The Twenty-First Century “Save the Earth” Climate Delusion

No longer are cap-and-trade, carbon (dioxide) taxes, and more solar and wind the promoted solutions to alleged global warming. Now we can add gender justice and defunding the police!

—Marc Morano, Green Fraud, 2021¹

In this book, you will learn why most of what you think you know about energy—and what our kids are being taught about energy—is flat-out wrong. In one of the worst ironies of history, a frantic global movement to eliminate fossil fuels—the foundation of modern life—has achieved comprehensive power throughout the developed world at the very moment when the supply of those resources, especially in the United States, has exploded.

—Stephen Moore and Kathleen Hartnett White, Fueling Freedom, 2016²

Having first experienced and then studied the phenomenon for fifteen years, I believe that secular people are attracted to apocalyptic environmental movements because it meets some of the same psychological and spiritual needs as Judeo-Christianity and other religions. Apocalyptic environmentalism gives people a purpose: to save the world from climate change, or some other environmental disaster. It provides people with a story that casts them as heroes, which some scholars, as we will see, believe we need in order to find meaning in our lives.

—Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never, 2020³

IN 1895, FRENCH CONSERVATIVE THINKER Gustave Le Bon wrote a seminal book entitled The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.⁴ In the introduction to that book, Le Bon clarified that profound changes in people’s ideas are the actual cause of great upheavals that preceded civilization changes, like the fall of the Roman Empire. He explained that the transformation humanity was then experiencing had a base cause in the destruction of the religious, political, and social beliefs that grounded civilization. He felt his era was in transition and anarchy as modern scientific and industrial discoveries created new conditions of existence. He observed that the past ideas, although half destroyed, were still compelling, while the new ideas replacing them were yet in the process of transformation. Le Bon could have written that exact introduction today.

In chapter 4, “A Religious Shape Assumed by All the Conviction of Crowds,” Le Bon expressed his disdain for democracy. He felt crowds whipped democracies through irrational historical moments where bizarre secular ideas assumed a religious-like popular devotion. The following paragraph from chapter 4 summarized his concerns as follows:

We have shown that crowds do not reason, that they accept or reject ideas as a whole, that they tolerate neither discussion nor contradiction, and that the suggestions brought to bear on them invade the entire field of their understanding and tend at once to transform themselves into acts. We have shown that crowds suitably influenced are ready to sacrifice themselves for the ideal with which they have been inspired. We have also seen that they only entertain violent and extreme sentiments, that in their case sympathy becomes adoration, and antipathy almost as soon as it is aroused is transformed into hatred. These general indications furnish us already with a presentiment of the nature of the convictions of crowds.⁵

Today, the Western world is in the grip of a similar turmoil caused by the idea that we are our greatest enemy. The self-hatred extends to the belief that we are also the enemy of our mother, Earth.

This self-hatred focuses on a molecule, carbon dioxide (CO₂), which we despicable humans exhale. Even worse, we desecrate organic life itself by burning fossil fuel, releasing into the atmosphere more CO₂ the earth had preserved from living organisms that had passed away through the ages. Powering our industrial society with these hated hydrocarbon fuels, we have created an economic system, capitalism, that is inherently evil. The evil of capitalism extends social injustice to new heights as the racially privileged white race perpetuates their luxury by subjugating people of color and emitting enough CO₂ into the atmosphere to destroy the planet. The only way to save planet Earth, and in the process protect ourselves, is to decarbonize. But even that is not enough unless we also dismantle capitalism, supplanting the economics of greed with a new vision of living and working together without prejudice to sustain Earth’s limited resources for the benefit of all.

In 1841, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay wrote another seminal book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.⁶ Mackay, like Le Bon, was fascinated by how crazed ideas can drive whole populations into actions motivated by a bizarre, self-destructive, mass psychosis that is hard to comprehend. In the preface to the 1852 edition of his book, Mackay boiled his thesis down to the following sentence:

We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds on one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.⁷

Mackay focused his attention on a series of fascinating crazes. He puzzled over the tulip craze that prompted Hollanders in the 1600s to spend fortunes on exotic roots producing color variations of the famous flower. He was amazed at the Crusades where Europeans left their homes and families to seize the Holy Land for Christianity. He was astounded by the grotesque witch mania during which those believed to be possessed by Satan were hunted down and made to suffer horrific deaths. Today, the Western world is on the precipice of abandoning the economic progress hydrocarbon energy has fueled since the Industrial Revolution to save Earth from catastrophic warmth by reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that plants depend upon for life.

In 2007, noted British columnist Christopher Booker and political analyst Dr. Richard North coauthored a book that took up these themes, entitled Scared to Death.⁸ Booker and North marveled that Western society since the 1980s had been “in the grip of a remarkable and very dangerous psychological phenomenon.”⁹ Booker and North were astounded that one mysterious threat to human health and well-being after another gave rise to society-wide fear. The list of these fear crazes was extensive: salmonella in eggs, listeria in cheese, bovine spongiform encephalopathy in beef, dioxins in poultry, and so forth. In the following paragraph in their introduction to the book, Booker and North identified why these periods of psychological insanity continue to occur among today’s supposedly well-educated and technologically sophisticated populations:

Each was based on what appeared at the time to be scientific evidence that was widely accepted. Each has inspired obsessive coverage by the media. Each has then provoked a massive response from politicians and officials, imposing new laws that inflicted enormous economic and social damage. But eventually the scientific reasoning on which the panic was based has been found to be fundamentally flawed. Either the scare originated in some genuine threat that had become widely exaggerated, or the danger was found never to have existed at all.¹⁰

Booker went on to examine the pattern behind these scares, finding the elements in common. One was that the supposed danger had to be something universal, to which we might all be exposed, like global warming and climate change. The threat must be novel, like the assumption that the developed world is bent on warming up Earth to hazardous levels by burning more and more hydrocarbon fuels until they are all exhausted. The threat must be plausible, but there must also be a powerful element of uncertainty. The uncertainty allows alarmist speculation to run wild, imaging the damage that might result, e.g., the warming of Earth caused by anthropogenic CO₂ until Earth is hazardous to human life. Finally, society’s response to the threat must be disproportionate, e.g., when the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) demands that all governments agree to implement decarbonization schemes devised by international agreements, e.g., the Paris Climate Accords. Even when the threat is not wholly imaginary, the response eventually seemed out of proportion to reality.

The dawning of the Internet promised to bring a new era of free speech. The open access to information quickly developed into easily created blogs to express dissident views of all kinds. But ironically, the technology welcomed as a liberating tool has transformed into a tool giving totalitarian governments increased ability to suppress speech that deviates from the government-approved version of the truth. The United States justice and intelligence agencies now can monitor all electronic communications, including the keystrokes made on a laptop computer in writing a book.

Australian geologist Professor S. Warren Carey, who propounded the expanding Earth theory we will examine in chapter 8, warned that challenging orthodox beliefs in science promised no glory. In the epilogue to the 1988 book Theories of the Earth and Universe that he wrote as a professor emeritus, Carey warned that “the more radical the advance from the current orthodoxy, the more certain will it be scorned and rejected.”¹¹ Carey understood this in personal terms. Carey suffered the scorn of those geologists, who were wedded to plate tectonics as their continent formation paradigm, for articulating and defending his theory of an expanding Earth. Yet, Carey had the wisdom to understand that not all challenges to orthodox thinking are necessarily correct in their views. In his last paragraph to the book, he wrote the following:

Should we then give credence to every heretic and iconoclast with the naïveté or the zeal or persistence to challenge the established order? Of course not! Most heresy is doubtlessly false—yet latent there are the gems of the age. To discriminate unerringly within doctrine and within heresy needs a keener mind than any yet—but this must be our ever-unattainable goal.¹²

I have dedicated this book to Marc Morano, the creator of ClimateDepot.com. For decades now, Marc has challenged global warming and climate change orthodoxy. International global warming conferences have thrown Marc out and closed their doors to him. Books by global warming enthusiasts have printed the vilest denunciations of Marc’s views and arguments. Marc has suffered the scorn Carey warned was inevitable for those who do not go along with what we will argue in this book is a mass delusion of Charles Mackey proportions.

Yet, Marc Morano has persisted, determined to pursue scientific truth about the climate with a purpose to prevent the Western world, and in particular the United States, from committing economic and political suicide over a scientific hoax of historic proportions. When the government mandates and subsidies run out, the fields of rotting wind turbines and rusting solar panels will be a monument to the folly of decarbonization. Should a new ice age come within our lifetimes, we will be around to lament the folly that sought to reduce atmospheric CO₂ by destroying capitalism. But should that day arrive, we fully expect the IPCC to blame the new ice age on the global warming that anthropogenic CO₂ caused.