Let me start with this: In his 2014 State of the Union speech, Obama told America that he wasn’t even going to go through the pretense of legislation anymore. “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” he told them.38
In other words, he’s not changing his style of governing a bit.
He made it clear he was going to rule by executive order and by having his Cabinet secretaries issue regulations that do not need congressional approval in order to move what many see as his antibusiness, anti-energy, anti-America agenda forward.
And there is practically no one left to stop him. Up to now, there’s been a small group of conservatives who are willing to stand up to him. They’ve been enough, but just barely enough, to make it difficult for the president to get laws passed that support his agenda.
Two Texas Republicans spoke out strongly against Obama’s executive-order presidency. Representative Randy Weber tweeted that the president is a “socialistic dictator.”39 Senator Ted Cruz published a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he described what he called “the president’s persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat.… The president’s taste for unilateral action to circumvent Congress should concern every citizen, regardless of party or ideology.”40
It bothers me when I hear politicians and political commentators explaining that there’s not really very much the president can do as far as setting policy and making law without the approval of Congress.
Texas Republican congressman John Culberson said that if Obama tries to advance his agenda by using illegal executive orders the House has the power to stop him simply by withholding funding for the projects and policies he announces. In Culberson’s words, “The power of the purse is the secret to this guy—the most illegal, unlawful president in American history.”41
Culberson may be right about the illegality, but the “power of the purse” hasn’t even slowed the president down.
Obama single-handedly implemented what amounts to his DREAM Act through a 2012 executive order that allows young illegal immigrants to remain in the United States indefinitely.
He’s initiated regulations through the Environmental Protection Agency that have shut down oil exploration on the coast of Alaska and stalled the Keystone XL Pipeline, severely damaging America’s energy industry, along with the U.S. economy.
He showed his sympathy for terrorists by unilaterally lifting immigration restrictions on people who have provided “limited material support” to terror groups.42
Rather than protect our borders and our citizens from allowing terrorist supporters into the United States, Obama has effectively granted immunity from deportation to known terrorists.43
If you think Congress can stop this administration’s subversive undermining of the Constitution and the laws of the United States by cutting funding, you’re in a fantasyland. Republican “leaders” like John Boehner and former Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan just don’t get it. They refuse to understand that they’re the victims of a master of legislative sleight-of-hand who has already taken over many governmental functions that should be handled by the other branches of our federal government. Both of these leaders have engaged in discussions with the president about a new immigration law that would effectively grant amnesty to the illegals already in the country.
The power of the purse has not been mentioned in these discussions.
Even political liberals are beginning to see the danger we face. One Constitutional scholar described the president’s agenda as the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid. “We have what many once called an imperial presidency model of largely unchecked authority,” he wrote.44
Here is a short list of the policies and actions the president has initiated by executive order:
• He’s unilaterally modified the Affordable Care Act without consulting Congress, despite the fact that Congress alone has the power to change the law.
• He’s bypassed the Senate in confirming several of his nominees for federal posts.
• And he’s effectively eliminated the welfare work requirements that Bill Clinton and the U.S. Congress had implemented and that had been so instrumental in reducing the number of Americans receiving welfare benefits.45
As one commentator has said, “The ultimate check on presidential lawlessness is elections and, in extreme cases, impeachment.”46
The latter may be the only solution to end this imperial presidency.
I started this chapter by telling you how Obama and his henchman, Harry Reid, used the Knockout Game to take away our civil rights by getting rid of the filibuster. I went on to tell you how this administration, both by overt and subversive methods, is systematically stripping us of the rights and freedoms that the U.S. Constitution guarantees. I’ll admit I’ve painted a pretty dire picture. Our enemies within outnumber us and out-finance us. And they have a head start.
CHAPTER 8
The War on Science
Yes, the Obama administration has lied to us consistently about global warming. They try to draw the eyes of the nation away from the real threats and calamities, like what’s happening in the Middle East and in Ukraine, with nonsense about rising seas and shrinking ice caps. The president champions regulations that cripple our energy output while he delights the warmists and the windmill farmers. But don’t be fooled.
I want to start this chapter by telling you a story. You might remember it. In late November 2013, a research vessel carrying Australian scientists and academics left New Zealand and headed to Antarctica on a fact-finding expedition. The expedition had set out to gather evidence of global warming. If you know anything about me you know that I know something about such types of voyages.
The ship, the Akademik Shokalskiy, was of Russian registry and was specially outfitted for polar navigating. But on Christmas Eve, the Shokalskiy sailed into a blizzard off the coast of Antarctica and in no time was literally encased in ice so thick it was frozen in place. Two icebreakers, one Chinese and one Australian, which were in relative proximity, received the SOS. En route, the Chinese vessel, called the Snow Dragon, an icebreaker so powerful it’s capable of navigating through ice as much as fifty feet thick, got stuck in the ice.1 Ice thickness and blinding snow caused the Australian ship to turn back. A U.S. Coast Guard cutter named the Polar Star, one of the most technically advanced polar icebreakers ever made, headed to free the scientists. But six days later the Russian research vessel was still frozen as stiff as a box of spinach in an old freezer.
There was plenty of food and supplies onboard, so it wasn’t exactly a life-or-death situation. E-mailed videos showed high spirits among the passengers on the isolated ship. But as the days went by and the weather cleared, it became obvious to the scientists that they weren’t alone. Penguins lined the frozen shores to get a look at the icebound ship. Ten years or so ago, March of the Penguins, an Academy Award–winning documentary about the mating journey of emperor penguins, was filmed in this area. The penguins certainly knew more about their neighborhood than the scientists did. Perhaps some on board realized the irony of their situation.
Finally, two weeks later, helicopters dispatched from the Chinese icebreaker were able to rescue the passengers of the Akademik Shokalskiy. Chris Turney, the Australian college professor who led the expedition, admitted to a reporter that the research team “got stuck in our own experiment.”
The New “Cold” War… on the Climate
In late February 2014, our secretary of state, John Kerry, said that “climate change” was the “greatest challenge of our generation.” He added, “We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists and science and extreme ideologues to compete with scientific fact.” Kerry—remember, he’s the secretary of state—uttered these words while Russia was amassing military assets in Ukraine as part of the expansion Russian president Vladimir Putin was carrying out at our expense. For his part, Obama stood behind a mic
rophone saying that the “international community” would issue a statement outlining the “costs” to Putin if he went any further.
A week later, while both Kerry and Obama were on vacation and Putin was ramping up his Crimea annexation and threatening to crash the U.S. economy if we tried to stop him, a “policy guidance statement,” the first of Kerry’s tenure, was released by the State Department. The statement urged his staff of seventy thousand to make climate change a top priority, saying, “Protecting our environment and meeting the challenge of global climate change is a critical mission for me as our country’s top diplomat.”2
In other words, after Putin had annexed Crimea and was moving troops to the Russia-Ukraine border in preparation for invading Ukraine, Kerry was delivering the full faith and power of the U.S. Department of State into the hands of the nutty warmists of the world.
While Putin was reigniting the Cold War, Kerry was focused on ecosystems.
Meanwhile, on the home front, Obama has been using the climate change canard as a reason to stop all legitimate energy production. One of his more contemptible moves was the appointment of John Podesta. In earlier chapters, I told you about Podesta, an Obama lieutenant whom I consider one of the most dangerous leftists in this country. Podesta promised that Obama would not hesitate to use executive orders in regulating energy production. He would gladly bypass Congress to impose his will on the American people. Podesta guaranteed that his boss would move “forward on his climate change and energy transformation agenda.”3
Obama’s appointment of Podesta is perhaps the clearest indication that this administration is ignoring the separation of powers on which our republic is based. White House mouthpiece Jay Carney promised, “Podesta will help implement executive actions where necessary when we can’t get cooperation out of Congress.”4 For his part, Podesta doesn’t even try to hide his contempt of Republican members of Congress who oppose the Obama agenda. He calls them “a cult worthy of Jonestown.”
It’s been clear for more than a decade what the international left is up to. The wealth-transfer specialists bent on implementing a new world order have used climate change as a shell to move money from hardworking, responsible people to the über-elites. If it weren’t so diabolical, their plan would be a parody: the domination of the global economy and the reduction of the planet’s citizenry to nothing more than the welfare clients of the international oligarchy.
The best part about making a case against the fraud of global warming is you don’t have to make a case. You can just sit back and watch the left make the case for you.
So let me introduce you to a few members of the global warming debate team.
Let me begin with Ottmar Edenhofer. Edenhofer was the co-chair of Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That group’s 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP-16, was held in Cancun, Mexico.
Edenhofer, in a startlingly candid interview with a German newspaper, let slip the true motives behind the climate change mafia: “[O]ne must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” he told the German reporter. “This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.”5
Edenhofer’s admission that global warming is nothing more than a political issue totally undermines the “science” that the left invented to justify global warming. The sole reason for the theory that man-made global warming exists at all is to help its proponents gain political and financial power over the money generated by capitalist economies.
In November 2013, 132 poor countries walked out of the United Nations climate talks during discussions of transferring wealth from richer countries—read “Western democracies”—to poorer ones. The discussion was about how wealthier nations would compensate those not so developed. The poorer nations insisted that developed countries give them $100 billion a year so they could prepare for natural disasters such as typhoons, heat waves, droughts, and other weather consequences of global warming. It was even suggested that rich countries pay for the fact that they had emitted greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as they developed their industrial base.6 This is the true agenda of the climate change movement.
Another beauty is Christiana Figueres, the so-called climate chief of the United Nations. Let me give you an idea of how much Figueres knows. Communist China, according to her, is the ideal model for government’s role in fighting climate change. One has to wonder if Ms. Figueres is familiar with the giant digital billboards the Chinese have erected. These advertisements feature a picture of the sun and the message “Protecting the atmospheric environment is everyone’s responsibility.” China’s pollution levels are more than 25 times higher than even the World Health Organization says are safe. Undoubtedly, the signs are there to remind citizens, who are unable to see the sun for weeks at a time because the airborne particulate matter blocks it out, that the golden orb around which the Earth revolves still exists.
Citizens in China are regularly notified that the air they breathe is “very unhealthy” and can cause “significant aggravation of heart or lung disease and premature mortality in persons with cardiopulmonary disease and the elderly.” Citizens are often advised to avoid all physical activity outdoors.7 Although it is the greatest emitter of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the history of mankind, China is “doing it right,” according to the U.N. climate change czar.8
There is no more powerful testimony, however, than evidence that comes from someone on one side of an issue who has seen the error of his ways. Such is the case with Patrick Moore, one of the cofounders of Greenpeace, the radical leftist climate change advocacy group. Greenpeace is one of the reasons Barack Obama hasn’t, as of this writing, approved the Keystone XL Pipeline. Moore was a member of Greenpeace from its earliest days, in 1971, until the time he left the group fifteen years later, as Greenpeace became focused not on global warming but on the politics of global warming.
“There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years,” Moore said in front of a Senate committee on the environment. He went on to explain that even if the planet is warming up slightly, that’s not necessarily a bad thing for human beings, who according to Moore are a “subtropical” species.9 He went on to explain that “we evolved at the equator in a climate where freezing weather did not exist. The only reasons we can survive these cold climates are fire, clothing, and housing.”10
Even more important, though, he talked about one of the primary reasons he left Greenpeace: The group aided and abetted those who established fraudulent computer models in order to scare people into believing that human activity actually had a negative impact on the climate. In other words, the “science” itself is a hoax. And you don’t have to take Moore’s word or my word for it. The people who practice it have admitted as much.
The entire climate-change movement is now in shambles, thanks to serial scandals about faked research, consecutive record cold and wet winters in much of Europe and the United States, and the conflict-of-interest get-rich schemes of prominent global-warming preachers such as the global warming debate team captain, Al Gore.
But you can only laugh at them for so long before it starts to sicken you. A graph created by these climate change researchers showing what they reported was a dramatic rise in temperature has been the subject of controversy when different e-mails were brought to light. One of the most potentially incriminating of these e-mails reads like this:
I’ve just completed Mike’s [Michael Mann’s] Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s [Keith Briffa’s] to hide the decline.11
The e-mails that Mann exchanged with his pro-global-warming cohorts were made public through leaks; Mann himself has never released all of his e-mails. Recently seventeen news outlets got
together to demand that he release them under the Freedom of Information Act.12
Mann had an answer to his critics. He made his opinion of at least one of them clear by filing a defamation-of-character lawsuit against a journalist who had criticized him in language Mann thought was overly harsh. The blog post over which Mann is suing described him as “the man behind the fraudulent climate-change ‘hockey-stick’ graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus.” Mann claimed that the blog post in which the words appeared falsely implies that he engaged in academic corruption, fraud, and deceit.
In other words, he may have been behaving like a typical twenty-first-century academic.
When I say “typical academic,” I mean it. Was another college prof, Lawrence Torcello of the Rochester Institute of Technology, saying in effect that anyone who disagrees with the fact that global warming is occurring and threatens life on this planet should be jailed?13 Here are his words:
What are we to make of those behind the well documented corporate funding of global warming denial? Those who purposefully strive to make sure “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” is given to the public? I believe we understand them correctly when we know them to be not only corrupt and deceitful, but criminally negligent in their willful disregard for human life. It is time for modern societies to interpret and update their legal systems accordingly.14
Speak what you see as the truth, and it’s not out of the question that academics will sue you for defamation and suggest that you be thrown in jail. It’s what the global warming movement has become.
Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth Page 16