris would have let unelected, unaccountable activists and bureaucrats decide which industries, companies, workers, families, states and countries win the Climate Hustle game, and which ones lose.

And it’s not just President Obama, who wants to slash America’s carbon dioxide emissions by 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025 – and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050! Every Democrat presidential candidate demands similar actions: Hillary Clinton wants one-third of all US electricity to come from wind and solar by 2027; Bernie Sanders wants 80% by 2050; Martin O’Malley wants 100% by 2050.

Obligating the United States to slash its fossil fuel use, and send billions of taxpayer dollars annually to dictators, bureaucrats and crony industrialists in poor countries would be disastrous. Thank goodness it did not happen. 

Whether the earth is getting a wee bit warmer, or a wee bit cooler, or staying much the same in this wee bit of time in which the present generations live, is of no importance. None. What is important is that a few thousand people are trying to undo our civilization, return the human race to the life of savages (“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”, as Thomas Hobbes described it), or even wipe it off the face of the earth*. And all to preserve the planet, they say. For whom? For what? They are obsessed madmen, religious fanatics. (Yes, environmentalism is a religion.) And they are winning. They have the ear of Western governments. They command government agencies. Some of them – such as the despots of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – have immense power. Their word is law.

Of the tactics they use, the one that is working best for them and worst for their victims, is stopping Western technology spreading to the Third World, thus keeping poor countries poor, and allowing disease to kill millions upon millions, year after year.

Big Green activists say anything other than solar panels and bird-butchering wind turbines would not be “sustainable”. Like climate change, “sustainability” is infinitely elastic and malleable, making it a perfect weapon for anti-development activists. Whatever they support is sustainable. Whatever they oppose is unsustainable. To them, apparently, the diseases and death tolls are sustainable, just, ethical and moral. Whatever they advocate also complies with the “precautionary principle”. Whatever they disdain violates it. Worse, their perverse guideline always focuses on the risks of using technologies – but never on the risks of not using them. It spotlights risks that a technology – coal-fired power plants, biotech foods or DDT, for example – might cause, but ignores risks the technology would reduce or prevent.

We quote an article by Paul Driessen at Canada Free Press:

Fossil fuel and insurance company executives “could face personal liability for funding climate denialism and opposing policies to fight climate change”, Greenpeace recently warned several corporations. In a letter co-signed by WWF International and the Center for International Environmental Law, the Rainbow Warriors ($155 million in 2013 global income) suggested that legal action might be possible.

Meanwhile, the WWF ($927 million in 2013 global income) filed a formal complaint against Peabody Energy for “misleading readers” in advertisements that say coal-based electricity can improve lives in developing countries. The ads are not “decent, honest and veracious”,  as required by Belgian law, the World Wildlife ethicists sniffed. Other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) make similar demands. …

They are demands which – we ardently hope – will rebound in their green faces.

In fact, the rebounding has begun.

India’s Intelligence Bureau recently identified Greenpeace as “a threat to national economic security”, noting that these and other groups have been “spawning” and funding internal protest movements and campaigns that have delayed or blocked numerous mines, electricity projects and other infrastructure programs vitally needed to create jobs and lift people out of poverty and disease. The anti-development NGOs are costing India’s economy 2-3% in lost GDP every year, the Bureau estimates.

The Indian government has now banned direct foreign funding of local campaign groups by foreign NGOs like Greenpeace, the WWF and US-based Center for Media and Democracy. India and other nations could do much more. Simply holding these über-wealthy nonprofit environmentalist corporations to the same ethical standards they demand of for-profit corporations could be a fascinating start.

Greenpeace, WWF and other Big Green campaigners constantly demand environmental and climate justice for poor families. They insist that for-profit corporations be socially responsible, honest, transparent, accountable, and liable for damages and injustices that the NGOs allege the companies have committed, by supposedly altering Earth’s climate and weather, for example.

Meanwhile, more than 300 million Indians (equal to the US population) still have no access to electricity, or only sporadic access. 700 million Africans likewise have no or only occasional access. Worldwide, almost 2.5 billion people (nearly a third of our Earth’s population) still lack electricity …

These energy-deprived people do not merely suffer abject poverty. They must burn wood and dung for heating and cooking, which results in debilitating lung diseases that kill a million people every year. They lack refrigeration, safe water and decent hospitals, resulting in virulent intestinal diseases that send almost two million people to their graves annually. The vast majority of these victims are women and children.

The energy deprivation is due in large part to unrelenting, aggressive, deceitful eco-activist campaigns against coal-fired power plants, natural gas-fueled turbines, and nuclear and hydroelectric facilities in India, Ghana, South Africa, Uganda and elsewhere. The Obama Administration joined Big Greeen in refusing to support loans for these critically needed projects, citing climate change and other claims.

As American University adjunct professor Caleb Rossiter asked in a recent Wall Street Journal article, “Where is the justice when the US discourages World Bank funding for electricity-generation projects in Africa that involve fossil fuels, and when the European Union places a ‘global warming’ tax on cargo flights importing perishable African goods?”

Where is the justice in Obama advisor John Holdren saying ultra-green elites in rich countries should define and dictate “ecologically feasible development” for poor countries? …

Imagine your life without abundant, reliable, affordable electricity and transportation fuels. Imagine living under conditions endured by impoverished, malnourished, diseased Indians and Africans whose life expectancy is 49 to 59 years. And then dare to object to their pleas and aspirations, especially on the basis of “dangerous manmade global warming” speculation and GIGO [garbage in, garbage out] computer models. …

Genetically engineered Golden Rice incorporates a gene from corn (maize) to make it rich in beta-carotene, which humans can convert to Vitamin A, to prevent blindness and save lives. The rice would be made available at no cost to poor farmers. Just two ounces a day would virtually end the childhood malnutrition, blindness and deaths. But Greenpeace and its “ethical” collaborators have battled Golden Rice for years, while eight million children died from Vitamin A deficiency since the rice was invented.

In Uganda malnourished people depend as heavily on Vitamin A-deficient bananas, as their Asian counterparts do on minimally nutritious rice. A new banana incorporates genes from wild bananas, to boost the fruit’s Vitamin A levels tenfold. But anti-biotechnology activists repeatedly pressure legislators not to approve biotech crops for sale.

Other crops are genetically engineered to resist insects, drought and diseases, reducing the need for pesticides and allowing farmers to grow more food on less land with less water. However, Big Green opposes them too, while millions die from malnutrition and starvation.

Sprayed in tiny amounts on walls of homes, DDT repels mosquitoes for six months or more. It kills any that land on the walls and irritates those it does not kill or repel, so they leave the house without biting anyone. No other chemical – at any price – can do all that. Where DDT and other insecticides are used, malaria cases and deaths plummet – by as much as 80 percent. Used this way, the chemical is safe for humans and animals, and malaria-carrying mosquitoes are far less likely to build immunities to DDT than to other pesticides, which are still used heavily in agriculture and do pose risks to humans.

But in another crime against humanity, Greenpeace, WWF and their ilk constantly battle DDT use – while half a billion people get malaria every year, making them unable to work for weeks on end, leaving millions with permanent brain damage, and killing a million people per year, mostly women and children.

India and other countries can fight back, by terminating the NGOs’ tax-exempt status, as Canada did with Greenpeace. They could hold the pressure groups to the same standards they demand of for-profit corporations: honesty, transparency, social responsibility, accountability and personal liability. They could excoriate the Big Green groups for their crimes against humanity – and penalize them for the malnutrition, disease, economic retractions and deaths they perpetrate or perpetuate.

*  See our posts: The evil that Greenpeace does, January 16, 2010; The vast left-wing conspiracy, January 18, 2010; The blind cruelty of Greenpeace, January 20, 2010; Fresh wild raw uninhabited world, January 2, 2012.

Donna Laframboise wrote The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, an examination of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its infamous report.

The report, you’ll remember, alleged that human beings, just by bumbling about their daily business in spots here and there in the vast empty spaces of the continents, were having a deleterious – worse, a drastic – still worse, a disastrous effect on the climates of the planet. Its fans have had it up to here with the human species. If they could have their way they’d be rid of every last one of the squalid two-legged contaminators, and let the planet, finally cured of human infestation, spin on round the sun forever fresh, a wild, raw, goodness-packed organic world.

These quotations, illustrating the anti-human strain in the ideology of environmentalism, come from a selection in our post Environmentalism, death cult (October 19, 2010):

Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planet … Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along. – David Graber, biologist, National Park Service.

Cannibalism is a radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation. — Lyall Watson, The Financial Times, 15 July 1995.

It may take our extinction to set things straight…. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.—David Foreman, Founder of Earth First!

The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing….This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run. —Economist editorial.

Last October, Quadrant Online published a review by Tony Thomas on Donna Laframboise’s book, usefully summarizing its main points. Here’s our pick of them:

IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri is quoted, in Nature, 19/12/2007 [as saying]:

“We have been so drunk with this desire to produce and consume more and more whatever the cost to the environment that we’re on a totally unsustainable path. I am not going to rest easy until I have articulated in every possible forum the need to bring about major structural changes in economic growth and development. That’s the real issue. Climate change is just a part of it. …

Peer reviewed material

In 2008, Pachauri [said in an address to] a committee of the North Carolina legislature:

“We carry out an assessment of climate change based on peer-reviewed literature, so everything that we look at and take into account in our assessments has to carry [the] credibility of peer-reviewed publications, we don’t settle for anything less than that.”

The reality …

In important instances, IPCC lead authors chose non-peer-reviewed material, or papers of low credibility, favoring their argument, in the face of prolific peer-reviewed material to the contrary. Instances include alleged climate relevance to malaria, hurricanes, species extinction, and sea levels.

IPCC rules were that non-peer citations could indeed be used but should be flagged as such. But out of the 5,587 non-peer citations, a grand total of six, or 0.1% , were flagged as per IPCC rules. After the InterAcademy Council in 2010 demanded that the flagging be strengthened and enforced, the IPCC in May 2011 dispensed with the flagging rule altogether!

The high stature of IPCC authors

The IPCC constantly claims its scientists are pre-eminent, world-leading specialists.

The reality …

(Eg) Laurens Bouwer in 1999-2000 was an IPCC lead author … before getting his Master’s in 2001. Although a specialist in water resources, he was lead author for the chapter on Insurance and Other Financial Services. Why? Apparently because during part of 2000, he was a trainee at Munich Reinsurance. …

IPCC scientists who wear Greenpeace* and World Wildlife Fund** hats

Are IPCC scientists independent, i.e. capable of objectively judging the literature and not open to any public perception of bias?

The tone was set from the top with Pachauri authoring prefaces to Greenpeace literature in 2007 and 2008.

Bill Hare has been a Greenpeace spokesman since 1992, its ‘chief climate negotiator’ in 2007, and a Greenpeace ‘legend’ – but also a 2007 IPCC report lead author, an expert reviewer on two out of three sections of that report, and one of only 40 people on the “core writing team” for the overall big-picture summary known as the Synthesis Report. He is a lead author for the 2014 report.

Australia’s marine biologist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg gets credits in nine chapters of the IPCC 2007 report. He was a contributing author and will be a ‘coordinating lead author’ for the 2014 Report. Laframboise says that he wrote four reports on coral reefs for Greenpeace between 1994 and 2000, and later, two for the World Wildlife Fund. He will lead a chapter for the 2014 IPCC report.

In the IPCC 2007 report:

28 out of 44 chapters include at least one individual affiliated with the WWF.

100% of the 20 chapters in Working Group 2 include at least one WWF-affiliated scientist.

15 of 44 chapters are led by WWF-affiliated scientists.

In three instances, chapters were led by two WWF-affiliated lead authors.

The ‘rigorous’ IPCC review processes

The IPCC’s supposedly rigorous “Review” processes involve thousands of experts but is toothless and uninquiring.

The IPCC reviewers do not check papers underlying data – and one reviewer who sought a paper’s raw data, was threatened with the sack.

If a reviewer points out a flaw in a lead author’s summary, the lead author, as judge and jury of his/her own case, can simply respond, “Rejected”. There is no independent referee. …

An upright IPCC scientist

In all this murk, only one IPCC scientist, Chris Landsea, a noted hurricane specialist, has resigned and gone public about unethical IPCC behavior.

Kevin Trenberth, a hurricane non-specialist, had gone to the press in 2004 claiming, with no science support, that recent hurricanes reflected global warming. He was lead author for the 2007 hurricane chapter. Not one other IPCC scientist stood up in agreement that Trenberth had compromised his objectivity as ‘judge’ on that chapter.

Two years later, the IPCC’s ‘moral midgets’ as Laframboise calls them, collected their Nobel Prize.

* See our posts: The evil that Greenpeace does, January 16, 2010; The vast left-wing conspiracy, January 18, 2010; The blind cruelty of Greenpeace, January 20, 2010.

** “If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.” —Prince Phillip, patron and past president of the World Wildlife Fund.

Another UN conference  on “climate change” with the ulterior motive of setting up a world government to redistribute wealth from prosperous Western countries to the bank accounts of Third World tyrants is running now in Durban, South Africa.

As we hoped and expected, Lord Christopher Monckton is there, speaking out as he constantly does against this conspiracy:

Mainstream science, politics, bureaucracy, academe, banking, business, media – all were of one mind. The West, so the playbook ran, must be shut down at once to Save The Planet from “global warming”, er, “climate change”, um, “climate disruption”, no, “extreme-weather events”, ah, that is, “energy-security challenges”. …

I find myself … in Durban among the creatures of “consensus” for the annual UN climate gabfest. Yet the party line was wrong. … Every dire prediction that the usual suspects had made with such sneering arrogance has failed.

Just look. Professor “Phil” Jones of the “University” of East Anglia had to admit … that there had been no statistically-significant “global warming” for 15 years. …

Arctic sea ice was supposed to be gone by 2013. Then it rebounded. Then it was going to reach a new low on 15 September this year …. [but] Antarctic sea ice has been on the up throughout the satellite era. Global sea ice shows little trend in 30 years.

Polar bears were supposed to be headed for extinction. … Today there are five times as many polar bears as 70 years ago.

Kilimanjaro has been losing ice since 1880. …  “Global warming” could not have caused the recent ice loss … The summit temperature, monitored by satellites, has not changed. Now the glacier is growing again.

Sea level is the big one. James Hansen of NASA, who made more than $1 million out of the climate scare last year alone, had predicted it would rise imminently by 246 feet. Was he right? No. The increase over the past eight years, according to the Envisat satellite, was at a rate equivalent to 2 inches per century. Not meters, not even feet. Inches. Two of them. Per century. …

Malaria was going to spread because of “global warming.” Yet the terrible leap in mortality from 50,000 to 1 million child deaths a year occurred a generation ago, when the Environmental Defense Fund – which, with Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund, spent $1 billion of taxpayers’ and donors’ cash on anti-Western pseudo-enviro propaganda last year alone – successfully campaigned for a worldwide ban on DDT, the only effective agent against the mosquitoes that carry malaria.

When the Board of the EDF met to plan the DDT ban, its then legal advisor, Victor John Yannacone Jr., begged it to ban only outdoor use: DDT sprayed inside houses would harm only the mosquitoes and spare the children. The then chairman, furious, fired Yannacone on the spot. As he left the room, someone said: “That’s the last time we employ anyone who knows any science.” That ban has killed 40 million children.

Extreme-weather deaths are down sharply. Global tropical-cyclone and hurricane activity is almost at its least in 30 years. Severe tornadoes have declined. Patterns of drought and flood remain as unpredictable and as devastating as ever. Bangladesh and nearly all of the Pacific atolls are gaining land mass, not losing it.

Net primary productivity of trees and plants worldwide is up. If you want a greener planet, add as much CO2 to the air as you can. Your emissions are also helping to stave off the next Ice Age. It’s already 6000 years overdue.

Yet the dreary, wasteful, pointless congresses of the greedy feeble-minded continue. The Bali Road-Map to Nowhere. The Copenhagen World-Government Treaty that collapsed as soon as it saw the light of day. The Cancun Concordats to establish 1000 – yes, 1000 – new bureaucracies: the structure of the unelected world government that every ex-politician from Gore and Chirac to Attali is demanding.

Everyone says nothing will happen at Durban. That worries me. It suggests the process of building a totalitarian global junta by what one UN official at Cancun called “transparent impenetrability” – publishing documents of such prolix length and complex obscurantism that no one can understand a word and yet no one can later deny the information was available – will invisibly gather pace. …

We like “transparent impenetrability”! Could we suspect that the UN official who invented it had a sense of irony?  No – too unlikely.

The Marxists’ wet dream …  is global totalitarian dictatorship. … But the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and I are in Durban to stop them. So perhaps you’re not going to have it after all.

It’s good to know that a Committee and the noble lord are defending us from world totalitarian dictatorship. But it would be better if the United States, which should be and can be and was always meant to be the truly powerful defender of liberty, had a president and administration that would put an end to the UN and a stop to all its evil schemes forever.

The UN must be destroyed.

You have seen them at street corners in towns all over America, men and women with clipboards, always smiling, asking you in a  friendly tone to sign something that promotes the objectives of the environmental movement. They often set out stalls, or wear T-shirts, with signs announcing that they serve Greenpeace. That smile of theirs is the smug smirk of those who believe they have seen the light and feel nothing but pity for the rest of us who haven’t. Christians of all stripes wear it; as does the Dalai Lama and a multitude of others who manage to combine God-bothering with Marxism; and Democratic Party spokesmen on television news; and Al Gore.

We have posted many articles about the harm that the environmental movement does. See, for instance, The evil that Greenpeace does, January16, 2010; The vast left-wing conspiracy, January 18, 2010; The blind cruelty of Greenpeace, January 20, 2010; and Green roots: the origins of ecology, January 22, 2010.

It is a message that needs repeating.

Daniel Greenfield writes, at his website Sultan Knish, on How Environmentalists Cause War and Repression. Here’s part of what he says:

No other group has done as much to keep America dependent on foreign oil as the environmentalists have. After leading successful campaigns against nuclear power and domestic drilling, the green movement may lecture on “oil wars”, but it is responsible for most of them.

The math of it is very simple. Resource shortages are a major cause of conflict. And environmentalists have dedicated themselves to creating resource shortages in prosperous nations. Their campaigns against nuclear, domestic oil and coal production have been big on self-righteousness and short on consequences. And the consequences are that their scaremongering has not only cost millions of American jobs, it has forced us to keep sending money to Muslim oil states who use that money for domestic repression and international terrorism.

The environmentalists have done the same thing in Europe and Asia, turning formerly moribund Communist powers, Russia and China, into energy and manufacturing superpowers. By making it more expensive and in some cases impossible to conduct manufacturing and energy production at home, they exported Western industries to the East, and enabled the transformation of struggling tyrannies into international superpowers. …

When the question arises, who killed the pro-democracy movement in China– it wasn’t the tanks, but their enablers, the liberals whose regulation and exploitation had made America into an uncomfortable place to do business. Those companies went elsewhere and the money they brought, propped up the Chinese Communist party. …

In Germany, the Greens have succeeded in their campaign against the domestic nuclear industry. What is the net result of this? It further degrades Europe’s energy capabilities and moves it into Putin’s orbit. That empowers Russia to begin another campaign of conquest aimed at its former republics. That is what a “Green” victory really looks like. People freezing in their homes while a dictatorship sends its tanks and infantry on a new campaign of terror. …

The environmental movement is not interested in cheap energy. If solar power provided energy cheaply, the greens would be marching against it. Any technology that provides cheap power is their enemy.

The mandate of the environmental movement is artificial scarcity. But artificial scarcity doesn’t exist in a global economy. If you raise the price of energy production, resource mining or manufacturing, it will move abroad to less regulated countries. The price will still go up and there will be other long term consequences, but people will still find a way to get what they need. Like the rest of the left, the green movement has never learned that people will act in their own interests, rather than in thrall to their dogma. That if they can’t get it legally, they will get it illegally. …

The left has created … the slave labor that makes the products which they deplore. It is responsible for all of it and it should take ownership of it. …

The environmental movement’s manifest hypocrisy is that it causes the very things that it deplores. Its campaign against the nuclear industry has sent billions overseas to countries which are developing their own nuclear weapons and intend to use them. By shutting down nuclear plants in America, [the movement]  has made it much more likely that nuclear bombs will be detonated in America.

It destroyed American industry in the name of worker protection and pollution, and sent the factories to countries where workers have no rights and the pollution looks like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie. And reduced those former workers to the point where they have no choice but to buy those same slave labor products at a non-union store with the profits going to China’s war machine. …

These are all victories for the environmental movements and defeats for anyone with any sanity or sense. But the environmental movement refuses to acknowledge the consequences of its actions. Instead it champions further domestic and international repression. Like every tyrannical ideology it knows only one solution to every problem, more laws, more chains, more investigations and prison cells for anyone who disobeys.

Repression and propaganda is the environmental movement’s solution to everything. Its imperative is to destroy, impoverish, oppress and intimidate. It spreads hopeless misery around the world, with a smile. The countless victims of Rachel Carson’s malaria [hers because she got DDT banned – JB] or the prisoners of the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] go unnoticed as the latest children’s propaganda cartoon is rolled out. Its implicit message is always that there is a war on between the environmentalists and the people who just want to live their own lives.