You've heard a lot about Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Tech and all the other big bad players out there. I want to talk to you about the biggest, baddest one of them all. This Goliath doesn't deal in billions. It deals in trillions. I'm talking about… Big Green.
Yes, the Environmental Movement. It's the richest, most powerful "Big" in the world right now. Nothing else even comes close. Until we see it for what it is and reign it in, it's going to get even bigger. And as is usually the case, bigger is not always better. You see, Big Green wants to take over your life. It has to. This makes perfect sense. Big Green, after all, intends to save the planet from oblivion. Your freedom would seem to be a small price to pay.
To accomplish its mission Big Green needs two things: Money. And power. It already has a lot of both. But it's hungry for much more. Who do we mean when we say Big Green? We mean the major organizations that set the agenda for the movement. This would include, among dozens: Greenpeace. 350.Org. Nature Conservancy. Sierra Club. World Wildlife Fund. And, of course, the politicians, bureaucrats, corporations, and media outlets who support and promote their agenda.
Before we get any deeper into this, let's stipulate a few things. The climate is changing. It appears, though we can't be sure, to be slowly warming. If it continues to warm, it could cause serious environmental problems sometime in the distant future. Industrialization probably plays a role in this warming process. Reasonable people should be able to agree on this. Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi and Republican leader Newt Gingrich actually once sat down together and said as much in a public service ad they made in the 1990s.
But Big Green has no interest in being reasonable. Reasonable doesn't get you money. Reasonable doesn't get you power. So, let's talk about the money. Greenpeace, Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, and Sierra Club all have financial assets in the $100 to $300 million-dollar range. Name a Fortune 500 company and chances are they're writing big checks to Big Green. Banking giant, Citigroup, for example, has committed $100 billion to "combat climate change."
But the real money is at the government level. In 2009 the Obama Administration directed more than $110 billion to be spent on renewable energy "investments" under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act alone. What the taxpayer got for this investment other than long-forgotten $500 million-dollar boondoggles -- like Solyndra -- is hard to say.
According to the best economic models, the Paris Climate Accord will cost the world $1 to 2 trillion every year. Total cost for The Green New Deal: $52 trillion—minimum. But money is only a means to an end. The end is power. The power to transform society into what they think it should be. That's what this is really about.
Here's how Saikat Chakrabarti, the architect of the Green New Deal described it to the Washington Post: "…it wasn't originally a climate thing at all…we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing." Maybe you like all this. That's fine. But don't pretend it's about protecting the environment.
Chakrabarti was being honest. You should be, too. It's about transferring more and more power to the government—at every level: federal, state, local. And the way to get the power is to gin up scary scenarios. The planet is burning. The seas are rising. We're all going to be dead soon unless we listen to those masters of disaster, Al Gore, Bill McKibben, and Greta Thunberg.
And what have all their horror stories led to? A generation of young people who have nightmares about a planet burning up around them. Poor people who pay higher energy bills than they need to because of massive subsidies for wind and solar power. Millions of birds, including endangered ones, dying, sliced to pieces by wind turbines.
Yet, in the midst of all the-planet-is-burning fearmongering, the world is cleaner, healthier, and richer than it has ever been. Deaths from natural disasters are at all-time lows. Here's why: Human beings adapt when faced with climate problems. We're really good at it. We've been doing it for thousands of years.
Sea levels rising? Build taller and better sea walls. That's what the Netherlands did. A good chunk of the country, including its international airport, is below sea level. Need more water? Spread the gospel of drip irrigation and desalination. Israel has more water than it needs and it's in the middle of a desert. Need clean energy? Build more nuclear power plants. Sweden gets half of its energy from nuclear.
None of these simple, practical solutions makes much of an impact on Big Green. You don't raise money off of common sense and you don't get political power telling people how good things are and you certainly don't become famous by being calm. Big Green is not poor, not honest, and certainly not powerless. It's time we all plug in to that truth.
Author: Rogan O'Handley, aka DC Draino
