The Goal Is Power: The Global Warming Conspiracy
by Charles Kadlec
In Watermelons: The Green Movement’s True Colors, British journalist/blogger James Delingpole promises to show that the man-made global warming is a fraud, one that has already cost billions of dollars and is a clear and present danger to our liberty and democratic traditions — and, ironically, to the environment itself.
He largely accomplishes this task and does so without sounding hysterical or radical. This alone would recommend this book to all who care about the environment, the human condition, and the foundations of our way of life.
Delingpole was among the leading journalists who reported the Climategate scandal, in which he analyzed e-mails among leading climate scientists that had been hacked and posted on the web. What he discovered was a pattern of purposeful and coordinated efforts to:
- Manipulate the data supporting the claims of a sudden and dangerous increase in the earth’s temperature;
- Not disclose private doubts about whether the world was actually heating up;
- Suppress evidence that contradicted the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming (AGW);
- Disguise the facts around the Medieval Warm Period, when the earth was warmer that it is today;
- Suppress opposition by squeezing dissenting scientists out of the peer review process.
All of this and more supports one of Delingpole’s more provocative claims, that AGW has become a formidable secular religion led by zealots and supported by true believers. What makes it sinister is that it circumvents the First Amendment prohibition against a state-sponsored religion. As a consequence, AGW is provided lavish support by government and taught as scientific fact in our schools. Like all state religions, its tenets are imposed on believers and non-believers alike.
Already, billions of dollars have been wasted, resources squandered, and the environment put at risk by the policies of the warming alarmists. Spain has been lauded for creating 50,000 green jobs. What goes unsaid is the cost of the subsidy, $756,000 per job, likely destroyed 110,000 jobs. And Spain now is shackled with high cost “green” electricity that hobbles its economy, burdensome debt and high unemployment.
In the aftermath of terrible floods in 1974 the government of Queensland, Australia promised to build dams and other flood control systems. Instead, persuaded by green activists that drought caused by global warming was now the real threat, the government diverted the money into a $13 billion water desalinisation plant program. When heavy rains returned earlier this year, the terrible flooding killed dozens of people and caused billions in property losses.
The American Bird Conservancy estimates 100,000 to 300,000 birds are killed by wind farms in the U.S. each year – roughly equal to the estimated 250,000 birds killed in 1989 by the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Yet, environmentalists fail to speak out, instead averting their eyes to the slaughter as unsightly windmills destroy vistas. And they remain strangely silent on the deployment of solar farms that will cover acres of ecologically sensitive desserts.
Delingpole has provided documented insight into a powerful political-scientific complex. This complex is led and supported by “Watermelons,” those whose rhetoric is green, but whose tactics and political ambitions he traces back to the national socialists and communists of earlier eras. Their goal is to control the economy and impose their vision of human society through the coercive power of government. All who cherish liberty, treasure the environment and aspire to a better life should take note.