It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Republican legislators all look the same as they did in saner times, but are now sounding like yesterday’s Democrats: Having caved, some are suddenly embracing the man-caused climate-change agenda.
As Bloomberg writes, reporting on the Bible-to-babble climate conversion of Congressman John Shimkus (R-Ill.):
Last month, in a turnabout, the Illinois Republican signed onto a letter with the top Republican of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that said “prudent steps should be taken to address current and future climate risks.”
“It’s just not worth the fight anymore,” Shimkus said in an interview when asked about his changing stance on climate change. “Let’s just see what we can do to address it and not hurt the economy.”
Shimkus is among a number of Republicans who — after years of sowing doubt about climate change or ignoring it altogether — are scrambling to confront the science they once rejected. They are holding hearings on the issue, beginning with one Tuesday. And they have pledged to invest in technologies to mitigate its impact and are openly talking about the need for taking action.
Bloomberg provides statements from various scientifically illiterate GOP politicians trumpeting the anthropogenic (man-caused) global-warming (AGW) thesis and writes that “Republicans have been meeting in small groups to come up with a strategy on the issue: Senators John Cornyn of Texas, Cory Gardner of Colorado, Susan Collins of Maine, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Rob Portman of Ohio, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and former 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, now a senator representing Utah.”
So what changed? The political climate. German leader Otto Von Bismarck noted, “Politics is the art of the possible,” and public-opinion manipulation has apparently made telling the truth on this issue impossible.
As Bloomberg also informs, “Fully 74 percent of registered voters think global warming is happening and 67 percent said they are worried [about] it, according to polling conducted by Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Among conservative Republicans, just 42 percent think global warming is happening but that is up five percentage points since a poll taken in 2017.”
Add to this that there’s “method to the madness of the Green New Deal” (GND), as American Thinker’s Peter Skurkiss puts it. He correctly points out that the GND’s radically ridiculous proposals serve to make garden variety climate-change lunacy seem reasonable — and like the middle ground for a necessary compromise.
In fact, Shimkus’ remark that it’s “not worth the fight anymore” is quite telling. It’s not a statement of principle but surrender. It partially reflects the result of a common leftist strategy: Maintain the pressure, keep pounding away with the demands, the lobbying, the continual arguing, until people are worn down and throw up their hands, tired of the fight.
If AGW schemes are taken far enough, the civilized world will be denied life-saving energy, but politicians will retain power. They don’t deserve most of the blame, however. When the culture-shapers — the media, academia, and entertainment — preach “progressivism” 24/7 and pull the culture ever further left, the “art of the possible” and those practicing it will follow.
Much has been said to refute the AGW thesis, examples are here, here, here, here, and here. The irony, however, is that this GOP capitulation occurs just as a recently released peer-reviewed study tells us that the vast majority of Albertan geoscientists and engineers have varying degrees of doubt about the AGW thesis. So once again it’s demonstrated that the “97-percent AGW consensus” argument was always propaganda.
It also occurs in the wake of our achieving energy independence and becoming a major energy exporter, and with new technology finding that most of the world’s hydrocarbon resources lie in North America.
Remember how people lamented for decades that foreign-oil dependency enriched and empowered the Mideast mullahs, sheiks, and terrorist-enablers? Our energy triumphs have ended this, ushering in a great geopolitical power shift wherein we can wither bad actors on the vine. But now the alarmist green schemers threaten this progress.
But why, despite computer climate-model predictions consistently failing, temperatures apparently stable, CO2 being beneficial plant food, and other facts contrary to AGW, does the agenda continue advancing? Forbes’ Peter Ferrara put it well in 2013, writing that
the theory of man-caused, catastrophic, global warming is embraced not because of any “science,” (that sham is for the “useful idiots,”), but because it is a justification for a government takeover of the energy industry, with massive increases in regulation, taxes and government spending. The United Nations loves it because it inspires fantasies of the UN growing up to be a world government, with real government powers of global taxation, spending and regulation, all “to save the planet.” Scientists who go along with the cause are rewarded not only with praise for their worthy social conscience, but also with altogether billions in hard, cold cash (government and environmental grants), for their cooperation in helping to play the “useful idiots.”
If you doubt Ferrara’s last assertion, read my 2014 essay “Blinding Me With Science: Fraud and Folly for Fame and Funding” (scroll down to page 24), or consider what professor emeritus of physics Harold “Hal” Lewis of the University of California at Santa Barbara wrote when resigning from the American Physical Society (APS) in 2016.
Noting that “Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago” of money corrupting science, he lamented “the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave.”
“It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist,” he continued.
For sure. The AGW scheme may cost trillions and kill billions, as Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore recently warned, but it’s the best science mega-money can buy.
This article has been edited to better reflect the findings of two studies originally cited. The scope of one study was narrowed to more accurately reflect its findings and the other was cut because we found conflicting evidence. March 13, 2019
Photo: AP Images
