Time magazine recounts in detail how the November 2020 US election was stolen from Donald Trump.

Time calls it  “saving” the election.

Also “protecting” it and “fortifying” it.

But the report is nothing less than a confession of fraud and theft. 

Why? It seems that the busy people who did the dirty work are giving all away now because they cannot help boasting. They’re cock-a-hoop and gloating. They obviously have no idea that they were being used, or by whom.

While the authors (several are mentioned beneath the article though only the name Molly Ball appears at the top) boldly state that there was an anti-Trump conspiracy, they yet seem genuinely to believe that President Trump was organizing a conspiracy of his own to steal the election. In the course of describing what their heroes did to prevent the democratic process from working in the normal way, they indignantly accuse him of an “assault on democracy”.

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

So the forces of labor and capital were inspired by the destructive protests of the “racial-justice” enemies of President Trump to “conspire” together to keep the peace –  by also opposing President Trump, not the destructive protestors.

The account is ludicrous. But it sufficiently lays bare what needs to be known about how the election was stolen.

It identifies many of the toilers for the cause, and a plethora of their organizations.

They believe one man started it on his own initiative.

Sometime in the fall of 2019, Mike Podhorzer became convinced the election was headed for disaster–and determined to protect it. He is a “senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest union federation” who has “marshaled the latest tactics and data to help its favored candidates win elections”.

He was soon joined by others:

It turned out Podhorzer wasn’t the only one thinking in these terms. He began to hear from others eager to join forces. The Fight Back Table, a coalition of “resistance” organizations, had begun scenario-planning around the potential for a contested election, gathering liberal activists at the local and national level into what they called the Democracy Defense Coalition. Voting-rights and civil rights organizations were raising alarms. A group of former elected officials was researching emergency powers they feared Trump might exploit. Protect Democracy was assembling a bipartisan election-crisis task force. …

Then COVID-19 erupted …

In his apartment in the D.C. suburbs, Podhorzer began working from his laptop at his kitchen table, holding back-to-back Zoom meetings for hours a day with his network of contacts across the progressive universe: the labor movement; the institutional left, like Planned Parenthood and Greenpeace; resistance groups like Indivisible and MoveOn; progressive data geeks and strategists, representatives of donors and foundations, state-level grassroots organizers, racial-justice activists and others. …

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.

… the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.  …

Protecting the election would require an effort of unprecedented scale. As 2020 progressed, it stretched to Congress, Silicon Valley and the nation’s statehouses. It drew energy from the summer’s racial-justice protests, many of whose leaders were a key part of the liberal alliance. And eventually it reached across the aisle, into the world of Trump-skeptical Republicans appalled by his [Trump’s!] attacks on democracy.

… the most urgent need was money …

That came chiefly from a much higher sphere, where the truly powerful enemies of President Trump were working on their own plans to overthrow him:

An assortment of foundations contributed tens of millions in election-administration funding. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative chipped in $300 million. …

In November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home, where they warned him about the danger of the election-related falsehoods that were already spreading unchecked. “It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement,” says Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who attended the dinner and also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others.

They needed a meeting over dinner before they decided to cut out pro-Trump opinion from the social media they controlled? Hmmm.

The protectors and fortifiers of democracy thought of everything, anticipated every possible complication.

What if ballot forms carrying votes for Biden were thrown out because they showed signs of fraud?

The Voting Rights Lab and IntoAction created state-specific memes and graphics, spread by email, text, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, urging that every vote be counted. Together, they were viewed more than 1 billion times. Protect Democracy’s election task force issued reports and held media briefings with high-profile experts across the political spectrum, resulting in widespread coverage of potential election issues and fact-checking of Trump’s false claims. The organization’s tracking polls found the message was being heard: the percentage of the public that didn’t expect to know the winner on election night gradually rose until by late October, it was over 70%. A majority also believed that a prolonged count wasn’t a sign of problems. “We knew exactly what Trump was going to do: he was going to try to use the fact that Democrats voted by mail and Republicans voted in person to make it look like he was ahead, claim victory, say the mail-in votes were fraudulent and try to get them thrown out,” says Protect Democracy’s [Ian] Bassin. Setting public expectations ahead of time helped undercut those lies. …

Fearing that Trump, being against democracy, might instigate violent protests, they would “harness the momentum” of “the racial justice uprising”; recruit the Antifa-BlM rioters, arsonists, cop-killers who had been thus “peacefully protesting” for months, to be active in their cause:

The racial-justice uprising sparked by George Floyd’s killing in May was not primarily a political movement. The organizers who helped lead it wanted to harness its momentum for the election … Many of those organizers were part of Podhorzer’s network, from the activists in battleground states who partnered with the Democracy Defense Coalition to organizations with leading roles in the Movement for Black Lives [BLM]. …

They planned huge street demonstrations to counter those that they just knew Trump would launch the day after he lost the election to effect a coup against … against … against the administration that would take over in January 2021 (as a result of their efforts):

More than 150 liberal groups, from the Women’s March to the Sierra Club to Color of Change, from Democrats.com to the Democratic Socialists of America, joined the “Protect the Results” coalition. The group’s now defunct website had a map listing 400 planned post-election demonstrations, to be activated via text message as soon as Nov. 4. To stop the coup they feared, the left was ready to flood the streets. …

Now enter, out of the global mists and high boardrooms, down into the well-lit bustling scene, more of the people who do know – are verily part of – the real vast inexorable movement of the truly powerful against President Trump’s re-election. Their eagle eyes had spotted the useful workers down there:

About a week before Election Day, Podhorzer received an unexpected message: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wanted to talk. …

Neil Bradley, the Chamber’s executive vice president and chief policy officer … reached out to Podhorzer, through an intermediary both men declined to name. Agreeing that their unlikely alliance would be powerful, they began to discuss a joint statement pledging their organizations’ shared commitment to a fair and peaceful election. They chose their words carefully and scheduled the statement’s release for maximum impact. As it was being finalized, Christian leaders signaled their interest in joining, further broadening its reach.

We wonder how the Christian leaders got to know about it if the preparation for the statement’s release was as quietly confidential as the story suggests.

The statement was released on Election Day, under the names of Chamber CEO Thomas Donohue, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, and the heads of the National Association of Evangelicals and the National African American Clergy Network.

It was a carefully worded appeal to American voters – long accustomed to a day of voting, a pause while votes were counted, and a result declared – not to be surprised, not to ask questions, not to object if votes were added and counted for days or even weeks after election day. The statement is  quoted:

It is imperative that election officials be given the space and time to count every vote in accordance with applicable laws. We call on the media, the candidates and the American people to exercise patience with the process and trust in our system, even if it requires more time than usual. … We are united in our call for the American democratic process to proceed without violence, intimidation or any other tactic that makes us weaker as a nation.

Podhorzer knew that only if late counting was accepted, Biden could be made to win:

Election night began with many Democrats despairing. Trump was running ahead of pre-election polling, winning Florida, Ohio and Texas easily and keeping Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania too close to call. But Podhorzer was unperturbed … the returns were exactly in line with his modeling. … He could tell that as long as all the votes were counted, Trump would lose.

Towards the end of the confession, the question is asked: who should get the credit for thwarting Trump’s plot?

Liberals argued the role of bottom-up people power shouldn’t be overlooked, particularly the contributions of people of color and local grassroots activists. Others stressed the heroism of GOP officials like [Aaron] Van Langevelde [Republican member of the Michigan Board of Canvassers] and Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who stood up to Trump at considerable cost. The truth is that neither likely could have succeeded without the other. …

Democracy won in the end. The will of the people prevailed. But it’s crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America.

Well, anyway, that’s what it took to put over a fraud of an election in the United States of America.

The full ingenuous article provides the names of many perps and their organizations. And after all, why not? Since the conspirators succeeded and their man won, nothing will be done about any law-breaking that went on. It was all in the great cause of fortifying democracy.

Their self-congratulation is not unwarranted. They worked diligently and efficiently – and they brought off their cheat. Who would grudge them their celebrations, their happy faces, their loud cheers? Only the mean-spirited would want to rain on such joy.

Let them rejoice while they can. It won’t be long before they experience the consequences of their achievement. Most of them will be just as oppressed by their chosen government as those of us who voted honestly for Donald Trump.

When Barack Obama said nonsensically that he led “from behind”, he was simply excusing his inability to lead, and – though he did not mean to – demonstrating his weakness and cowardice.

Who except the former affirmative-action president doesn’t know that “lead” means being in front and having others follow?

Well, “his know-nothing fans” is the answer.

Now President Trump leads.

Politicians are rising in Europe who follow him in wanting to make their nations great again – by recovering national self-determination, stopping the intrusion of Third World hordes into their countries, and focusing on protecting the freedom and promoting the prosperity of their citizens rather than trying to affect the climate conditions of the next century.

In short, they see the need to act against the aggressive International Left.

And not only in Europe are they coming to power, but in South America too.

From Breitbart, by Thomas D. Williams:

Brazil’s new foreign minister said this week that his “main mission” in office is to combat the Marxist ideology of the preceding regime, including “climate alarmism” and abortion.

Ernesto Araújo, named as future foreign minister by president-elect Jair Bolsonaro, said that putting an end to Marxist ideology in Brazil’s foreign policy is “the main mission that the president has entrusted to me” in an op-ed published in the Gazeta do Povo newspaper.

According to Araújo, the Workers’ Party (PT), which governed Brazil for 13 years under Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, turned the country’s foreign policy into a tool to spread Marxist ideology, and the mission of the new administration is to dismantle that apparatus.

Among the Marxist elements pushed by the PT, Araújo cited climatic alarmism, knee-jerk third-worldism, adherence to abortionist policies in international forums, and the destruction of the identity of peoples through mass immigration.

“All these are elements of the PT’s ideology, that is, of Marxism,” he said.

“To cure a disease it is not enough to say that we detest it; it is necessary to know its causes and manifestations, its strategies and its disguises,” the minister said.

In an earlier blogpost, the future minister went into greater depth regarding his understanding of the aims of the climate change lobby.

“This dogma has served to justify increasing the regulatory power of states over the economy and the power of international institutions over national states and their populations,” Araújo wrote in mid-October, “as well as to stifle economic growth in democratic capitalist countries and foster China’s growth.”

Araújo, who is a vocal supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump, said that China is the enemy of the West and that the globalist movement wants to transfer the economic power of the West to that country.

The minister’s words this week coincided with an announcement by the president-elect that Brazil has withdrawn its offer to host the United Nations COP25 climate summit in 2019, citing “current fiscal and budgetary constraints” as well as “the transition process for the newly elected administration’.

Greenpeace reacted strongly to the news, saying that the new government had “shamed the climate agenda” and lost an opportunity to position Brazil as a “climate leader” on the international stage.

“Shamed the climate agenda”? They mean the new Brazilian government makes “the climate agenda” look shameful.

Which it is.

In a statement this week, Greenpeace went on to call President-elect Bolsonaro, who will take office on January 1, an “environmental threat”, while lamenting that the new foreign minister Ernesto Araújo “believes that climate change is no more than a major international conspiracy, something that functions as an agenda of global domination”.

Which is exactly what it is.

… 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?

It is against reason to oppose fracking. But the Left opposes it with passion. That is to say, the opulent elite who vote left and have political influence, oppose it with passion.

Of course, in the Great Divide between the politics of Reason and the politics of Romanticism, the Left is the Romantic side: the side of the emotions. Reason is its enemy.

So there should be no surprise that wealthy Democrats hate industrial progress. They find the landscapes of poverty too pretty to spoil.

Here’s the story.

We quote from The Liberal War on American Energy Independence, by Arthur Herman, in the February 2015 issue of Commentary.

Williamsport sits on the edge of the Marcellus Shale area, the second-largest natural-gas find in the world. It stretches across most of Pennsylvania and into New York, West Virginia, Ohio, and Maryland. Most of it was inaccessible until a decade ago, when a combination of new extraction technologies—including hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” and horizontal drilling—opened up the shale to energy development.

Since 2002, fracking has generated in Pennsylvania more than 24,000 drilling jobs and some 200,000 other support jobs in trucking, construction, and infrastructure, according to the state’s Department of Labor and Industry. Wages in the gas field average $62,000 a year—$20,000 higher than the state average.

To Pennsylvania, fracking has brought in $4 billion in investment, including a steady flow of income to local landowners and local governments leasing mineral rights to their land. According to National Resources Economics, Inc., full development of the Marcellus Shale could bring another 211,000 jobs to this one state alone, not to mention other states on the formation, including New York.

But there will be no such jobs in the state of New York. In December, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a complete ban on the use of hydraulic fracturing. The cost of that move was already foreshadowed three years ago when I drove across the border from Pennsylvania into New York. The busy modern highway coming out of Williamsport, U.S. Route 15, shrinks down into a meandering, largely empty two-lane road. On the way to Ithaca, I passed through miles of a deserted rural landscape dotted with collapsing barns and tumble-down houses reminiscent of Appalachia.

The one thing that broke the dismal monotony were the signs, many painted by hand, that had sprouted up along the road and in the fields, all saying the same thing: Ron Paul for President. The state was then in its fifth year of a moratorium on fracking, and that moratorium had turned upstate New York’s rural residents into libertarians. Bitter ones, at that. They didn’t particularly care about Ron Paul’s views on Israel or the Federal Reserve. All they wanted was a chance to collect the lucrative fees a gas company would pay them to drill on their land; they would have voted for anyone who would help them make their land generate an income again for themselves and their families.

This sort of gain is precisely what the left’s war on fracking (which has scored its most significant victory so far with Cuomo’s permanent ban) aims to prevent. It is nothing less than a policy of selective immiseration.

Fracking — a technique that uses a mixture of chemicals, sand, and water to break apart deep formations of oil- and gas-rich shale rock and draw it to the surface — is the most important American industrial enterprise of the 21st century. It joins the automobile industry, aircraft and aerospace, the computer and the digital revolution, as one of America’s great successes in technological innovation, productivity, and entrepreneurial flair. Like other industrial revolutions, including the first in 18th-century Britain, the fracking revolution is bringing about enormous changes in how we live — and sharply altering the nation’s income-distribution curve.

The fracking revolution has also brought America’s oil and gas industry back to life. In 2000, fracking accounted for less than 3 percent of all oil and natural-gas production in the United States, which was then importing more than 60 percent of its oil. Today, fracking accounts for more than 40 percent, and that percentage is going steadily upward, as the U.S. replaces one country after another on the list of the world’s biggest oil and gas producers. Our oil imports from OPEC countries have shrunk by half.

Indeed, the production gushing from America’s shale oil and gas deposits — from Eagle Ford in Texas to the Marcellus Formation in Pennsylvania and the Bakken oil field in North Dakota — doesn’t just promise the long-elusive goal of energy independence. It points to an energy dominance and economic power that the United States hasn’t seen for 100 years, since the heyday of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil.

The difference is that instead of that power being lodged in a single megacorporation or the Seven Sisters of the 1950s (Mobil, Shell Esso, etc.), the fracking revolution is being created by hundreds of smaller, more agile independents who are transforming the technology as fast as they are pumping the oil and natural gas out of the ground.

They are also pumping out jobs by the tens of thousands. It is no longer the case that good-paying blue-collar employment in America is on the verge of extinction. Fracking employs thousands of people in physically demanding jobs that require no college degree and pay, in many cases, six figures.

In North Dakota, where fracking has turned the Bakken Shale formation into the most productive oil patch in the country, an entry-level job hauling water and helping to move rigs and machinery averages $67,000 a year. A well specialist with a couple of years experience will be looking at a $100,000 salary, while a directional driller—the highest job a fracking employee can hold without a B.A.—earns close to $200,000.

Overall, the fracking boom has driven up North Dakota’s per capita income to $57,367 in 2012—the highest in the nation save for Washington D.C. The per capita figure has jumped 31 percent since 2008, the year after the fracking boom got under way, compared with 10 percent for frackless South Dakota.

The other beneficiaries are private landowners, many of them farmers. They have been able to lease out the mineral rights to their land for large sums; and if a well opens up, it quickly becomes a gusher of cash. In North Dakota, that has produced a series of so-called High Plains millionaires; for other landowners, leasing fees have become a lifeline for their farm or property.

Private-property rights, often of middle-income people, are the real drivers behind the fracking revolution, with county and state governments leasing rights on their lands not far behind. It’s one reason so many state capitals have been amenable to the fracking revolution: They’ve been prime beneficiaries.

Under the Obama administration, the number of oil- and gas-drilling leases on federal lands has fallen, and oil production on federal lands is at levels lower than in 2007. Nevertheless, America’s oil production jumped by 1 million barrels a day last year thanks to fracking—even as we’re bringing up more natural gas than at any time in our history.

In less than a decade, the boom has already changed the energy map, with the rise of states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Dakota joining Texas, Oklahoma, and Alaska as major energy producers, and with many others poised to join the club, from Illinois and Wisconsin to Alabama and California.

Indeed, the fracking revolution is the one sector of the Obama economy that’s been steadily booming, creating more than 625,000 jobs in the shale-gas sector alone—a number estimated to grow to 870,000 in 2015. Its benefits also flow in trickle-down savings by lowering the cost of energy, particularly natural gas. Mercator Energy, a Colorado-based energy broker, has calculated it’s saving American families more than $32.5 billion in lower natural-gas bills for home heating and electricity.

It has also had a positive impact on U.S. manufacturing, especially petrochemical and plastics firms that have cashed in on lower natural-gas and oil prices and the increasingly abundant supply. From 2010 to 2012, energy-intensive manufacturers added 196,000 jobs as Rust Belt cities such as Lansing, Michigan, and Gary, Indiana, have been revived by cheaper, more abundant energy.

Wallace Tyner, an economist at Purdue University, estimates that between 2008 and 2035 the fracking revolution (oil and gas combined) will add an average of $473 billion per year to the U.S. economy. That’s roughly 3 percent of today’s GDP.

The most striking change, however, has been at the gas pump. Falling U.S. demand for imported oil (a drop of 40 percent since 2005) has lowered global prices overall, and has been a huge factor in oil’s 25 percent price plunge in 2014. Filling up the family car at $2.80 a gallon versus $3.80 a gallon is a great benefit to Americans, especially in low-income households. A strong case can be made that the shale revolution’s impact on natural-gas prices has been the equivalent of a poverty-relief program, since the nation’s poor on average spend four times more of their incomes on home energy than do the more affluent. On average, the drop in natural-gas prices has given low-income families an effective tax rebate of some $10 billion a year.

This is one of the most notable aspects of the fracking revolution. Unlike the computer and digital revolution, for example, which created an industry dominated by Ph.D.’s and college-trained engineers, this is an economic bonanza of particular meaning to those in the middle- and low-income brackets, with the potential to benefit many more.

Yet today’s liberal left is, virtually without exception, implacably opposed to fracking, from the national to the state to the local level. In the forefront have been environmental lobbying interests. In localities such as Ithaca, New York—the hub of the anti-fracking movement in New York State—liberal elites have banded together to prevent an economic transformation that would pad the wallets of their neighbors and upset the socioeconomic status quo.

Of all the national environmental groups, the Sierra Club probably has the mildest official position: that further fracking in the United States must stop until its overall impact on the environment has been studied more carefully. More typical is Greenpeace’s April 2012 joint statement on fracking (co-signed by the Water and Environment Alliance and Friends of the Earth Europe) that makes a fracking well seem not entirely different from a nuclear-waste dump.

That document asserts that “fracking is a high-risk activity that impacts human health and the wider environment”. It warns that natural-gas development through fracking “could cause contamination of surface and groundwater (including drinking water)” and pollutes both soil and air while it “disrupts the landscape and impacts upon rural and conservation areas”.  Greenpeace also claims that fracking and its related activities produce smog, particulates, and toxic methane gas; cause workers to expose themselves to toxic chemicals used in the fracking process; increase “risks of earthquakes”; and lock local communities such as Lycoming County into a “boom and bust economy” that will run out when the oil and gas run out. Greenpeace and its allies insist that these places look to “tourism and agriculture instead”.

The document creates a dire picture, yet nearly every one of these claims is false. Since fracking operates thousands of feet below the aquifer, the risk to drinking water is nil; and there are no proven cases of water supplies becoming contaminated from fracking, despite the thousands of fracking wells drilled both in the United States and Canada. Yet the charge is repeated ad nauseam in anti-fracking ads, films, and pamphlets.

So is the charge that fracking exposes people, including workers, to dangerous chemicals. More than 99 percent of the fluid used to fracture rock in the operation is nothing more than water and sand mixed together. In fact, most of the statistical risks associated with fracking in terms of contact with dangerous chemicals (benzene is a favorite example, radioactive isotopes another, methane yet another) are no higher, and sometimes lower, than those associated with any other industrial job or outdoor activity, including driving a big-rig truck.

The charge that fracking can leak methane into drinking water stems from a Duke University study that examined a mere 68 water wells in a region of Pennsylvania and New York in which 20,000 water wells are drilled each year—and those who conducted the study never bothered to ask whether any methane concentrations existed before the fracking began (which turned out to be the case).

That fracking might cause earthquakes is another oft-repeated alarmist charge with no facts or evidence behind it. In certain conditions, deep underground injections of water and sand used in fracking can lead to detectable seismic activities, but so can favored green projects such as geothermal-energy exploration or sequestering carbon dioxide underground. None of these adds up to seismic rumblings any human being will notice, let alone an Irving Allen movie-style catastrophe. And given the fact that for years there have been thousands of fracking wells around the country that operate without any detectable seismic activity, the argument seems clearly driven more by the need to generate emotion than the imperative to weigh actual evidence.

But perhaps the oddest claim from groups such as Greenpeace is that increasing the use of natural gas will not reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The evidence is overwhelmingly the opposite. As natural gas continues to squeeze out coal as a cheap supply of energy, especially for power plants, the greenhouse-gas-emission index will inevitably head downward. In fact, since the shale boom, those emissions in the United States have been cut by almost 20 percent, a number that one would expect to make any environmental activist smile.

All of which suggests that the war on fracking is waged in defiance of facts. And that, in turn, suggests a particular agenda is at work in the anti-fracking camp. A hint of it appears in Greenpeace’s claim that local communities would be better off sticking to “sustainable agriculture and tourism”, meaning organic farming and microbreweries that cater to the tastes of affluent and sophisticated out-of-towners. The war on fracking is a war on economic growth, which the shale revolution has managed to sustain in the middle of the Obama recession, and a war on the upward mobility any industrial revolution like fracking triggers.

It is part of what the Manhattan Institute’s Fred Siegel has called the “liberal revolt against the masses,” and a good place to see it in action is in New York State.

In 2006, then-gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer made a campaign swing through the so-called Southern Tier of upstate New York. The Manhattanite expressed shock at a landscape that was “devastated,” as he put it, and was steadily being abandoned for lack of jobs and economic opportunity. “This is not the New York we dream of,” he said.

Much the same had been true of large portions of rural Pennsylvania. Fracking reversed the downward course there. But the moratorium Spitzer’s successor, Andrew Cuomo, placed on fracking in 2008 before locking it in permanently late last year has frozen those portions of the state in their relative poverty.

Local farmers have been furious over the de facto ban. They are frustrated that the valuable source of income that fracking would generate has been denied them — and that Albany and its liberal enablers are content to crush them under the twin burden of some of the highest property taxes in the country and a regulatory regime that, in Fred Siegel’s words, “makes it hard to eke out a living from small dairy herds.”.

Locals are furious, too, that the ban is denying blue-collar jobs that could help young people find work in a fracking site and could transform local standards of living. In 2012, the state’s health department determined that hydro-fracking could be done safely in the state and concluded that “significant adverse impacts on human health are not expected from routine HVHF (hydro-fracking) operations”.  This was not what state officials wanted to hear, and the report was buried. When someone leaked it to the New York Times, the Department of Environmental Conservation’s spokesperson quickly disavowed it. Meanwhile, Cuomo’s acting health commissioner, Howard Zucker, served as front man for his boss’s permanent ban.

Ithaca is the center of New York’s anti-fracking hardliners. Their leader is Helen Slottje, who organized the Community Environmental Defense Fund to use local zoning regulations to keep fracking out of the surrounding county. She admits that many local people down the hill from Ithaca resent their efforts and think that she and her environmentalist militia are little more than thieves stealing money from their pockets.

But Slottje dismisses their worries, just as she angrily dismisses the charge that she’s a classic example of someone who opposes salutary change because she doesn’t want it in her own back yard. “If a serial killer knocks on your door,” she says, “it’s not NIMBYism to fight back.” She doesn’t bother to wonder whether her comparison of frackers to serial killers might be slightly exaggerated. She simply adds, “We’re not NIMBY, we’re NIABY. Not In Anyone’s Back Yard.”

She is joined in her activism by the Duncan Hines heiress Adelaide Gomer, whose anti-fracking Park Foundation is based in Ithaca and bankrolls much of the activism. “Hydro-fracking will turn our area into an industrial site,” she has proclaimed. After citing the usual charges about poisoning the aquifer, she also adds, “It will ruin the ambience, the beauty of the region.” The beauty of falling-down barns, rusted cars and farm equipment, and abandoned farmhouses may be lost on the locals, but it’s united the rich and influential in New York City. They want to keep things that way — and keep the “creepy advances of environment-trashing frackers” out of the state.

Gomer was able to mobilize demonstrations around the state to maintain the ban despite lobbying in Albany to overturn it, while celebrities such as Alec Baldwin, Robert de Niro, Yoko Ono, Debra Winger, Carrie Fisher, David Byrne, Jimmy Fallon, Martha Stewart, Lady Gaga, and the Beastie Boys signed an Artists Against Fracking petition. Like other Manhattanites, they have no reason to worry much about low land prices in the Southern Tier—but they do worry about development that would benefit the locals while possibly spoiling the view.

By cloaking their social snobbery in the clothes of the environmentalist movement, New York’s well-heeled have managed to forestall the kind of wealth transfer that fracking has brought to Pennsylvania. Indeed, some like Slottje are hoping to spread the same anti-fracking gospel back across the state line and stop Pennsylvania’s economic boom dead in its tracks. …

Anti-frackers also thought they had a shot at stopping the industry in Colorado. The state is one of the wellsprings of environmental activism, after all, with plenty of willing foot soldiers from campuses such as the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Denver. But Colorado also sits on one of the biggest shale fields in North America and is one of the top natural-gas states. In 2013, oil and gas contributed $30 billion to Colorado’s economy, in addition to thousands of jobs.

A serious effort to launch an anti-fracking initiative, which would have banned drilling within 2,000 feet of homes and hospitals and given local community councils effective veto power over fracking efforts, ran aground early in 2014. Colorado Democrats realized it could endanger the reelections of Governor John Hickenlooper and Senator Mark Udall. Fracking is popular with Colorado voters, especially working-class voters. They convinced the multimillionaire congressman Jared Polis to set aside his petition drive for the bill just as Hickenlooper and Udall suddenly turned squishy on the fracking issue, to the fury of local environmentalists. …

When regulatory agencies actually investigate the dire charges made against the industry, most of the charges evaporate under scrutiny. Remaining health and safety matters, such as waste disposal, turn out to be manageable with simple oversight. In the end, this means that the fight to ban fracking outright is steadily turning into a losing battle.

And when politicians and courts decide to quit the field, what’s left for the left? More protests, even civil disobedience. “We will resist this with our bodies, our hearts, and our minds,” one southern Illinois organic farmer told the website Green Progress. “We will block this, we will chain ourselves to trucks.” …

While the activists are lying in the road, fracking and its technologies are constantly evolving. Far from rejecting the environmentalists’ demands for more safety and for meeting community standards, companies are constantly adjusting to make their work as clean as possible. Many now employ reusable water for the hydro-fracking process, for example, while cutting back their use of toxic chemicals. Technologies for water-free fracking are already here and will become increasingly widespread in areas where water resources are scarce. That will be another body blow to fracking’s opponents, who like to claim it wastes water needed for human consumption or agriculture.

And we haven’t even begun to explore the possibilities of natural gas. While fracking has yielded record levels of oil production in the United States, those reserves-in-rock are limited. American natural-gas reserves are not. According to a recent Colorado School of Mines study, they amount to 2.3 quadrillion cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas in the United States, enough to fuel our energy needs for decades — and the constant technological innovations of the industry will make extracting those reserves increasingly cost-efficient. …

Beyond that, there are methane hydrates — deep deposits of crystalline natural gas, embedded in large parts of the Arctic permafrost and ocean bottoms. Even when shale oil and gas have eventually run out, technologies to extract methane hydrates will be able to supply almost limitless energy — according to the U.S. Geological Survey, more than all previous discovered oil and gas put together, even while wind and solar are still trying to figure out how to generate power efficiently.

Progressives who believe themselves to be on the side of science and the little guy at the same time are in fact defying both. This is a battle between the partisans of a discredited ideology from the past and those who see the fast-advancing future.

We were reluctant to cut out any parts of the article, which is long but rewarding. Lean meat all the way through.

If you like the taste we’ve given you, read all of it here.

This happy story comes from Investor’s Business Daily:

A Greenpeace co-founder testified in Congress Tuesday [February 25, 2014] about global warming.What he said is hardly what anyone would expect.

Patrick Moore came off as a raving denier.

“There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years,” said Moore, who was testifying before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight. “If there were such a proof, it would be written down for all to see. No actual proof, as it is understood in science, exists.”

Moore is somewhat famous for leaving Greenpeace, a large environmentalist organization that grew from a small activist group he belonged to in 1971 while earning his doctorate in ecology. He quit in 1986 because it had become too political and strayed away from the science he believed was its institutional strength.

Moore didn’t hold back in his Senate appearance. He quickly zeroed in on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and strongly scolded it for claiming there is a “95-100% probability” that man “has been the dominant cause of” global warming. Those numbers, he said, have been invented.

He also characterized the IPCC’s reliance on computer models as futile; told senators that history “fundamentally contradicts the certainty that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main cause of global warming”; and noted that “during the Greenhouse Ages,” a period that precedes our fossil-fuel burning civilization, “there was no ice on either pole and all the land was tropical and subtropical from pole to pole.”

Moore further crossed the line of accepted climate change discourse when he insisted “that a warmer temperature than today’s would be far better than a cooler one” and reminded lawmakers “that we are not capable, with our limited knowledge, of predicting which way temperatures will go next.”

*

Meanwhile, the “climate change” chorus sings on.

We’ve taken this from PowerLine, by Steven Hayward:

Just when you think the Climatistas can’t get any more desperate, they get their freak on to a whole new level. The latest claim to add to The Warmlist of things caused by global warming is . . . a higher crime rate—100 years from now.

I love the precision of this forecast, which matches the faux-precision of temperature forecasts 100 years out:

Should global warming (or climate change, or whatever they decide to call it by then) continue, crime will increase — specifically, violent crime. By how much?

An additional 22,000 murders, 180,000 cases of rape, 1.2 million aggravated assaults, 2.3 million simple assaults, 260,000 robberies, 1.3 million burglaries, 2.2 million cases of larceny, and 580,000 cases of vehicle theft in the U.S.

This is indeed bad news, as it means our prisons may be so overcrowded that there won’t be enough room for all the climate skeptics that the Climatistas now say they want to prosecute for their crimes of disagreeing with the “consensus”.

In a long and boring video, which PowerLine posts but we will not, you can hear a “Climatista” presenting the case that people who disagree with them should be prosecuted. It’s the Catholic Church and Galileo all over again.

It has been reliably estimated by many researchers into the subject of “Global Warming” (or any of the other sobriquets by which it is known) that in fulfilling the draconian prescriptions of the Kyoto Accord or its successors, such as the United Nations IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, millions of jobs will be lost in the developed world, the quality of life in the industrialized nations will sink to substandard levels, and the inhabitants of the Third World will be deprived of the minimal immunities, comforts, and amenities to which they aspire.

Are the warmists aware  of that? Do they want to spread poverty?

Seems so. But they are not succeeding.

This is from PJ Media, by David Solway:

Fiona Kobusingye, coordinator of the Congress of Racial Equality Uganda, has vehemently denounced the attempt to impose energy restrictions on African nations in the name of fighting global warming. “These policies kill,” she writes. As for the combustible Al Gore, he “uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year.” Her conclusion: “Telling Africans they can’t have electricity — except what can be produced with some wind turbines or little solar panels — is immoral. It is a crime against humanity” . …

H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the nonprofit National Center for Policy Analysis, would clearly agree. He correctly argues that recommendations based on “flawed statistical analyses and procedures that violate general forecasting principles” should be taken “into account before enacting laws to counter global warming — which economists point out would have severe economic consequences.” Such consequences are already in evidence. Benny Peiser, editor of CCNet science network, speaking at the Heartland Institute’s 2009 climate conference in New York, sounded the death knell of the green movement in Europe owing to huge costs and minimal results …  Environmentalist Lawrence Solomon quotes Spanish economist Gabriel Calzada, whose studies show that “every green job created ploughs under 2.2 jobs elsewhere in the economy” and that green jobs are proving to be unsustainable since the creation of even one such job costs $1 million in government subsidies …

These are costs that may be suffered in other, frankly ludicrous, ways as well. The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) in its 2008 Annual Report, published in 2009, jubilates over the replacement of motorized vehicles by “bicycle rickshaws”—which, it must be admitted, will certainly help to decongest metropolitan traffic. That it would reduce America and the West to Third World Status does not trouble UNEP overmuch. Perhaps that is the plan.

The much-ballyhooed T. Boone Pickens strategy of introducing large-scale windmill technology is now proving to be a similarly quixotic project, unsightly, land-consuming, bird-killing, neurosis-inducing, expensive and totally inadequate to its declared purpose of meeting even a fraction of our electricity needs. Alex Alexiev of the Hudson Institute has laid the cards on the table for all to read: green electricity bills are rising exponentially; Europe is gradually abandoning many of its green energy programs as cost-ineffective and injurious to both wildlife and human health; and, as of the end of 2008, American solar and wind-power stocks had lost 80% of their value …  Rhode Island’s Public Utilities Commission has rejected a deal to build an offshore wind farm that would have entailed “hundreds of millions of dollars in additional costs…”  New Zealand has repealed its carbon tax scheme and Australia’s opposition party is vowing to follow suit.

The writing is on the wall in majuscule. The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) has closed shop, putting an end to its estimated $10 trillion carbon trading scheme. In August 2011, President Obama’s pet green project, the California-based Solyndra solar plant, filed for bankruptcy, costing the U.S. $535 million in wasted stimulus funds and 1,100 jobs …  Other such futilities are impending. The Beacon Power Corp, recipient of a $43 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy, has filed for bankruptcy after being delisted by the NASDAQ …  The solar cell company Spectrawatt, recipient of a federal stimulus boost, and Nevada Geothermal, which profited from Federal DOE and Treasury Department subsidies, are on the brink of failure …  Ener 1, which received a $118 million stimulus grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop lithium storage batteries for electric cars, has filed for bankruptcy protection … This is bad news for the plug-in Chevy Volt, the president’s car of choice, which is beset with problems anyway; GM had to suspend production to cut inventory owing to anemic sales …  Abound Solar, which makes cadmium telluride solar modules to the tune of a $400 million federal loan guarantee, has laid off 300 workers, amounting to 70% of its workforce … And now the electric vehicle battery company A123 Systems, beneficiary of $300 million in Obama’s Recovery Act funds and $135 million in state tax credits and subsidies, courtesy of Michigan’s former Democratic governor Jennifer Granholm, is about to go belly up …

The reason for many of these failures in green energy-production companies is simple. … As author Rich Trzupek explains, the energy density of convertible wind and solar is risibly low and dispersed, which renders electricity-generating power plants, whether large or small, “the most inefficient, least reliable, and expensive form of power we have” …  As happened in Spain, Europe’s bellwether country for climatophrenic ruination, Obama’s “solar alchemy,” which demonizes traditional forms of energy extraction and application, has become a recipe for an American economic debacle.

Finnish professor Jarl Ahlbeck, a former Greenpeace member and author of over 200 scientific publications, points out that “real measurements give no ground for concern about a catastrophic future warming.” Contrary to common belief, he continues, “there has been no or little global warming since 1995” …  His findings have been supported by many other studies. To adduce just a few instances: geophysicist Phil Chapman, basing his results on careful analyses from major weather-tracking agencies, reports that global temperature is “falling precipitously” ;  …  geologist Don Easterbrook, associate editor of the Geological Society of America Bulletin, Professor Emeritus at Western Washington University and former U.S. representative to UNESCO, is also convinced that recent solar changes suggest the advent of a new cooling cycle which could be “fairly severe” ; … and a new study conducted by three Norwegian scientists, Jan-Erik Solheim, Kjell Stordahl and Ole Humlum, indicates that the next solar cycle, which is imminent, will see a “significant temperature decrease” over and above the current decline …

Moreover, as Robert Zubrin has decisively shown in his recent Merchants of Despair, there exists robust scientific proof derived from ice core data and isotopic ratios in marine organism remains that Earth’s climate is a stable system, that CO2 emissions create surplus plant growth that in turn absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide, thus restoring climate equilibrium over the long haul, and that under cyclical conditions of global warming agricultural productivity naturally increases and human life immensely improves.

In a brilliant article for the Financial Post …  analyzing the eleven logical fallacies on which the argument for man-made climate change rests, Lord Christopher Monckton, known for tracking and exposing scientific hoaxes, has effectively proven that the anthropogenic thesis has absolutely no basis, neither in fact nor in theory. So-called climate skeptics need nerves of steel to oppose the reigning ideology. It takes no less courage and perhaps even more for a climate “Warmist” to buck the trend, as culture-hero James Lovelock has recently done. Lovelock, who in his 2006 The Revenge of Gaia prophesied the charring of the planet, now admits he had been “extrapolating too far.” Despite predictably hedging his bets and deferring catastrophe into the indefinite future, he avers that “we don’t know what the climate is doing” and disparages his previous work, including Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, as “alarmist” (MSNBC.com, April 30, 2012).

Nevertheless, the Global Warming meme continues to circulate in defiance of the accumulating evidence, which leads one to wonder who the real “deniers” are. In my own country of Canada, “Warmist” foundations are determined to continue issuing environmental fatwas, in particular to tie up state-of-the-art, economically productive oil pipelines in endless litigation. That such a move would impact national revenues and cost thousands of potential jobs is a matter of no concern.

But the cost of environmentalism is becoming of ever greater concern. Must do.

If the deceit and self-righteousness of Big Green don’t rouse voters and tax-payers to vocal opposition, the cost will surely do it.

Today, April 22, is Earth Day, the Holy Day of the present-day religion of Gaia.

She is very thirsty for human blood.

Here’s a UK government 2010 video canvassing our sympathy for the environmentalism that Earth Day celebrates:

Earth Day was begun in 1970.

Alan Caruba, writing at Canada Free Press, quotes leading environmentalists of that year:

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” – George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” – Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” – New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” – Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.” – Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day in 1970.

“What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” – Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-CO)

“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” – Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace.

“We have wished, we eco-freaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion — guilt-free at last!” – Steward Brand, writing in the Earth Catalog.

Now there’s a confession! Affording us proof of a theory we’ve held about eco-freaks these many years.

“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.” – Dave Forman, founder of Earth First

Indeed it will. No one left to worry about anything.

“I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.” – John Davis, editor of the Earth First Journal

Yeah, pity about modern medicine curing diseases. Much nicer when life was hard, agonizing and short.

“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.” – An editorial in The Economist.

All that was way back when Earth Day was begun.

How have the predictions panned out?

Daniel Flynn, a skeptic with a taste for facts, writes at Front Page:

The world’s population on [the forty-second] Earth Day is double the world’s population on the first Earth Day. Rather than ushering in Doomsday, more people have meant a more livable Earth. Life expectancy rates in the U.S. have ballooned by about ten years for men and women since the first Earth Day. Other parts of the world have experienced even greater gains. Revolutions in travel and communications have made the globe a smaller ball. Farming techniques opposed by extreme environmentalists have shifted the conversation from “Will we have enough to eat?” to “Will we eat what’s healthy?” The more, the merrier.

But in the doom-predicting and humanity-hating business, nothing’s changed.

The following comes from an article at Infowars.com by Paul Joseph Watson:

In 2006, an environmental magazine to which Al Gore and Bill Moyers had both granted interviews advocated that climate skeptics who are part of the “denial industry” be arrested and made to face Nuremberg-style war crimes trials.

[In 2010]  “Gaia hypothesis” creator James Lovelock asserted that “democracy must be put on hold” to combat global warming and that “a few people with authority” should be allowed to run the planet because people were too stupid to be allowed to steer their own destinies. 

Writing for Forbes Magazine, climate change alarmist Steve Zwick calls [now] for skeptics of man-made global warming to be tracked, hunted down and have their homes burned to the ground, yet another shocking illustration of how eco-fascism is rife within the environmentalist lobby. … “We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices. … They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?” …

It’s the argument of a demented idiot who’s obviously in the throws of a childish tantrum over the fact that Americans are rejecting the global government/carbon tax agenda for which man-made global warming is a front in greater numbers than ever before.

*

What news for this special day from the Gaian Church of Man-Made Global Warming?

This comes from an article by Daniel Greenfield at Front Page:

A University of Illinois 2009 survey [found] that 97.4% of scientists agree that mankind is responsible for global warming. This is easily debunked when one considers its selection methodology. … The Illinois researchers decided that of the 10,257 respondents, the 10,180 who demurred from the so-called consensus “weren’t qualified to comment on the issue because they were merely solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists, astronomers and the like. Of the remaining 77 scientists whose votes were counted, 75 agreed with the proposition that mankind was causing catastrophic changes in the climate. And, since 75 is 97.4% of 77, ‘overwhelming consensus’ was demonstrated once again.” The real percentage of concurring scientists in the survey is less than .008%. That these 75 were … “scientists of unknown qualifications” adds yet another layer to the boondoggle.

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.