After the experience of Covid lockdowns, the manipulation of Federal Agencies and online platforms, the invasion of privacy, the suppression of free speech and assembly, and then the wild spending and debt burden undertaken to address problems caused by the government itself many Americans are left wondering if we could see a repeat of such tyranny on even a broader scale.

Unfortunately, this atrocity on liberty has a close cousin that has the potential to do even greater harm – the environmental movement. Specifically, the elites and their lemmings claiming that man’s CO2 emissions are causing global warming are the most concerning.

Remarkably, they were able to convince courts that CO2 and carbon generally, is a pollutant, which has opened the door to administrative agencies taking over our lives. 

Since humans exhale about two pounds of CO2 daily, just by breathing, then logically, human breathing should be regulated.  Our bodies are powered at the cellular level by glucose, a carbon-based sugar resulting from plant photosynthesis. To live anywhere in the vast animal kingdom is to have a carbon footprint.

Just as they incorrectly alleged that mask-wearing and vaccination were not a violation of liberty because they affected others, so too they will argue that your “carbon footprint” so endangers others, that your liberty will be of necessity, stripped from you.  You are not free to gravely harm others.

You must give up your liberty and prosperity to save the earth from man’s depredations, or so it is asserted.

That this assertion can be expanded to dictatorial lengths is evident.  Like COVID-19, those who disagree are getting banned from social media and academia. 

Grant hustling academics also do not like the challenge from skeptics.

The deep state agencies are mandating what kind of cars you will be able to buy, what kind of dishwasher, home heating system, and even how you cook your food.  Now they even want to tell us what kind of leaf blower we can have. Where is the limit to their control of our lives?

Speaking of food, because all animals breathe and emit methane, there has been a wholesale attempt to regulate agriculture in Europe and Sri Lanka, which in both cases, has been so onerous it has led to open rebellion.  By controlling fertilizer, farm equipment, and fuel, the government can completely regulate the production of food.

A government that controls your speech and assembly, your energy sources, and your food supply, is a government that can completely control you.

By controlling energy and its use, the government now has a broad writ to regulate all kinds of personal and business activities, even beyond those seen in the Covid crisis.  A crisis, we might add, that was caused by our own government subsidizing dangerous “gain of function” research in Chinese laboratories.

There seem to be four positions on environmental questions, and three of them can be occupied by Conservatives and Libertarians, but one cannot.

In the first corner, is the liberal/progressive position.  In Europe, the Green Movement is an openly socialist/communist movement.  In the US, it is a bit more constrained, likely for political reasons.

Man’s actions, specifically his use of so-called fossil fuels, are causing an increase in CO2 levels, which leads to global warming, which leads to the “destruction” of the environment.  This destruction, which includes erratic severe weather, rising sea levels, etc., is blamed for everything from reduced sea ice to shifting polar bear populations to Muslims killing Christians in Africa. 

The latter contention shows just how far advocates of climate change are willing to take their argument.  Anything and everything is caused by climate change.

They even have attempted to widen the argument from global warming to “climate change”, which then can accommodate severe cold or anything else they want to throw into the hopper.

To fight climate change, we must relinquish our freedom and prosperity to governmental agencies, and most particularly, to international organizations like the World Economic Forum and UN agencies.

Notice that power is shifted from the people and their local government, largely to unelected national and international bureaucrats who are not elected and cannot be held accountable by the populace.

To have most decisions in life determined by force inflicted by those not democratically chosen seems a good working definition of tyranny.

As early as the 1970s, this was recognized, as some environmentalists were described as watermelons: green on the outside and red on the inside. 

Unfortunately, that metaphor has proven to be largely true.

But like other trends, the left position has become dominant in our culture and we now have several generations that think Al Gore is a climate scientist.

In another opposing corner, are those that believe there is no connection whatsoever between CO2, no discernable increase in temperature, and hence no crisis of global warming. 

This position suggests much of the data has been distorted. 

The fact is there is no “ideal” CO2 level or “ideal” temperature to be mandated.  CO2 levels are actually near a historic low and so are temperatures.  Lots of animals, indeed huge animals, lived in a higher CO2 world.  Why is our short snapshot in time the standard?

The fact is the earth was much warmer in earlier periods and largely ice-free.  That was well before man started burning fossil fuels.  This proves to a reasonable mind that there must be other powerful variables at work beyond your leaf blower.

Some contend that temperatures that were once recorded in rural areas decades ago, but now because of urban growth, are recorded in concrete cities, simply are measuring a “heat island” distortion of temperatures.  There have also been differences between land observations and satellite data. They generally feel the whole temperature record is too short and the data too unreliable to draw firm conclusions between CO2 and temperatures. Computer modeling has proven quite wrong on some occasions. They contend there is no connection between the two, and hence do not agree this is a man-caused crisis that requires centralized authority to deny freedom because of a non-existent “existential threat.”

In a third corner, is a more nuanced position, mostly occupied by Bjorn Lomborg and the Copenhagen Consensus. He contends there is warming, that it is largely man-caused, but that the correct response is to use freedom and common sense in addressing the problems of climate change.  If indeed sea levels are rising, build sea walls.  Cut emissions by using nuclear power.  In short, mitigate particular problems with warming trends by addressing specific issues, rather than attempting an arrogant and expensive attempt to change the climate of the earth.

This can be done within the free-market system making rational economic decisions and involving modest expenditures to address particular needs.  No gigantic international socialist cabal is needed to address the problems.

In the last corner, you have those that combine a number of the previous positions. They believe the earth is warming, but largely for reasons unrelated to man’s activities.  They will cite independent variables outside of man’s control, and to some extent, even our understanding.  This includes but is not limited to,  such phenomena as the role of solar storms, cloud formation and its reflection of sunlight, the fluctuations in the sun itself, the influence of our planetary system on orbit paths, the tilt of the earth’s axis, volcanoes, and ocean currents.  Largely unobserved and particularly important undersea volcanoes can lead to warming sea temperatures.

In short, they do acknowledge some warming but do not attribute much of the trend to either CO2 or man’s activities.  Climate has never been static.  We have had warming periods, and cooling periods before, long before man started using a leaf blower.

They also point out an important fact: CO2 levels are not linked one-to-one with temperatures.  Increasing CO2 levels result in diminishing influence for CO2.  Water vapor, what we identify as clouds and humidity, is a vastly more important “greenhouse” gas.

Like the Lomborg and the Copenhagen Consensus, they feel whatever changes in the climate we are having can be mitigated with affordable options.

You can see those three corners of the square, do not agree with the progressive left’s description of the problem and hence will not agree to their statist solutions.

The earth may or may not be warming.  Warming may not be bad and higher CO2 levels are not bad either.  The earth is noticeably greening because higher CO2 levels are plant food. Based on geological history, current CO2 levels are among the lowest ever recorded.  We could use more of it and it will be beneficial.

This is the position of Dr. William Happer, who we recently interviewed.  Go to c02coalition.org, and view our video, for much more information. Their position is summarized:

“The failure of computer models to reliably predict future temperatures has created a growing awareness that such models are fundamentally flawed—and have greatly exaggerated past and future anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that any future anthropogenic warming will be far smaller than projected by the IPCC’s models. The best available evidence suggests that the equilibrium doubling sensitivity, the final warming of the surface in response to doubling atmospheric CO2, is closer to 1 C than to the “most likely” 3 C of mainstream climate models.”

If we are talking maybe of 1-degree centigrade, note most people in the US are moving to the sun belt to get a change far larger than that.

Thus, conservatives and libertarians can argue their positions among themselves, but they cannot agree with either the underlying assumptions or the prescriptive solutions offered by the left.

This is not denying science, this is doing science. Aside from scientific considerations ( and there are other important considerations), it recognizes that our prosperity is linked closely with agricultural productivity and the availability of inexpensive energy to power the machines that give us a high standard of living.

In the spirit of the Founders, we must remember their elaborate efforts to control power and the tendency of humans to abuse it.  It is foolish to transfer power to unelected bureaucrats, who are largely unaccountable and untouchable, whatever the problem to be addressed.  In the past, such expansions of power were permitted only for war, and sometimes “national emergencies.” Absolute power corrupts, even if in the name of a good cause.

With “climate change”, the phenomenon can span decades or centuries, so for all reasonable purposes, the “emergency” and dictatorial powers, can last indefinitely.

Neither our liberty nor prosperity should be lost because of an unproven argument about climate change.  And if climate change is real, man-caused or not, we can adapt to these changes without destroying our standard of living or our Republic.  Progressives would have you think that only their political concentration of power in the hands of the few is an answer.

We have already seen what is happening in Germany.  It is deindustrializing to the point of almost national suicide through the use of dictates from centralized government.   We do not want to go down that road.

Within the rest of Europe, discontent with green policies has united farmers, truck drivers, railroad workers, and the general population.  February 20th through the 21st are planned the biggest demonstrations in Europe.

It will be interesting to see the political consequences.

One final thought.  Besides being bad for prosperity and liberty, there is a new, fifth corner, emerging argument that these Green policies are actually bad for the environment.  This is a relatively counterintuitive argument that has considerable substance behind it.  The unintended consequences of some policies were hard to know until “green energy” reached a threshold of use.  But now we are seeing them in all their ugliness. Green policies are killing whales, and birds, and polluting the earth.