Written by Vijay Jayaraj

Greta Thunberg, in her latest opinion column for The Guardian, has called for an end to today’s business as usual. She believes current economic activity is a crime against humanity as it increases the global warming rate.

As a citizen of a developing country, I protest!

Greta and other schoolchildren camped at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Their primary objective was to peddle lies, demand economic suicide, and ridicule world leaders who are trying their best to uplift economies.

In her brief column, written as a forerunner to the World Economic Forum, Greta outlined her demands.

“We demand that at this year’s forum, participants from all companies, banks, institutions and governments immediately halt all investments in fossil fuel exploration and extraction, immediately end all fossil fuel subsidies and immediately and completely divest from fossil fuels,” she said.

“We understand and know very well that the world is complicated and that what we are asking for may not be easy,” she continued.

But in reality, Greta does not understand what she is demanding.

Almost all products we use in our everyday lives are made from or by means of fossil fuels. Yes! That includes your toothbrush, toilet seats, kitchen utensils, house paint, pens, mobiles (yes, your mobile phones and the rotating plastic toys that hang over infants’ cribs), computers, roads, vehicles, clothes, and thousands of other things that the majority of us—except forest dwellers—would not be able to live without.

Ironically, even Greta and her friends don’t live without them. The lettered placards used in their protests couldn’t have been made without fossil derivatives.

The boat Greta used to cross the Atlantic was also manufactured with the help of fossil fuels. Her recent train journey—about which she was caught lying—was also made possible only because of fossil fuels, even though the train was powered by what the company called “100 percent eco-friendly electricity.” Fossil fuels went into mining and transporting the minerals from which the steel of the cars and wheels and track were made, and into the composition and manufacturing of the plastics and most other materials in its cars.

Even worse, the very same energy technologies which Greta calls “clean”—solar and wind—are manufactured with the direct help of fossil fuels and fossil derivatives, besides releasing toxic substances into the environment.

Immediate, comprehensive disinvestment from fossil fuels would halt not just fossil fuel supply but the entire global economy. Even the countries that use the highest percentage of renewable energy cannot sustain their economies for a single week without the use of fossil fuel-based products.

Eighty percent of all energy consumed globally (2018) came from oil, natural gas, and coal. In 2015, 65 percent of all electricity produced came from fossil fuels.

More than 70 percent of the electricity consumed in China and India—for around 3 billion people—came from coal alone. Both these countries are adding more coal plants to their existing fleets, not shutting them down as Greta demands.

Given the extremely high inefficiency and costs of non-fossil fuel based energy sources, economies are nowhere close to increasing their dependency on “clean” energy. A call for disinvestment in fossil fuels is asking for humanity to cease functioning.

Not to forget, there are still 850 million people in the world (including hundreds of hospital patients in Africa) who do not have access to electricity at all—and many more whose access is highly unreliable.

Even without implementing any of Greta’s mind-boggling demands, the world is struggling to implement 100 percent electricity access in developing countries.

Greta herself enjoys the benefits of living in a developed country and continent whose economies were driven by the fossil-fuel based industrial era.

To turn a blind eye to those of us in developing countries, and those in much worse economic conditions, is certainly not admirable or praiseworthy. In fact, it is detrimental to the economic progress that billions in the developing world are aspiring to see in our lifetimes.

The mainstream media, especially the leftist leaning media from the West, must stop treating school dropouts like climate experts and economists.

In their sustained effort to promote climate alarmism, the positions Greta and the loony media are pushing might very well be destroying the hopes of those at the very verge of death in poor countries.

Vijay Jayaraj (M.Sc, Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, England), Research Associate for Developing Countries for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, lives in Udumalpet, India.

This article was originally published at Townhall.com.

Written by Dr. E. Calvin Beisner

George Orwell, call your office.

In what Huffington Post‘s Alexander Kaufman called “an Orwellian rhetorical shift away from a scientific reality,” the Department of Defense “scrubbed its latest National Defense Strategy of all references to climate change.”

In all likelihood, Orwell would call the 30-year campaign for climate alarmism—with all its oxymoronic appeals to “scientific consensus,” its sleight-of-hand temperature data homogenizations, its revisions of past data to exaggerate apparent warming, its exaggeration and fabrication and suppression and loss of data, its intimidation of dissent and corruption of peer review—Orwellian.

And he’d lead a standing ovation for the Pentagon’s courageous and sensible leaders.

Sure enough, the 2018 Summary of the National Defense Strategy (NDS) never uses the word “climate” (as this screen shot of search results shows), let alone the phrase “climate change” or “global warming.”

That’s the first time since 2008 that climate change hasn’t played an important role in national defense strategy.

As Michael Bastasch reported in The Daily Caller in December,

The Obama administration listed global warming as a top national security threat, and administration officials even [wrongly] blamed climate changes for sparking the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS.

“Climate change will impact every country on the planet,” former President Barack Obama told U.S. Coast Guard Academy graduates in 2015.

“No nation is immune,” Obama said. “So I am here today to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security, and, make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country.”

Secretary of Defense James Mattis, like his boss President Donald Trump, clearly rejects prioritizing climate as a defense issue. Not only does the new NDS never mention climate change or global warming, but also it discusses energy not in terms of climate impacts but of the need to ensure stability in major energy-producing regions of the world, such as the Middle East. Why? Because the Trump Administration believes access to abundant, affordable, reliable energy, especially in the form the Middle East produces most—fossil fuels—is far more important to national and global security than whatever’s going on with climate.

It follows that the Department of Defense no longer thinks fossil fuel use is driving global warming that threatens global security.

Welcome to the new era—when adults are in charge at the Pentagon.

This article originally posted CornwallAlliance.org.