A Killing Frost for Green Bosses

My article from the January 8, 2014 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

A Killing Frost for Green Bosses

By Matthew Vadum

Does a record-setting cold wave have anything to do with massive upheaval among the fear-mongering elite of professional left-wing environmentalism?

As the endlessly referenced Polar Vortex of Doom keeps the fruited plain in a deep freeze, it turns out several major environmentalist lobbies are shedding their current leadership.

This is happening despite the media’s nonstop, years-long, global warming propaganda assault, the presence of a radical, lawless left-winger in the White House and a Democratic stranglehold over the Senate. The voters can’t be bothered to care about this silly global warming issue.

In an amazing non-coincidence, Maggie Fox, CEO for Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, is leaving her organization in the spring. Formerly known as the Alliance for Climate Protection, the group changed its name after a hard-fought push to enact cap-and-trade legislation fizzled.

National Wildlife Federation CEO Larry Schweiger, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) President Frances Beinecke, Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) President Eileen Claussen, and Greenpeace USA’s youthful Executive Director Phil Radford are also decamping from their respective posts this year. (The Pew Center on Climate Change was relaunched as the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions in 2011.)

Could it be that the career eco-extremists, con artists, and meteorological Machiavellians selling global warming doom and gloom are finally beginning to realize that their current approach isn’t working?

Evidence abounds that whatever the environmentalists are doing to try to scare the bejeezus out of the citizenry, it is failing to hit the mark. Environmentalism remains a low priority for voters.

Although many Americans are convinced that global warming is real, they don’t believe it is enough of a problem to justify spending cold, hard cash on a supposed solution, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. “The American public routinely ranks dealing with global warming low on its list of priorities for the president and Congress.” In 2013 “it ranked at the bottom of the 21 [issues] tested.”

Global warming skepticism abounds — and not just in America. Last year a poll by the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) suggested “the proportion of people in the UK who don’t think the world’s climate is changing has more than quadrupled since 2005.”

The problem can’t be a lack of money on the enviro Left.

As David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin reported in their recent book, The New Leviathan, in the world of environmental activism, there are 32 major conservative groups that “promote market-friendly solutions” and 552 progressive groups that “promote radical views that are anti-business.”

Collectively, the conservative groups have net assets of $38.24 million, a figure that seems insignificant compared to the $9.31 billion figure representing the progressive groups’ combined net assets. The progressive environmental groups enjoy a 37 to 1 advantage over conservative environmental groups in revenues ($3.56 billion compared to $96.17 million).

While many global warmists sincerely believe that science supports their theory of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change, they are lying when they claim to be outgunned by eeevil corporations in the fight over this issue.

These green groups allege that “vast amounts of untraceable special interest money fund[s] global warming skeptics and give[s] skeptics an unfair advantage in the global warming debate,” writes James Taylor at Forbes.

But the “undeniable truth is global warming alarmists raise and spend far more money – including far more untraceable special interest ‘dark money’ – than global warming skeptics.”

Big businesses that stand to benefit from carbon controls or other greenhouse gas mitigation strategies are among the green movement’s biggest funders.

The Environment Defense Fund, for example, goes out of its way to work with mega-corporations.

EDF, by the way, has the blood of millions of dead malaria victims on its hands. EDF boasts that it was instrumental in banning the highly effective insecticide DDT in 1972, an act that has since led to the deaths of as many as 60 million people — largely children in poor tropical countries. EDT and others, egged on by works of paranoid fiction like Rachel Carson's 1962 book, Silent Spring, grossly exaggerated the dangers of DDT and helped to create the mass hysteria that was necessary to achieve an international DDT ban.

Environmentalists groups are drowning in oceans of money. As Forbes reports,

“Two environmental activist groups – Greenpeace and The Nature Conservancy – raise more than $1 billion cumulatively per year. These two groups raise more money than the combined funding of … 91 conservative think tanks … Just as importantly, these two groups raise money solely for environmental causes and frequently advocate for global warming restrictions. Their $1 billion is not diluted addressing issues such as economic policy, health care policy, foreign policy, etc.

Five environment-specific groups alone raise more than $1.6 billion per year (Greenpeace, The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, National Wildlife Federation, and the Sierra Club). All five focus solely on environmental issues and are frequent and prominent advocates for global warming restrictions.”

As scientific evidence continues to mount that global warming is a colossus-sized nothing burger for the ages, those bad people who want to use the weather and climate to attack capitalism and the American way of life, and those pathetic people who are in it only for the corporate and government money, aren’t giving up.

In recent years alarmists of both species have been trying to move the goalposts in what reasonable people can only pray is a doomed, eleventh-hour effort to remain relevant. Now many of these tireless, annoying do-gooders speak of climate change and its hazards instead of merely squawking about the more specific phenomenon global warming.

It’s a slippery move because the climate is by its nature always changing. The definition of climate is hugely important. Climate is different than weather. Weather refers merely to the short-term conditions of variables in a specific area.

Nature is constantly adjusting weather patterns and its future actions are often difficult to predict. Water levels rise and fall. Deserts come and go. The wind blows and then it doesn’t. Sometimes there is much precipitation; other times, hardly any. The ways in which the various elements interact with each other is always changing, sometimes by a lot, sometimes by only a little.

Climate is “weather writ large,” according to the most useful definition of the term this writer could find online. “Climate is determined by a complex combination of geographic conditions and latitude. It is weather writ large, which is to say, weather patterns considered over a long time — years, decades, even centuries.”

How can one argue against a truism called climate change? Climate change is a fact. That and two and a half bucks will get you a ride on New York City’s subway.

Weather is always changing, has always been changing, and will always be changing. By the same token climate is always changing, has always been changing, and will always be changing. Change is perhaps the only constant in the study of climate and changes in climate are not always bad.

Moving from the specific to the general by making a political issue out of climate change, instead of global warming, affords alarmists infinite flexibility to keep spinning, misdirecting, and changing the parameters of the debate.

It is an irrevocable license for bloviators, demagogues, science-hating misanthropes, and enemies of freedom.