Desperate Days For Global Warm-ongers
Posted 07:02 PM ET
Environment: The United Nations wants $100 billion a year in taxes to deal with climate change. Two groups of researchers plan to go on the offensive against global warming "denialists." When will the madness end?
The U.N.'s craving for money it hasn't earned is insatiable. So it's no surprise that one of its panels has proposed to raise $100 billion a year from taxes on carbon dioxide emissions and international transportation, and possibly on financial transactions as well, to mitigate the effects of climate change.
This isn't the first time, of course, that the U.N. has proposed a global warming tax that would chill the world economy more than the Earth's temperatures. Taking $100 billion out of private hands and making it available to unelected bureaucrats who would channel money to unproductive, but politically favored, uses can't help but be a drag on growth.
Remember the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill? Under different versions of that legislation, real aggregate GDP losses by 2035 ranged from $7.4 trillion to $9.4 trillion and job losses from 844,000 to 2.48 million a year.
Fighting global warming is not only useless, it's expensive.
At roughly the same time the U.N. announced this plan to dig deeper into our pockets, a group of researchers led by John Abraham of St. Thomas University in Minnesota said it was mobilizing a "climate rapid-response team" that would also mount a media campaign to defend its position.
The researchers, the Tribune News Service reports, are even willing to appear before "potentially hostile audiences on conservative talk radio and television shows."
According to Scott Mandia, a professor of physical sciences at Suffolk County Community College in New York, this team will "not only communicate science," but also "aggressively engage the denialists and politicians who attack climate science and its scientists."
"We are taking the fight to them because we are tired of taking the hits," Mandia told the Tribune news service. "The notion that truth will prevail is not working. The truth has been out there for the past two decades, and nothing has changed."
Apparently the alarmists are alarmed yet again, this time at the election to Congress of dozens of Republicans who are skeptical that human activity is causing Earth to warm.
It seems they're afraid that with the GOP in control of the House, political funding for their climate change research will dry up. Having virtually invested their lives in the needless spread of fear, they must feel that they've been thrown into a struggle for relevance.
Organizing a rapid-response team looks like a desperation move. Believers' beloved CO2 cap-and-trade legislation, which for many on the political left is just the tip of their plans to cut carbon emissions because they don't think it goes far enough, is dying from wounds suffered in last week's midterm elections.
What do they have left outside of a public relations battle?
With no evidence in the environment that man-made global warming is occurring, there is an urgent need among the global warming believers to keep reminding the public about their hunch.
And they know that the mainstream press is the right place for them to conduct their campaign. The media are as invested in the tale as the scientists who have politicized it.
It's possible that just as the president believes that poor communication on his part, not his extreme agenda, is the reason voters turned out his party last week, the global warming believers think their "messaging" is the problem — not the message itself.
But that notion has as many holes in it as the global warming theory. The media have eagerly bought into, zealously spread and protectively nurtured the man-made global warming story. It fits their narrative: Corporations are malevolent, and conspicuous consumption by anyone outside their elitist circle is immoral.
The media have not been objective by any measure and have, in fact, campaigned as hard as any group for cap-and-trade and other schemes to cut carbon emissions and add to the taxpayer and consumer burdens. There's been no shortage of rapid responses to any criticism of global warming claims.
While the thinking on the issue keeps getting clearer, global warming hysteria is still with us.
But it can't last much longer. That's why believers are trying to squeeze as much from it as possible before it's gone.
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