Is the Climate Change Industry the New Enron?

At heart, the scheme is worthy of a Bond villain.

Imagine “Springtime for Hitler” on a global scale. In Mel Brooks’ The Producers, an unscrupulous Broadway producer and an accountant plot to make the worst musical of all time - a tribute to Adolf Hitler - and plan to make a killing in the process by selling the rights many times over on the theory that no one will ever ask what happened to the money they invested in a giant flop. In light of the revelation that “scientists” at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia deliberately altered climate data in order to invent a warming trend in the face of temperatures that have actually declined over the past eleven years it’s hard not to wonder if that’s what’s been going on here.

What most people don’t realize is that Climate Change is big business. Billions - potentially trillions - of dollars.

On a global basis, the sincere concerns of millions of people have been cynically exploited by people who have misdirected their honest passion into a money-making scheme.

It’s ultimate refuge in audacity. Corporate criminals pose as defenders of the Earth and assemble vast fortunes peddling technologies and schemes that most people don’t expect to actually work to combat an unfalsifiable crisis. Together with other interested parties, they buy the data they need to secure their profits. Then they smear anyone who disagrees with them as being the pay of Evil Corporations.

This would not be a coordinated conspiracy. There are no Secret Protocols of the Elders of Gaia. I maintain my belief that any conspiracy that would involve more people than can comfortably be seated inside of a portable toilet (which, to be entirely clear, is, in my opinion, one) cannot possibly be kept secret for any extended periods of time.

This would be a conspiracy of common interest.

The scientists - like those at the University of East Anglia - need a crisis to convince people to keep them in operation.

The politicians and activists who preach the word need an excuse for extending the reach of government. After all, as others have pointed out in the past, it’s probably not a coincidence that the current wave of the environmental movement took off contemporaneously with the fall of the Soviet Union. Just take a stroll through Wikipedia someday and look up the members of the New Left who’ve lived to late middle age and how many of them ended up somewhere in the new movement.

Finally, into the breach, step business charlatans. They create “green” ventures of all sorts and convince governments to hand them fat contracts and subsidies. And they never have to deliver. The scientists don’t care is the businesses get paid so long as they get paid too. The politicians and activists don’t care what happens to the money either - not really - they care about looking like they care, about making themselves feel better about themselves, and about extending the reach of government into all facets of human life. And these illegitimate businessmen love it because no one expects them to actually produce anything of value.

So, who loses in this?

The most obvious losers are the millions of honest citizens and enterprises who are being taxed to pay for non-viable ventures justified by science that increasingly appears not merely to be incorrect but actively fraudulent.

When I was young, we mostly talked about “Global Warming.” When my parents were my age, the threat was “Global Cooling.” That’s why “Climate Change” is now the preferred nomenclature - it’s a catch-all that can paint everything as an urgent threat.

The biggest loser in all of this is the environment itself. A fraction of the money and energy spent fighting the “Climate Change” phantom could have brought clean air and water to tens of millions of people. Lunatics debates over “carbon credits” in Europe and North America have given the Chinese political cover to undertake a rapid industrial expansion that is poisoning a fair chunk of the Earth. The energy and hope of millions of people that might otherwise have been usefully channeled into a thousand local projects of use has instead been expended in making those people the unwitting dupes and propagandists of duplicitous corporate interests.

When people at Enron falsified figures and misled the world to get people to invest, some of them ended up going to jail. Shouldn’t everyone be held to the same standard?