Money Being Made From Warming Scare

Red Hot Lies CoverRED HOT LIES: HOW GLOBAL WARMING ALARMISTS USE THREATS, FRAUD AND DECEPTION TO KEEP YOU MISINFORMED

By Larry Thornberry 

Christopher C. Horner has deconstructed global-warming alarmism before, but in “Red Hot Lies,” he focuses on how the global-warming industry, with huge money and power on the line, defends itself and perpetuates its beliefs.

The senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute shows readers scientists, bureaucrats, journal editors and government agency administrators acting more like con men and mob enforcers than objective seekers of truth.

In the current global-warming lobby, Mr. Horner points out that leftists who want ever bigger government with hypertaxation and microregulation of every aspect of our lives find common cause with large companies that stand to make a bundle if alternative energy forms are mandated and/or one of the carbon-fuel-rationing schemes is adopted.

(With billions in government research grants, there’s more money in alarmism than on the skeptical side, worth remembering when a skeptic is accused of being in the pocket of “Big Oil” – no alarmist is ever accused of being in the pocket of Big Research Grants.) These two groups are enabled by a compliant press that relishes sensational scare stories and by politicians ever eager for ways to show their virtue and ways to appear to be saving their constituents.

In his first book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism)” (Regnery, 2007) Mr. Horner parsed the fanciful claims of the global warmers. He built the case, infrequently encountered by the public, that the warming our planet has undergone over the past century is almost certainly nothing outside of the normal temperature variations the Earth has been undergoing since there’s been an Earth. Man’s activities may have played a part in this small temperature increase, but almost certainly a trifling part compared to variations in solar activity.

There remain plenty of honest scientists who go to work every day with no other objective than to look for the truth, wherever it leads. But the saddest casualties of the sorry global-warming story are the many scientists who have been corrupted by the oceans of grant money they and their universities are awash in and that will remain available only if the heat is kept up (so to speak) on the global-warming threat to mankind.

Mr. Horner shows how these folks will do just about anything to keep this gravy train going. This includes playing with the data to keep the horrendous story of global catastrophe before the public. It also includes denying jobs, publications and promotions as well as sullying the reputations of “heretics” who dare to question the warming-catastrophe orthodoxy. Alarmists have succeeded in characterizing disagreement with them as either, in Mr. Horner’s words, “daft or venal.”

Read the rest of this review at the Washington Times

3 Responses to Money Being Made From Warming Scare

  1. Suspended for Obscenities December 5, 2008 at 1:32 pm #

    The Oil industry has its own reserves whose value is attached, like a suckerfish, to OPEC’s price targets. Here’s a statistic you won’t see on Army recruitment posters: The rise in the price of oil after the first three years of the war boosted the value of the reserves of ExxonMobil Oil alone by just over $666 billion. (The devil is in the details.)

    Smaller Chevron Oil, where Condoleezza Rice had served as a director, gained a quarter trillion dollars in value. Chevron named a tanker after Rice, but given the firm’s change in fortunes once she became National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State, they should rename the whole fleet in her honor. Altogether, I calculate that the top five oil operators saw their reserves rise in value by over $2.363 trillion.

  2. Neil F. December 5, 2008 at 7:42 pm #

    Rob N. Hood, you should really read this book. I seem to recall that you do not believe that global warming hysteria is about money. Well, it is. And this book proves it. Forgive me if that came across as smug. I so rarely have a chance to be smug…. feels good!

  3. Neil F. December 9, 2008 at 11:06 am #

    Suspended for Obscenities: Forgive me for being a little confused about your post. Just what are those reserves worth now that the price of oil is plummeting? I think you do not understand anything about the history of oil prices. http://www.wtrg.com/prices.htm and http://www.mahalo.com/Price_of_oil might be good places for you to start. I also do not understand how what you are saying is even remotely analogous to the article about which we are supposed to be commenting. Do you have something to say about that? Or are you only interested in demonizing Big Bad Oil?

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