Pause there for a moment.
Central planning?
Does that ring any bells?
Central planning was exactly what Vladimir Lenin attempted to implement when he seized control of the farming sector. And, as I’ve already demonstrated, the concept of Marxist-Leninist centralized planning has been a disaster everywhere it’s been tried. Ebell concurs, saying, “most centrally-planned economies collapsed towards the end of the last century … if enacted, Title III’s cap-and-trade regime would be the single largest government intervention in the economy and in people’s lives since the Second World War.”46 Time will tell whether this scheme or the newly passed Obama socialist medicine bill will prove to be the greater intrusion of government into our economy and the lives of the middle class.
Enough has been said about the costs.
The fact remains, we don’t know what it will cost.
What can be said with certainty is that cap-and-trade—or whatever Obama and his senior policy advisor David Axelrod eventually call it—is just another way for the government to trample on your freedom and further impoverish your standard of living. When did it become the role of government to legislate the kind of energy you can consume, or how much you use, or whether you want to use fluorescent or incandescent light bulbs in your closet? Is this suddenly a low watt republic?
Adding insult to injury is the fact that you and I will be forced to pay for something that we completely disagree with, something that we know to be false. That was never the intention of our Founding Fathers. In the words of President Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence: “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.”47
Make no mistake: Obama’s energy policies are a federal tyranny.
Think about the incredible loss of personal freedom that comes when the government tells you, in effect, what size car to drive (small), what kind of food not to eat (meat from methane producing cows), or what temperature to run your heater during the winter (the lower the better). Don’t you see your liberties are at risk? Can’t you see that the proposed energy legislation is nothing more than a gigantic expansion of power in the marketplace? The global warming farce is nothing more than a Trojan horse for more federal regulation! In the ex-Soviet Union and currently in Cuba, electric power is only turned on twice a day.
For only a few hours.
By the central government.
While there’s an abundance of electricity in America, there’s a shortage of good energy policy ideas coming out of the Obama administration. Look no further than how the Waster-in-Chief blew $5 billion on an empty “stimulus” scheme to weatherize homes in 2009. What were the results of this much trumpeted, federally run, home energy-savings and stimulus plan? Disaster. According to the Associated Press:
In Indiana, state-trained workers flubbed insulation jobs. In Alaska, Wyoming and the District of Columbia, the program
has yet to produce a single job or retrofit one home. And in California, a state with nearly 37 million residents, the program at last count had created 84 jobs … after a year, the stimulus program has retrofitted 30,250 homes—about 5% of the overall goal—and fallen well short of the 87,000 jobs that the department planned, according to the latest available figures.48
Talk about ineptitude. Can you name one privately owned company that would remain in business if it were run with such inefficiency? How long would any business stay open if it missed its overall goals by 95 percent as the government has done? None. What’s the Waster-in-Chief’s solution? Throw more of your tax dollars to insulate your neighbors’ home and to buy them a new water heater—yet another example of Obama’s spreading-the-wealth mission. This time President Weatherstrip has upped the ante with $6 billion in what some are calling a “Cash for Caulkers” rebate plan.49 As of this writing, it’s pending congressional approval.
Five billion dollars in 2009 for a program that was a miserable failure.
Six billion more dollars proposed for 2010.
Eleven billion dollars in just two years.
Do you understand what an enormously large sum of money $11 billion represents? Let me put it to you this way. The government could literally feed every man, woman, and child in the world a McDonald’s double cheeseburger … and still have money left over to buy everyone a candy bar for dessert. That’s what the Waster-in-Chief hopes to spend in the name of creating jobs while reducing America’s impact on global warming.
There’s a thread of good news in the midst of this.
The fog is beginning to lift among the sheeple and the Obamanics.
According to a Gallop survey in the spring of 2010, 48 percent of Americans are cooling to the global warming alarmism. They now believe the crisis is exaggerated. The pollster has conducted the Gallup Social Series Environment poll since 1997 where the number of skeptics stood at just 31 percent.50 They note that the reversal of public opinion began in 2009, which coincides with the timing of numerous reports debunking Al Gore’s premise.
I realize some have been duped because we’ve been living with a blend of Marxism and capitalism for sometime. After seventeen years of Clinton, Bush, and now Obama, we are fundamentally a socialist-capitalist state. And while we are already, in effect, living in a socialist-capitalist nation, that’s not good enough for President Obama. The only thing that will make him happy is to move us toward a hard-core Marxist-Leninist state, which the progressives in Congress—Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry and the others—demand. This explains why BO is getting so extremist, even fanatical in his efforts to pass energy legislation.
Let’s remember where the word “progressive” comes from.
Mao Zedong wrote, “Communism is at once a complete system of totalitarian ideology and a new social system. It is different from any other ideological and social system and is the most complete progressive revolutionary and rational system in human history.” Notice Mao’s choice of words. If we were to boil down his definition of communism and looked at it as a simple math formula, it would read this way:
“Totalitarian ideology” + “new social system” = “progressive revolutionary.”
Now you know where the word progressive comes from.
Progressives want to usher in a new socialist system that gives them total control over your lives. The problem is most Americans are politically uneducated. They do not understand that progressivism is a new code word for Marxist-Leninism, otherwise known as communism.
Now you know who progressives really are.
Are you beginning to understand why they want more control over your life?
Muzzling the Opposition
Al Goreleoni may be the biggest liar of the century if not one of the greatest con men in history. But he hasn’t acted alone. Gore wouldn’t have amassed a fortune peddling fear and apocalyptic prophecies if he hadn’t received a little help from his chums in Congress. Case in point. On Friday, April 24, 2009, Big Al was scheduled to appear at a hearing on climate change before the Energy and Commerce Committee.
That’s when the Demoncats circled the wagons.
To present an opposing point of view, Representative Joe Barton, the ranking member on the Energy and Commerce Committee, had invited Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to Margaret Thatcher, to testify. He would be essentially going head-to-head with Goreleoni to refute Gore on Climategate. Of course, the Demoncats were afraid of Lord Monckton engaging in a scientific duel of wits with an unarmed opponent.
Upon arrival from England the day before he was to testify, moments after deplaning at the airport in Washington, D.C., Lord Monckton received a call in which he learned he was being banned from appearing in Congress! The Stalinist Democrat party under Obama put their jackboots to the throat of this respected authority. House Demoncats essentially said they didn’t want Gore humiliated and so they slammed the door of the capital in his face.
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What was Lord Monckton’s reaction? He said, “The Democrats have a lot to learn about the right of free speech under the U.S. Constitution. Congress-creature Henry Waxman’s refusal to expose Al Gore’s sci-fi comedy-horror testimony to proper, independent scrutiny by the House minority reeks of naked propaganda.”51
Is this the America that you want to live in?
Do you want to live in a country where you cannot hear both sides of a discussion, especially when the implications directly impact your wallet? Under Obama, that is exactly what’s happening. President BO could have stepped in and said, “No, let the man speak. Let’s hear from this trustworthy scholar who traveled thousands of miles to make his case.” That didn’t happen. Far from it. Instead, Lord Monckton’s scholarly views were censored from the public debate.
What was Henry Waxman, one of the authors of the Waxman-Markey bill, so afraid of? Could it be that Lord Monckton would blow the lid off his precious little power grab for more control of your income? “Waxman knows there has been no ‘global warming’ for at least a decade. Waxman knows there has been seven and a half years’ global cooling,” said Lord Monckton. “Waxman knows that, in the words of the UK High Court judge who condemned Gore’s mawkish movie as materially, seriously, serially inaccurate, ‘the Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any scientific view.”52
Lord Monckton and I share several things in common: I was banned in Britain, and he was banned from addressing Congress in the United States. Likewise, we are both experienced in the field of science. When I heard that he had been censored by our government, I immediately had him on my radio show to address the Savage Nation.
Of particular interest was his explanation why some scientists—whether on the political right or left side of the spectrum—are too afraid to come forward with a dissenting viewpoint on climate change. After all, thousands of scientists agree that global warming is a farce, the science doesn’t support the theory, and the models being used to back the data were fabricated. Why, then, do scientists cower instead of speaking out? Lord Monckton said:
Most scientists know it’s rubbish. Yet very few of these scientists dare to say that it’s rubbish because the Left is ruthlessly in control of the academic world and the universities. Anyone who dares to say, “Just a moment. None of this adds up. It’s all nonsense,” they get penalized. They get moved to ever-smaller offices with no daylight.
Which, of course, sounds like what they did in the ex-Soviet Union.
But this isn’t a communist nation where dissenters are silenced—unless you hold an unpopular scientific opinion that Obama’s government doesn’t want you to hear. If you don’t want to believe that’s happening, here’s one example of the censorship of true science in academia. Colorado State University professor emeritus Dr. William Gray is “often called the World’s Most Famous Hurricane Expert”—according to the Washington Post.53 He’s been in the field of meteorology for more than half a century. He knows weather like Al Gore knows a good con.
Dr. Gray is also an outspoken critic of global warming.
Blasting Gore’s theory of global warming, Dr. Gray said, “I am of the opinion that this is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people.” He’s basing that on personal observation of the data in the field, not some spreadsheet cooked up by a bureaucrat with a computer and an agenda. Dr. Gray said, “Few people know what I know. I’ve been in the tropics. I’ve flown in airplanes into storms. I’ve done studies of convection, cloud clusters and how the moist process works.”54 Because of his dissenting view, he says he’s watched most of his government funding evaporate, forcing him to use personal funds of more than $100,000 to maintain his research into global warming. I’m not surprised.
Despite all the evidence, Obama, Waxman, Gore and their cadre of “climatenazis” will not believe it. Their minds are made up. They don’t want to know what Dr. Gray is reporting just as they didn’t want Lord Monckton to testify in Congress. The darkness in their vacuous souls fears the light of truth. Contrary to their predictions that, for example, the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere should be rising, Lord Monckton, had he testified, would have demonstrated that these accelerated levels are not accumulating at a rate originally forecasted by their computer models. He told my radio audience:
The computer models say there ought to be twice as much CO2 staying in the atmosphere as there is. But it’s all being taken out. You know, it is being taken out by trees and plants. It’s being taken out to form the shells of ocean creatures. It’s being taken out in huge quantities by what we call the biosphere and the hydrosphere. That’s why it isn’t accumulating at the rate that the UN would like it to be accumulating—so as to justify the continued existence of its climate panel as the New World government. But the fact is that CO2 is rising at far less—about half—the rate the UN predicted. The UN admits that it can’t explain why the CO2 isn’t rising as fast as it wants it to rise.
Despite the total collapse of the credibility of the global warmist mob, despite the fraud of engineering and manipulating the scientific data, these left-wing progressive fanatics continue to tell the big lie. For example, a recent issue of a local San Francisco newspaper featured an article entitled, “The Best Argument Against Global Warming.” When you read the story, the writer, who thinks he’s a genius, quips, “There isn’t one.”55
That’s classic liberal sophomoric stupidity.
In my day, a guy like that would be selling hotdogs at a stadium, not writing a newspaper column. How does this empty inkjet explain the fact that current temperatures in Greenland are actually colder there now than they were in the 1930s and 1940s?56 You got that right—Greenland today is colder than it was seventy years ago. Empty inkjets in the media like him don’t report that pesky fact, do they? Why? It flies in the face of the popular notion that the world is warming.
Likewise, if the climate is warming to dangerous levels, how does this denier of reality explain that, for the first time in fourteen years–since the winter of 1995–1996, Lake Erie was entirely frozen over?57 How does he explain that parts of Britain were under a winter snowstorm watch in April while Scotland prepared for near-blizzard conditions?58 He can’t. His mind is made up—evidence be damned. He’d probably argue that, although it was colder in Britain, it was really warmer. He’s probably been brainwashed by those plight-of-the-polar-bear TV commercials.
Polar Bear Propaganda
For several years, we’ve been barraged with images of desperate polar bears clinging to ice floes half their size, adrift helplessly at sea. Momma polar bears are struggling to feed their cubs, we’ve been told. And, if the press is to be believed, polar bears are dying in record numbers. One panicked newspaper headline worried, “Will polar bears make it back to shore?”59 Beneath it was a photograph taken by a tourist, whose name is irrelevant, picturing a polar bear and cub “stranded” twelve miles out at sea.
Stranded?
The photographer was worried sick about the survival of the bears. What this dunce doesn’t apparently know is that a polar bear can swim fifty miles. For all he knows, those bears went out for a joyride on an ice floe one sunny day. Of course, images like these are manipulated to provoke one thing: fear. Fear drives public policy. It also drives donations, which is why the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) takes advantage of the emotions such images generate to put cash for their pockets while milking global warming for all it’s worth.
Here’s an especially offensive bit of polar propaganda created by the WWF. In it, we hear the voice of an actor speaking in what might be best described as manufactured caring tones on par with a seasoned mortician. Looking straight into the camera with his sad, puppy dog eyes, he gives this dire warning. (Cue the violins):
A tragedy is unfolding in the world today. Climate change is threatening one of the most magnificent wild animals on the planet. Polar bears. They’re struggling to survive. The ice is melting all around them and food is becoming harder to find
as they lose their hunting grounds. Climate change. It’s happening right now and it’s leaving mothers weaker and unable to provide for their young and cubs dying without enough to eat.
Designed to tug at your heartstrings, video footage of a mother bear and her cub floating on a raft-sized ice chip take full screen. The pancake-faced spokesmouth continues turning up the heat with more “they’re all gonna die” rhetoric:
As the struggle and the search for food continues polar bears are hanging on for survival. Polar bears are on their way to extinction. If we don’t act now, most will die in our children’s lifetime. But you can change that. Call now and join the Wildlife Rescue Team. For just $16 a month you’ll be part of the most ambitious effort to save wildlife and wild places the world has ever seen … If we don’t act now, it could be too late … [pause for effect] … for the polar bear. It’s all up to us.60
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The polar bears are not on the brink of extinction due to rising temperatures and shrinking ice caps. The exact opposite is true. Dr. Mitchell Taylor, a renowned Canadian biologist, whose work involves the hands-on study of these arctic mammals, says, “We’re seeing an increase in bears that’s really unprecedented … Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present. It is just silly to predict the demise of polar bears in 25 years based on media-assisted hysteria.”61
Translation: global warming isn’t about to kill off the polar bears, your SUV emissions aren’t jeopardizing their habitat, nor should polar bears be put on an endangered species list, as some are attempting to do in Congress. Senator James Inhofe puts it this way:
The bottom line is that the attempt to list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act is not based on any evidence that the polar bear populations are declining or in trouble. It is based on computer climate models fraught with uncertainties…. And frankly, listing the polar bear isn’t about the bear either. It is about trying to bring about climate change regulations using the most powerful development-stopping law in the land, the Endangered Species Act. Polar bears are being used to achieve long sought left-wing environmental regulatory policies.62
Trickle Up Poverty: Stopping Obama’s Attack on Our Borders, Economy, and Security Page 22