Its high time to stand up to climate change bullies
By Tom Harris
web posted February 5, 2024
What do car manufacturers, farmers, ranchers, coal, oil and natural gas companies, electricity providers, cement companies, bird lovers, everyday consumers and pro-life activists have in common? They are all victims of the irrational and unscientific idea that humanity is causing dangerous climate change by our so-called greenhouse gas emissions. Yet virtually none of these groups contest the climate scare. Indeed, many support it, like hostages who identify with the goals of their captors in what has become known as the Stockholm syndrome.
For example, rather than explain that their products have negligible impact on climate, oil and gas companies and their associations acquiesce to the scare by spending hundreds of billions of dollars reducing their emissions to appease the climate bullies. They even waste untold sums of cash trying to capture and store benign carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas of life, underground in what they call Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). For example, Pathways Alliance, a group of companies with major operations in Canada's oil sands, boasts,
"Canada's oil sands are on a path to reach net-zero emissions from operations…Pathways has outlined a planned $16.5 billion investment in the foundational CCS project and a further $7.6 billion on other emission-reduction projects."
Coal companies are often frequently worse, meekly accept their designation as the bad boy of hydrocarbon fuels due to their CO2 emissions, ramping down production (at least in Canada and the US) and slowly dying:
Coal company and association leaders would apparently rather see thousands of their workers laid off than dare contest one of the major causes of their companies' decline: the climate scare. But then, unlike their workers, coal company presidents are frequency wealthy and so can quietly retire to their hacienda in Mexico when their companies go belly-up.
And how about electricity providers? In the United States, the Electric Power Supply Association (EPSA), the national trade association representing America's power suppliers list their first three policy positions as follows on their website:
Concerning the last item, their position on the Paris Agreement, EPSA state:
"The risks of climate change are real. EPSA member companies have and continue to play a significant role in reducing power sector greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions while ensuring reliable electric supply. EPSA members have invested billions of dollars to deploy new, low and zero carbon emitting solutions.
"EPSA supports the ambitions of the Paris Agreement to reduce GHG emissions, along with state and federal market-based policies, that seek to meaningfully, rapidly, and economically lower GHG emissions."
Rate payers who foot the bill for these costly, woke policies have a right to be angry that power suppliers support an agreement that will ultimately result in price spikes and widespread blackouts.
Cement companies also bow to environmental political correctness, with the Cement Association of Canada even asserting:
"Our #ConcreteZero Action Plan shows that greater emissions reductions are possible. Relying on developed and proven technologies and processes, #ConcreteZero is about finding "true" net-zero emissions. It will require many actions, from changing the way we make cement, to imagining new ways of designing and constructing our infrastructure."
The American Automotive Policy Council (AAPC), which Bing AI defines as "a trade association that represents the common public policy interests of three American automakers: Ford, GM, and Stellantis," have apparently succumbed to the climate scare as well, for example asserting in their December 9, 2021 press release:
"Governor Matt Blunt, president of the American Automotive Policy Council, today issued the following statement on the Biden Administration's executive order on lowering emissions and promoting electric vehicles for the federal fleet:
"We applaud the Biden administration for this announcement. American Automakers Ford, General Motors and Stellantis produce the vast majority of all government fleet vehicles, and they look forward to continuing to supply the vast majority of these vehicles as they do their part to reduce emissions and produce and sell more electric vehicles to help achieve these goals."
Considering the problems with EVs and how most consumers have rejected them, the last thing these companies should really want is to produce more EVs. But they are too frightened of political correctness to speak out against the climate scare. And, of course, there is money to be made producing vehicles for the government, no matter how useless.
Farmers and ranchers are somewhat better, at least protesting now and then about the imposition of unreasonable fertilizer and livestock reduction mandates in the name of "stopping climate change." But look how the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers start the "Our Story" section of their website:
"Over the next ten years, we have the ability to collectively shift agriculture to be net-neutral for greenhouse gas emissions and ultimately a net positive sector, effectively erasing the footprint of how our food is grown while offsetting other industries.
"It will take collaboration and action across the entire food value chain.
"...Today farmers face the largest challenge of this generation – creating sustainable food systems and solving climate change. And they only have 30 harvests until 2050 to do it."
Did Al Gore write the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers "Our Story" webpage?
You would assume that the last people to support the climate scare would be bird-lovers. After all, one of the main consequences of the climate scare is the mass proliferation of 60-story-high industrial wind turbines across the world. And, as Suzanne Albright, a founding member of the Great Lakes Wind Truth, my guest on the December 11, 2023 edition of The Other Side of the Story podcast, explained so well, wind turbines kill huge numbers of birds and bats. Yet, what is listed first on "Our Work" on the Audubon Society's web site? Climate, of course:
Clicking on "Climate" takes one to a webpage that highlights "The Audubon Guide to Climate Action" which then takes the reader to Your Climate Action Guide | Audubon headed by, get this, spinning industrial wind turbines, a screen capture of which appears as follows:
All that is missing are dead birds splattered across the landscape.
Every day consumers are always complaining about high prices caused by the increasing cost of fuel and all the products that require fuel to manufacture and transport. Conservative politicians take full advantage of that sentiment by attacking impositions such as Canada's "carbon tax." But do political leaders or the public at large condemn the climate scare causing these price spikes? Aside from former president Donald Trump and a handful of others, none do.
About the only group that is a victim of the climate scare which have started to criticize the underlying science are the pro-life lobby, some of whom have recognized the nefarious connection between the climate movement and the abortion industry. For example, the Ottawa, Canada chapter of the Campaign Life Coalition, "a national (Canada) pro-life organization working at all levels of government to secure full legal protection for all human beings, from the time of conception to natural death," brought me in for an evening of presentation and discussion in 2023. Similarly, LifeSiteNews.com, "a non-profit Internet news service dedicated to issues of life, family, and many related issues" recently published a four-part series I wrote advising pro-life activists how to fight back against the climate scare threatening their movement.
When I was in elementary school in Montreal, an aggressive boy who enjoyed hurting people, used to pick fights with me on the way home from school. At first, I was merely his victim, coming home with a black eye, bleeding lip and so on. So my father bought a punching bag and taught me how to fight effectively enough that I could defend myself. I eventually fought the bully to a draw and hurt him sufficiently that he instead eventually picked on boys who had not learned how to properly defend themselves. I am eternally in my father's debt as a consequence.
But, before I learned how to fight, I discovered that other boys were also being picked on by the same delinquent and I tried to organize the victims to stand up to the bully as a group. Of course, we could have easily stopped the bully in his tracks if we had just stuck together, making it clear to him that an attack on one of us was an attack on all of us and then he would pay a serious price. But the victims were all too frightened and so continued to give him their hockey sticks, pucks, chocolate bars or whatever else he demanded and then run away after being punched in the head a few times.
The same thing is happening with the groups that are victims of the climate scare. Each of them, with, as I say, the recent exception of some in the pro-life lobby, are giving climate bullies exactly what they want—the power to control how they run their organizations, what priorities they establish and, ultimately, in the case of many of the companies, acceptance of their own guilt and eventual demise because they are too frightened to stand up and fight them uno a uno.
Imagine if all of them—coal, oil, gas, cement, automotive and electricity companies, ranchers and farmers, bird-lovers, pro-life advocates and ordinary citizens and the politicians who pretend to represent them—stood up to their shared enemy, climate activists and their supporters in government and the press, and announced,
"We are convening open hearings of scientists from diverging points of view on climate change so the public can finally hear what is really going on in the climate science community."
If such hearings were held, the public would quickly learn that the science of climate change is anything but settled and is actually diverging away from the hypothesis that humanity is causing dangerous climate change. Politicians, fearing a violent backlash from their constituents, would drop the climate file like a hot potato and all of us would benefit immensely.
If these groups are too frightened to do this, an obvious alternative would be for them to help fund the next International Conference on Climate Change organized and run by The Heartland Institute, the most recent of which may be viewed at WATCH THE WHOLE CONFERENCE - 15th International Conference on Climate Change (heartland.org). Then entities funding the conference would use their considerable public and government relations departments to promote the conference in every way possible—press releases, newspaper articles, radio and TV interviews and advertisements, billboards, social media announcements, published transcripts and books, editorial board meetings with major media, meetings with government officials, and so on—to make sure millions of citizens would get the message loud and clear:
"There is no climate emergency. Efforts to solve this imaginary crisis will leave us bankrupt, hungry and freezing in the dark for no environmental benefit."
And then the victims of the climate scare can finally say to the climate change bullies,
"We have had it with your aggressive behaviour and will no longer kowtow to your demands to prioritize actions to address a crisis that many scientists say does not exist."
Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC). Please share this article and support ICSC through its GiveSendGo crowdfunding webpage at GiveSendGo - THERE IS NO CLIMATE EMERGENCY!: The Leader in Freedom Fundraising.
