What I call the “climate scam” is the proposition that human use of fossil fuels will shortly bring about a catastrophic increase in atmospheric temperatures, and that this crisis can easily be averted by governments in a few rich countries, with about 10% of the world’s population, imposing crippling coercive restrictions and cost increases on fossil fuel use while also massively subsidizing alternative “renewable” energy sources.

I have long thought that this scam could not go on too much longer. The reasons I have thought that are many, the least important of them being that in the several decades since the warnings of catastrophic warming were first issued, atmospheric temperatures have increased much less than predicted. But here are two other reasons for my view that are more important:

1. Restrictions on rich-country carbon emission cannot possibly have any meaningful effect on world climate, because rich-country emissions are a minority and a rapidly-shrinking portion of total world emissions, while developing countries, with about 90% of world population, are rapidly increasing their emissions from a low base. The developing countries will never agree to limit their ongoing emissions increases, particularly while many of their people still lack basic access to electricity, automobiles, air conditioning, and so forth; and

2. In rich countries, ordinary and working-class people will surely put up an insurmountable roadblock to restrictions on fossil fuels as soon as they figure out that many of their jobs are threatened and their costs of electricity and gasoline are planned to increase by factors of 2 or 5 or 10 in the effort to achieve a (theoretical) meaningless reduction of predicted world temperatures of a few tenths of a degree 50 or 100 years from now.

I still believe that eventually this scam will fall apart, and for the reasons given (among other reasons). After all, the information to support my points (1) and (2) is readily available, not only from many posts on this blog, but many other sources as well, official and otherwise. There is a network of climate-skeptic news sources and bloggers, of which I am one, constantly putting this information out for the public to see. All of these sources, as far as I am aware, operate on a shoestring; but they cannot be silenced, and the skeptic community is remarkably robust and resilient. We aren’t going away.

But then, you have to consider what we are up against. First, of course, are the vast amounts of government and taxpayer money that fund the global warming alarm industry. I have never found a comprehensive figure for how much government money backs this industry, but it is clearly in the tens of billions of dollars per year in the U.S. alone. All the thousands of people in academia and research institutions calling themselves “climate scientists,” not to mention everyone working in the entire industries of wind and solar energy, stand to lose their careers as soon as the public realizes that this emperor has no clothes.

For today, I want to focus on a related phenomenon, namely, that coterie of highly wealthy and/or influential people who clearly ought to know better, who devote vast resources, public and private, to the nonsensical efforts to obstruct people from using fossil fuel resources. Consider just a few examples:

• You may have seen back in February that Amazon mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos announced he had created something called the Bezos Earth Fund, which he then funded with an initial $10 billion! Just a couple of days ago, Bezos announced the first recipients of grants from the Fund, who will receive a total of some $791 million. The recipients will include several of the usual run of environmental activist groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund. These are the people who lobby and litigate endlessly to block every infrastructure project involving fossil fuels, from pipelines to power plants to drilling endeavors. Essentially, these guys are being given infinite resources for their efforts. In one of those linked pieces, Bezos is quoted as saying, “I’ve spent the past several months learning from a group of incredibly smart people who’ve made it their life’s work to fight climate change and its impact on communities around the world. . . . I’m inspired by what they’re doing, and excited to help them scale.” Wouldn’t you think that a guy who could make a hundred billion dollars creating Amazon would have enough critical thinking ability to see through this nonsense?

• Bezos has made headlines with the massive size of his largesse, but he is far from alone among the super-rich in backing fossil-fuel restriction efforts. Michael Bloomberg — the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Climate Action! — has given tens of millions for an initiative he calls “Beyond Carbon.” (“Beyond Carbon is working to get the country [U.S.] on the path to a 100 percent clean energy economy . . . .”). With China alone building hundreds of new coal power plants — why? Or here is an announcement from July 2019 that Leonard DiCaprio, Laurene Powell Jobs and a guy named Brian Steth have launched a joint initiative to “battle climate change.” According to the piece, DiCaprio alone has so far given “around $100 million” toward the efforts. You can see how the environmental activist groups of the world have virtually unlimited funding for advocacy, lawsuits, or whatever else they can cook up.

• And then there are the politicians who clearly ought to know better. Consider UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He is the guy who led the campaign for Brexit. The Brexit fight was very much like the climate wars in pitting smug elite conformists against freedom lovers and independent thinkers, with Johnson leading side of the freedom lovers and independent thinkers. But Johnson hasn’t stuck with that side on the climate issue. Since taking on the prime ministership, Johnson has gone farther and farther over to the side of government suppression of fossil fuels, even though UK emissions are a small fraction even of those of the U.S., and their reduction will never be noticed by the world’s atmosphere. Recent initiatives from Johnson have included proposals for a government-funded “green industrial revolution” and for government-backed “green bonds” to subsidize industry to cut emissions. Some in the UK attribute Johnson’s recent environmental activism to the influence of his current girlfriend Carrie Symonds. Here are the two in a picture from the Daily Mail:

As to Joe Biden, the less said the better. Yes, it should be a basic test of competence for a U.S. President to steer clear of shackling the U.S. economy while the whole developing world is building fossil fuel power sources as fast as they can. But let’s face it, we’re not likely to get basic competence, let alone any critical or independent thinking, from Joe.

Anyway, as the anti-energy advocates get their hundreds of millions and billions of dollars of funding for flooding the zone, our hardy band of skeptics labor on, mostly on a pro bono basis. Several readers over the years have asked me how they could support this website, whether by a subscription fee or a donation or otherwise; and my answer has been, I’m happy to do this at my own expense. But I’ve now joined the Board of the American Friends of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The entire budget of the GWPF is a tiny fraction of that of any of the organizations funded by the Bezoses or Bloombergs or DiCaprios. But if you want a good cause to give to, check them out. Here is a link to the main website; and you can go to this link for instructions on how to contribute.