Put A Fork In It...

This was a surprise to read: the real story finally comes out, one that should have been obvious, but where MSM and everyday journalism (and journalists) failed.

The key quote is the very first sentence:

The 20-year effort by environmentalists to establish climate science as the primary basis for far-reaching action to decarbonize the global energy economy today lies in ruins.

Yep: it never was about the science: it was, from the very beginning, an attempt by environmentalists to take over and control the world's economy.

All the holier-than-thou arguments, all the appeals to science, were nothing but an attempt to take over literally everything. All those on that side of the argument were either in on the deal or were willing fools, either out of ignorance or out of support.

In case you're not entirely convinced, there is this as well:

Climate science, even at its most uncontroversial, could never motivate the remaking of the entire global energy economy. Efforts to use climate science to threaten an apocalyptic future should we fail to embrace green proposals, and to characterize present-day natural disasters as terrifying previews of an impending day of reckoning, have only served to undermine the credibility of both climate science and progressive energy policy.

To repeat: it was never about the science: it was always about getting control over the world economy. Period. End of story.

Who is saying this?

Ted Nordhaus, left, and Michael Shellenberger are the authors of Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility and a recent collection of energy and climate writings.

More importantly, this was posted at Environment360, hosted at Yale, and one of the more important environmentalist web sites.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger continue:

The habit of overstating the current state of climate science knowledge, and in particular our understanding of the relationship between global warming and present-day weather events, has been difficult for environmentalists to give up because, on one level, it has worked so well for them.


This says it all: it has worked so well for them because it was something they could use to further their goals, of controlling the world economy.

In other words, the worst fears of the critics has been shown to be true: the arguments to make such sweeping changes to the world economy were based not on science, not on empirical evidence and scientific method (let's leave peer review out of the story for the time being, given how tainted that has become), but in spin and deception, if not outright lies. Imagine what would have happened if the world had gone along with the environmentalists taking control of the world economy in the name of preventing something that wouldn't have happened the way that they said it was going to?

That would have been the greatest fraud in the history of the world, bar none.

For more than 20 years, advocates have simultaneously overestimated the certainty with which climate science could predict the future and underestimated the economic and technological challenges associated with rapidly decarbonizing the energy economy. The oft-heard mantra that "All we lack is political will" assumes that the solutions to global warming are close at hand and that the primary obstacle to implementing them is public ignorance fed by fossil-fuel-funded skeptics.

In other words, they overplayed their hand and their claims are worthless.

Put a fork into it, people, it's cooked.