Radical leftists say oil companies are committing climate murder. They’re gaslighting voters and consumers.
We’re constantly told fossil fuel use is causing an existential climate crisis, extreme weather, worsening wildfires, and more frequent and intense hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts.
Actual temperature, storm and other records provide no support for these claims. They certainly don’t back up ludicrous assertions that burning coal, oil and natural gas – and even human breathing and baking pizzas in wood-fired ovens – are causing countless alleged calamities: such as slowing Earth’s rotation, thereby affecting scientific time clocks (by one second). The fact is, Earth’s climate is perfectly healthy.
The claims are based primarily on computer models that erroneously assume carbon dioxide and a few other “greenhouse gases” (0.05% of Earth’s atmosphere, in total) control the climate, while the sun plays virtually no role, urban heat islands are inconsequential, and incompetent forest management is irrelevant.
It’s gaslighting: perversions of truth designed to make us guilt-ridden, willing to slash our living standards, and happy to keep poor countries energy-deprived and impoverished.
In the USA and worldwide, fossil fuels still provide 80% of total energy. They’re also the foundation for our economy, living standards, health and longevity – and over 6,000 vital products, including plastics, paints, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, cell phones, eyeglasses, fertilizers and wind turbine blades.
“Earth-friendly” wind and solar installations would blanket millions of acres of farmland, scenic areas and wildlife habitats; require billions of tons of ores; generate billions of tons of toxic water and air pollution from mining and manufacturing; and send electricity prices skyrocketing to pay for expensive battery or gas backup systems, and extensive new transmission lines and grid upgrades.
Climate Defiance, Extinction Rebellion and other radical groups nevertheless block pipelines, rant and rampage through our streets, deface priceless artwork, and glue themselves to roads and statues, to intimidate legislators and regulators.
Others file endless lawsuits to bankrupt fossil fuel projects and promote their twisted views about “climate justice.” Their latest scheme could be viewed as the culmination of their self-indoctrination.
A recent Harvard Environmental Law Review article proposes prosecuting major oil companies for “climate homicide” and “mass murder” – for supposedly killing people, by raising global temperatures and sea levels, and causing deadlier hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, heatwaves, blizzards and wildfires.
Media outlets eagerly promoted the claims – and Soros-funded prosecutors will undoubtedly be thrilled to indict ExxonMobil and other companies, once they’ve put more flash-mob thieves back on our streets.
But not even these prosecutors – or any judge, jury or “expert witness” – can separate natural from human causes of modern climate change. Nor can they calculate fractions of manmade-climate-change-induced disasters attributable to coal, oil, gas, dung, or “renewable” energy mining and manufacturing; to China and India versus Europe and the United States; or certainly to specific energy companies.
What they really don’t want addressed in this “climate homicide” discussion, however, is who is actually committing mass murder, especially of women and children, people with disabilities, people of color and other “particularly threatened” groups so supposedly beloved by climate justice warriors.
My book, Eco-Imperialism: Green power · Black death, forcefully demonstrates that it is these self-righteous climate and environmental activists, and those who fund them, that are callously causing the eco-murder deaths of millions every year – and setting the stage for dramatically more in the future.
These environmentalist death tolls have worsened, as greens became wealthier, more powerful, more fanatical, and more influential with and within US, EU and UN government agencies.
More than 750 million people still have no access to electricity; nearly 2 billion have only sporadic access to barely enough electricity to charge cell phones and power a lightbulb or 1-cubic-foot refrigerator – and no juice for modern homes, schools and hospitals, water purification, or factories and other job-creating businesses.
These people are forced to heat and cook with wood, charcoal or animal dung, inhaling noxious fumes that cause millions of deaths annually from respiratory diseases. Millions more die annually from intestinal diseases due to contaminated water and spoiled food, due to energy deprivation.
Green fanatics perpetuate the death tolls, by battling anything except grossly insufficient, weather-dependent wind and solar power. (In European and other modern countries, people die of heatstroke when they cannot get or afford air conditioning; nine times more die from cold – from hypothermia and illnesses they’d normally survive if they could afford to heat their homes properly.)
The fanatics also wage campaigns to deny Third World people access to insecticides and spatial insect repellants that would control disease-carrying flies and mosquitoes and even modern farming practices and technologies. Millions more thus die every year from diseases that are readily preventable or could be cured in modern hospitals (that don’t exist).
No wonder developing nations increasingly reject Western carbon colonialism.
Radical food groups despise genetically engineered crops that multiply crop yields, survive droughts and slash pesticide spraying by 75% or more. They vilify Golden Rice, which enables malnourished children to avoid Vitamin A Deficiency, blindness and death.
They demand “AgroEcology,” which rejects virtually everything that helps modern farmers feed billions more people (read this article!) with less acreage and water, and could largely eliminate hunger and malnutrition worldwide. The perverse movement rabidly opposes biotechnology, chemical insecticides, nitrogen fertilizers, and even hybrid seeds, monoculture farming and mechanized equipment like tractors.
It demands “food sovereignty” for impoverished, malnourished Africans, Asians and Latin Americans – the right to “define their own food and agriculture systems” and have “healthy and culturally appropriate” food produced through “ecologically sound and sustainable methods.”
Even more bizarre and frightening, major philanthropies like the Rockefeller Foundation and Walton Family Foundation support this craziness! So do the World Bank and many UN agencies.
They say the world’s food production systems should be “aligned” with the purely arbitrary goal of preventing more than 1.5ºC of global warming since 1850, by “phasing out fossil fuel use, especially fossil-fuel-based chemicals in industrial agriculture.”
Farmers who want to “define their own food and agriculture systems” by choosing modern technologies and practices get ostracized instead of supported.
It’s increasingly obvious that climate fear-mongering and GIGO computer models have replaced evidence-based science, history, human nutrition needs and traditional ethical principles. More and more, it is regulating and academic elites versus the rest of us, in rich and poor countries alike.
But on a more positive note, climate cultists chomping at the bit to see oil companies prosecuted for climate murder should be careful what they wish for. Such a precedent could put eco-imperialists and their financiers on trial for manslaughter on a truly horrific scale.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of articles and books on environmental, climate and human rights issues.
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