Government Zero: No Borders, No Language, No Culture (22 page)

Contrary to what the communists in America, who like to call themselves progressives, might tell you, socialism is a brutal, violent ideology. Free enterprise is stifled by force. Property is redistributed by force. You cannot complain because speech is repressed by force. The so-called progressives are the most vicious subpopulation in this country. That’s why they don’t speak out against the massacres occurring daily against Christians and other minorities, including homosexuals, by their friends, the Islamists. They are used to all of their heroes doing the exact same thing.

Ironically, most of them would be the first ones lined up against a wall for a firing squad or sent to the gulag in a traditional socialist country or tortured and beheaded in an Islamic one. If they had any sense they’d side with the forces of civilization against both. Lenin’s pope was raised in a socialist, oppressive society like this and those influences are showing.

If you think he was wrong about economics and foreign relations, wait until you hear what he has planned next. He has already said, “Climate change, the loss of bio-diversity, deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness.”
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Now he’s writing an encyclical letter on the subject and plans to support Obama on climate change initiatives in the United Nations.

Remember when I said the Church limits papal infallibility to a very narrow range of subjects? Well, encyclicals have traditionally been issued by popes on only the most important religious issues. That naturally limits them to subjects the author knows something about.

The pope knows less about climate science than he does about economics. I actually worked to save rain forests as an environmental activist, before that moniker became synonymous with
socialist
. Pope Francis has never done environmental work. His only scientific experience is as a chemical technician, which has nothing to do with climate or the environment. The only thing the pope knows about climate is when it rains, his aides open up an umbrella for him.

In an attempt to represent him as a scientist, the progressive left has propagated the myth that Pope Francis has a master’s degree in chemistry. He doesn’t. According to the
National Catholic Reporter
, he doesn’t have a college degree in any subject, neither a master’s nor a bachelor’s degree.
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That doesn’t stop him from rendering his utterly valueless opinion. In the absence of any actual scientific understanding of climate or the environment, he just repeats liberal talking points, putting a religious spin on them:

Yes, shame on those who have “slapped nature in the face,” but nothing but excuses for jihadist lunatics who cut people’s heads off merely because of their religion. No wonder the most anti-Christian president in American history is wrapping himself in the robes of the Holy Father. They think alike on so many things.

So, here is the pope again using his office to promote a political movement. I say “political” rather than “scientific,” because that’s what the entire environmental movement has become. It’s not about saving the planet anymore, if it ever was. It’s about money and control. Like every other crisis the left dreams up, the proposed solution to climate change is politicians getting more of your money and controlling more of your life.

What never ceases to amaze me is that anyone believes the climate change narrative. When you take a step back and think about what we’re asked to believe, it really is quite ridiculous. It requires us to forget the basic science we all learned in grade school.

Most of us learned about the recurring ice ages that have occurred throughout Earth’s history somewhere around the fifth grade. They were all ended by global warming, which was obviously occurring long before the industrial revolution.

In fact, the first ice age occurred over two billion years ago, during the Proterozoic Eon. As you may have surmised, the warming period that ended it wasn’t caused by human activity. It wasn’t dinosaurs engaging in heavy industry, either. They wouldn’t exist for over a billion years themselves.

The truth is that the earth has cooled and warmed in cycles during its entire existence. Technically, we are still in the last
of five major ice ages in Earth’s history. What most people refer to as the end of the last ice age around ten thousand years ago was really just the end of the last glacial period. The current ice age as defined by real scientists won’t end until there is no glacial ice anywhere, including in Antarctica.

Even within the current interglacial period there have been significant fluctuations in temperature. Right after your fifth-grade science class, you may have learned in history class about the Norse settling Greenland. They were able to do so around 1000 AD because of the Medieval Warm Period,
²³
which made Greenland much more hospitable. At the time of their arrival, Greenland’s climate was “relatively mild (i.e., as “mild” as it is today)” according to Jared Diamond.
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Its rivers were more navigable, trees and herbaceous plants were more abundant, and crops could be grown farther north.

The Norse settlements ended abruptly during the 1400s with the onset of what is now known as the Little Ice Age, a period of dramatic cooling.
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The details of their demise are uncertain, but all theories include the effects of cooler temperatures on farming and navigation. There was less land to farm and less wild vegetation, and the North Atlantic Ocean was harder to navigate due to more abundant ice. All of these pressures combined with new competition from the Thule, ancestors of the Inuit, and mistakes the Norse made themselves in managing resources.

What is important to take away from their story is that much more violent climate changes than anything experienced since the industrial revolution have always occurred on this planet. The Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age are not controversial theories. They are accepted scientific facts, although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) has tried to mitigate
their
“inconvenient truths” by characterizing them as regional climate patterns.

Perhaps the biggest whopper the climate change cult wants us to swallow is that carbon dioxide causes global warming. They’ve actually called carbon dioxide a pollutant. Yes, I’m talking about the same carbon dioxide that is necessary for photosynthesis and without which all plant life would die. This is something you probably learned in fourth grade, but the enviro-socialists want you to forget that, too.

The data they rely on does show a correlation between warming periods and carbon dioxide. But the increases in carbon dioxide always occur
after
the temperature increases.
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So, increases in carbon dioxide don’t cause global warming. Global warming causes increases in carbon dioxide.

Obviously, a point-by-point scientific rebuttal to the climate change theory would require its own book. I do deal with it at greater length in the next chapter. I’ve come to my own conclusions as a scientist, knowing the historical background behind this movement. Common sense will serve you just as well.

I invite you to do your own research. You’ll find every major assertion of the climate change hoax completely refuted by qualified scientists. As with everything else, the leftist media ignores the evidence and goes on repeating the lies.

Even the scientists the IPCC relies on don’t tell anywhere near the same story about climate change the politicians do. They still debate quite a bit about what causes it, how dramatic it has been or will be, or even if it is ultimately harmful or helpful to human life.

That’s right, the IPCC’s own scientists aren’t even sure global warming won’t be a good thing.

Before getting back to the pope’s role in all of this, I invite
you to ask yourself a few questions you don’t have to be a climate scientist to answer:

If the climate change question is so settled, why does the IPCC need to kick scientists out for dissenting? Have you ever heard of any other multidisciplinary research team behaving this way?

Why did everyone stop calling the phenomenon “global warming” and start calling it “climate change”? Absolutely no one pushing this theory calls it global warming anymore. Could the reason be that there has been no warming since at least 1998? Look it up. It’s true.

The overwhelming majority of scientists not kicked out of the IPCC are dependent upon the politicians running the organization for funding for their research. Under any other circumstances you can imagine, wouldn’t this be considered a conflict of interest?

Last, but not least, let’s consider who is leading the charge to have this theory accepted and government policy based upon it. They are exclusively the hard left, the same people who were so wrong about everything in the twentieth century.

Most people forget that at the beginning of the twentieth century, the left actually argued that socialism was a better system than capitalism. They didn’t say it was necessary to save the planet from global warming or pollution. They said it was a better system on its own merits.

The next one hundred years was like a laboratory experiment
to test that theory. It wasn’t a completely controlled experiment, because even the United States was partially poisoned with socialist policies. But Russia, China, and many other countries tried full-out communism. It was a disaster.

Even discounting the hundreds of millions who died in wars or purges under communism, it still failed. Eight thousand years after the discovery of agriculture, tens of millions just plain starved to death, all directly as a result of the economic system imposed upon them. It was the single most tragic failure of an idea in human history. That’s why Putin said nobody wants to see it repeated.

Now, the very same people who pushed this tragic failure of an idea are pushing the climate change narrative. Being familiar with his writing on economics, it is not surprising to see the pope lining up with them. Cardinal Wuerl confirmed this when he made the familiar Marxist “sustainable development” argument at an international forum on economics and the environment in May.
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We’re supposed to believe that it’s no coincidence that the only possible way for us to save the planet is for us to accept the same failed sociopolitical system that killed hundreds of millions in the twentieth century.

Pope Francis may be a lot of things, but he’s not stupid. No one rises to the highest office in an organization as large as the Catholic Church without being creative, smart, and educated. That doesn’t mean he is intentionally promoting something he knows to be wrong. Again, he was raised in an anticapitalist culture within which socialist fallacies are constantly reinforced. Even intelligent people can form emotional attachments to ideas that overcome their reason if those attachments are formed early enough.

The same may not be true for the people he’s siding with. When Al Gore left office as vice president of the United States in 2001, his net worth was less than $2 million. By 2013, it was estimated at over $300 million.
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He’s made it all on climate change and other left-wing scams, including selling Current TV to Al Jazeera, who used its assets to launch Al Jazeera America. He’s also made a nice bundle trading on companies that received government subsidies for green technology. Do you think he’s shrinking his “carbon footprint”? Not a chance. Gore spends over $30,000 a year on electric and gas bills.
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That’s over twenty times the national average.

When you follow the money, you find a rogues’ gallery of people making money off this scam, including friends and relatives of congressmen and wealthy executives of “green energy companies.” The latter benefit when their companies’ stock prices soar because of government funding or loan guarantees, only to fall like a stone when it turns out their product doesn’t work or is too cost-prohibitive. They don’t care. They sell out when the stock is high and live happily ever after, leaving taxpayers with the losses.

Everybody involved in this scam gets what they want. Politicians get to tax, spend, and regulate more. Crony capitalists get to make fortunes, returning a portion to their politician friends in the form of campaign contributions. Bought-and-sold scientists get funding to continue their research, which they then intentionally misinterpret and misrepresent.

All of this comes at a cost, and guess who gets the bill? You do. It’s not just the $22 billion directly stolen from taxpayers and wasted by the government on this nonexistent problem. It’s also the higher prices you pay for energy, which will go even higher if Obama and Lenin’s pope are successful. It’s the
higher prices of other products due to energy costs driving up the price of bringing them to market. It’s the costs passed onto consumers of complying with all of the insane regulations imposed to avert the phony crisis.

There is also the opportunity cost of stifling creativity, distorting market prices, and overriding consumer choices inherent in the socialist system they’re building based on this sham. Who knows? In a truly free market, someone may have already discovered a better energy source than fossil fuels. We’ll never know. The capital that might have funded that discovery was wasted on Solyndra and other tax-subsidized green-energy disasters.

I have no problem with people making money, even lots and lots of it. That’s what a free country is all about. Freedom is the opportunity to work hard and change your economic circumstances by providing great benefits to others. That’s how true capitalists become wealthy. They provide society with billions in products and get billions of dollars in return. Everybody wins.