The Cult of Climate Change

In the wake of the proposed Green New Deal resolution, Democratic politicians who have signed on to the resolution have stated clear intentions to fully centralize government power. This includes five Democratic Senators running for President. The stated excuse for this radical shift towards socialism is Climate Change. Anyone who argues against the Green New Deal is ostracized by the media and called a Climate Denier. However, the approach to Climate Change by the left is much closer to cult behavior than actual science, and the proposals to solve it will accomplish nothing but the complete destruction of the American economy.

Climate Change Cultists will immediately dismiss any argument in favor of rational discussion about Climate Change, so it is important to discuss some givens. Yes, the climate is changing. Yes, man-made carbon emissions since the industrial era have contributed between one percent and 100 percent to the amount of change that climate scientists have observed over the last century. The exact contribution is a debate best left to climate scientists and not politicians and opinion journalists, but there are arguments on both sides. For Democrats, though, properly contextualizing and defining the past is not as important as predicting the future. If politicians can predict the future, they can push for policy that gives them power.

Like all good cults, the Cult of Climate Change has its sacred texts and its leaders. Sacred texts of Climate Change include the reports by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Climate Change Cultists use these reports as a stick to beat their opponents into submission. However, examining the reports themselves disproves the claims made by the Cultists. The reports don’t only give their predictive models; they also make recommendations, and those recommendations are pushed by socialist economists who espouse demolition of capitalism. The IPCC report from October 2018 recommends up to ten percent of all capital revenues be redirected towards public works projects like building solar and wind farms (which is more expensive and less efficient than nearly every other energy source), and a massive carbon tax (which caused massive civil unrest and rioting in countries where it’s been tried).

The problem is that the IPCC is making these recommendations despite the downward prediction in its climate model from the previous report. The 2018 report allowed for more carbon emissions to stay within the 1.5-2 degrees Celsius than the 2014 report did. If you combine the fact that we have more leeway now than we did four years ago regarding emissions, with the United States making the greatest reductions in emissions year after year, an argument can be made that lack of government intervention is helping. Despite these facts, Cultists still want to create a massive government takeover.

The ones who obfuscate the IPCC reports for their own benefits are the Cult leaders. Amongst those leaders are prominent Democrats such as former Vice President Al Gore and Member of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Al Gore has made a living as a Climate Change Cult Doomsayer. His 2007 film An Inconvenient Truth is so riddled with inaccurate statements that his 2017 film An Inconvenient Sequel made one-tenth at the box office than the original. People aren’t buying his propaganda anymore. In 2007, after the widespread release and fanfare of An Inconvenient Truth, a judge in the United Kingdom ruled that the film could not be shown in schools unless the school outlined nine lies told in the film. These lies included Mt. Kilimanjaro having no snow in ten years, the drying up of Lake Chad in the same time period, and the link between Climate Change and extreme weather events like Hurricane Katrina. All of these predictions and claims have since been debunked.

Like all good cult leaders, Al Gore does not practice what he preaches. According to an August 2017 analysis by the National Center for Public Policy Research, Gore’s 10,000-square-foot home in Tennessee “guzzles more electricity in one year than the average American family uses in 21 years.” Heating his pool alone could power six homes a year. Gore, who is worth approximately $300 million, preaches to middle class Americans to add solar panels and other green improvements to their homes like he did. However, his improvements cost over $60,000 to install and only account for 5.7 percent of his energy consumption. His recommendations fall far outside the ability for the vast majority of Americans to pay for, with negligible results.

Another rising cult leader is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, sponsor of the Green New Deal. Responding to criticism, Ocasio-Cortez famously pronounced, “I’m the boss,” because, as she claims, nobody has tried anything regarding Climate Change. She ignores over a decade of cap-and-trade legislation and other climate-change-related proposals. The Green New Deal is largely being ridiculed for its outrageous proposals (like replacing airplanes with high speed trains and rebuilding or retrofitting every single building in America) and its obscene price tag (nearing $100 trillion over ten years, five times the annual GDP).

Like Gore, Ocasio-Cortez pushes the public to embrace a policy she does not herself follow. The New York Post reported last Saturday that between May 2017 and December 2018, the Ocasio-Cortez campaign used $29,365.70 on ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft (which she called the “financial ruin” of Yellow Cabs in February 2018). She used this gas-guzzling, carbon-emitting form of transportation over the subway station 138 feet away from her campaign headquarters. She also spent $25,174.54 on airline travel during the campaign, despite all of her potential voters living in Queens and the Bronx. By contrast, Freshman Congressman Max Rose (D-NY) “listed only 329 transactions for car services, totaling $6,091.29” in a district twice the size of Ocasio-Cortez’s. The message from Ocasio-Cortez seems to be: “Green New Deal for thee, but not for me.”

The Green New Deal is so ridiculous that when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would bring it up for a vote in the Senate (which is literally the goal of proposed legislation), Democrats attacked him for not being serious enough about Climate Change. Ed Markey, Democrat Senator and co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, said on Twitter: “…this is nothing but an attempt to sabotage the movement that we are building. He wants to silence your voice so Republicans don’t have to explain why they are climate-change deniers.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the floor of the Senate regarding open debate and voting on the Green New Deal, “This is not a debate. It’s a diversion. It’s a sham.” It’s not surprising that the Cult leaders must lash out. Defending their proposal at this stage would set them back, as not enough Americans have been indoctrinated yet.

Despite their doomsday warnings, the Cult leaders do not fear Climate Change as much as they want the public to think they do. Democrats in the House of Representatives, where they are the majority party, scheduled a House Natural Resource Subcommittee hearing for Tuesday, February 26. The topic was about industry manipulation of science and policy regarding climate change and public health, supposedly an important topic. However, of the five Democrats on the subcommittee, only two bothered to show up. All four Republicans showed up to the hearing. The meeting was adjourned in a 4-2 party line vote because the topic was “outside [the subcommittee’s] jurisdiction.” Climate Change Cultists will preach on television about the “most pressing issue of our time,” but then not show up to hearings that they scheduled to try to do something about it.

This is because cults thrive on fear and misinformation. When President Trump joked on Twitter in January, “Large parts of the Country are suffering from tremendous amounts of snow and near record setting cold. Amazing how big this system is. Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!”, nearly every newspaper and news show in the country reacted the same way: One weather event is not an indicator of the effects of Climate Change, and Trump is a denier. However, these same pundits and journalists blame Climate Change for hurricanes in Houston, Puerto Rico, and New York. These same pundits and journalists have nothing to say when Ocasio-Cortez proclaims, “At this point, we don’t even have to prove it – just walk outside in winter in a lot of places, and it’s either way worse than you’re used to, or way warmer than you’re used to. Hurricanes, storms, wildfires, we are dying now.” This is coming from the same person who said, “There’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”

The Green New Deal, even if implemented, would have no legitimate impact on Climate Change. This is because even if America has net zero carbon emissions, the greatest increasers in carbon emissions are still building coal plants every year. China and India lead the world in increased emissions, while the US leads in reductions. So the two degrees Celsius predicted increase by the year 2100 may go down to a 1.9275 degrees increase, with a price tag of $100 trillion to get us there. Climate Change Cultists want to ignore that, because they want to centralize government power any way they can.

So, for all the critics who say “can you do any better,” there is a simple response: deregulation and nuclear energy. Technologies can be invented in the free market that will tackle these issues and make carbon emissions obsolete. Tesla was the first American car company in nearly a century, pushing a product nobody wanted. Last September, they accounted for a third of all luxury auto sales in the country, with zero emissions. Many American nuclear plants are operating on 1970s technology. France has built a massive infrastructure based on nuclear energy, and is the world’s largest exporter of electricity due to its nuclear-energy-friendly policies. The pros and cons of nuclear energy as a whole are a separate topic, but the Cultists will not even consider it. The inefficient and expensive solar and wind energies are all they will focus on.

Why are certain people on the left susceptible to believing the end of the world is nigh, and will take the words of their leaders and sacred texts as dogma? It is not a shock to learn that the United States, like Europe, is becoming less and less religious with each passing generation. The void that religion leaves behind is being replaced with a new cult; and like all cults there is blind loyalty, punishment for dissenters, dictation of actions, elitist mentality, us vs. them classification, and a belief that the ends justify the means. The message that the cult pushes (and is shared throughout the mainstream media) is one of doom, gloom, and no clear options except a complete government takeover of the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans. In reality, climate change is a problem that can be addressed with innovation, not regulation. It’s time to call out the Climate Change Cultists for what they are: fear-mongering, power hungry, and manipulative con artists.

By Moshe Hill