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CCP Proves ‘Climate’ Fight Not Really About Climate

You don’t have to be a climate scientist to know the ringleaders of the “climate change” bandwagon don’t truly believe the narrative they’re selling.

And it’s not just because they jet around the world in private jets to lecture you about your car and your hamburgers.

In fact, if the people at the top bought into the notion that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are really “pollution” producing a “climate crisis,” they would be doing exactly the opposite of what they’re actually doing.

Examining climate policy and communist China proves the point.

Consider the UN Paris Agreement. Negotiated at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris in 2015, the global deal calls on national governments to make their own national pledges about what they force on their populations to combat the alleged “climate crisis.”

Under the deal, the Obama administration unilaterally pledged to slash CO2 emissions in the United States by more than 25 percent by 2025. This was to be imposed on Americans through executive orders and federal regulations to avoid involving Congress. Other Western governments made similar promises.

The Chinese communist regime, by contrast, was already emitting far more CO2 than the United States and now spews more than the entire Western world combined by far—and yet it pledged only to keep increasing its emissions for the next 15 years. Seriously.

In its submission to the UN (pdf), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agreed “to achieve the peaking of carbon dioxide emissions around 2030.”

In other words, the regime proudly announced to the world that its CO2 output would continue to grow for at least 15 years, at which point nobody will even remember the Paris pledges.

When I asked members of the Chinese delegation for comment at the UN summit, instead of responding, they sent one of their minions to follow me around the conference and take pictures of me, something I promptly reported to UN security and the French police.

It’s a good thing for the CCP that nobody will remember its promises by 2030, because virtually every analyst who has looked at the regime’s coal-fired power-plant construction binge has acknowledged there’s no way its emissions will “peak” by 2030. Communist promises have never been worth the paper they’re printed on anyway, as history has shown.

The CCP wasn’t kidding about increasing its emissions, though: Beijing is currently bringing more coal-fired power plants online just between now and 2025 than the United States has in total.

According to Global Energy Monitor’s February 2021 briefing (pdf), the CCP built more than three times as much coal-power capacity as the rest of the world combined in 2020. And it already has about half of all the world’s coal power capacity, according to Global Energy Monitor’s “Boom and Bust 2020: Tracking the Global Coal Plant Pipeline.”

Already, China emits more than twice as much CO2 as the United States, according to data from the Global Carbon Project. Its emissions are rising meteorically even as U.S. emissions and emissions from other Western nations continue to plunge.

In 2021, Americans released about 5 billion tons of CO2, while China released about 11.5 billion. If current trends continue, the CCP may release more CO2 than the rest of the world combined in the not-too-distant future.

Think about this. If one was truly concerned about CO2 emissions producing “climate hell,” as world leaders claimed at the latest UN “climate” summit in Egypt that I attended, they would be panicking, not celebrating.

Moving Production

Again, all of the production being moved out of the West and into China will result in vastly more CO2 entering the atmosphere than if that production had remained in the United States, Canada, or Europe.

And yet, Western governments, tax-funded climate activists, UN leaders, and their media allies all celebrated and continue to celebrate the Paris Agreement and subsequent follow-ups as a huge success in saving the climate. Perhaps Donald Trump was on to something when, in 2012, he wrote on Twitter,

“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

That’s exactly what happened, of course, as electricity rates got pushed higher and higher over time. In 1975, electricity was averaging around 3 cents per kilowatt hour, helping U.S. industry remain competitive globally. By 2010, thanks in part to Obama’s policies, it had tripled. And by 2021, it was approaching 15 cents.

For perspective, electricity prices in China are about half that.

There are many reasons for the shifting of production from the United States to China—many of them directly related to U.S. policy—but one key factor has been the cost of energy.

Yet higher energy prices were openly touted as a policy objective by Obama. As he made clear in a 2008 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, “under my plan … electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

Later that year, he expressed similar sentiments as gas prices soared to around $4, saying only that he would have “preferred” a “gradual adjustment” instead.

Faced with higher labor costs and a tougher regulatory environment, American companies and entrepreneurs were already struggling to keep production in the United States amid a rigged global trading regime benefiting the CCP at America’s expense.

Soaring energy costs in many cases pushed firms over the edge, forcing them to shift production to China or shut down in the face of Chinese competition.

Again, if you truly believe CO2 is pollution, the worst possible outcome of “climate” negotiations would be to transfer even more production to China, where CO2 emissions per unit of economic production are massively higher.

But this is precisely the result of the much-celebrated UN “climate” process.

The shift into so-called “renewable energy” being engineered by the Biden administration and federal policymakers has been and will continue to be a huge boon to the CCP, too—and not just because it will force prices higher while making the U.S. energy grid more unstable.

Almost 80 percent of solar cells produced in 2019 were made in China, according to Bloomberg data (pdf). The CCP dominates production in the wind sector and battery industries as well. It also controls the supply chain for rare-earth materials needed to produce all of these “green energy” products.

The U.S. government, for its part, is offering massive subsidies to these CCP-dominated industrial sectors while forcing Americans into dependence on them through regulations, mandates, subsidies, and other policies. How this is supposed to help the environment is never made clear.

For some perspective on the economic carnage inflicted on America by Obama’s Paris scheme, which he claimed was an “executive agreement” and thus not subject to Senate ratification as required by the Constitution, the Heritage Foundation crunched the numbers in a 2016 study.

Among other findings, the conservative-leaning think tank said Obama’s Paris pledges would increase electricity costs for a family of four between 13 and 20 percent annually while vaporizing almost half a million jobs, including around 200,000 in manufacturing.

That damage translates to about $20,000 in lost income for American families by 2035 and a reduction in GDP of over $2.5 trillion.

Who Benefits?

Who benefits from all this? Certainly not the “climate.” Again, shipping U.S. industry to China will result in more CO2 in the atmosphere, not less. And in any case, based on the UN’s own debunked “models,” complete elimination of all U.S. CO2 emissions would result in virtually no reduction in global temperatures.

According to a peer-reviewed paper by Dr. Bjorn Lomborg published in the Global Policy Journal, even if all the significant pledges made in Paris were fulfilled, global temperatures would be just 0.05 degrees C (0.086 degrees F) cooler by 2100—a statistically insignificant rounding error.

The big winner, of course, was the CCP, which has been laughing all the way to the bank as it absorbs the factories, jobs, and wealth production that U.S. and other Western authorities are shutting down to “save the climate.”

This appears to be deliberate, as statements by leading officials in the Obama administration and the UN have made clear.

Obama’s “Science Czar” John Holdren openly advocated a de-industrialization of the United States in his 1973 book “Human Ecology.”

“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States,” Holdren and his co-authors wrote. “De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology.”

Then consider seemingly bizarre comments made by then-UN Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Christiana Figueres.

Speaking to Bloomberg a few months after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed his unsettling admiration for the CCP, Figueres claimed that the regime in Beijing—overseeing about one third of global CO2 output—was “doing it right” on climate policy.

In separate comments while pushing for major climate policies, Figueres also suggested the goal of “climate” policy was really economic transformation.

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said on Feb. 4, 2015.

Five years before those comments, one of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s top officials, Ottmar Edenhofer, revealed a similar agenda in comments to Germany’s NZZ Online.

“One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” he said. “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”

Wealth redistribution? Changing the economic model of the world? De-developing the United States? And here Americans are being told this is about “saving the climate.”

Remember, too, that when Trump withdrew from the Paris agreement, climate alarmists from around the world declared that Beijing was the new global “leader” of the effort to save the climate—the same regime that oversees the most CO2 emissions, is building coal plants faster than they can be counted, and that promised to keep increasing CO2 emissions until 2030.

If this is really about saving the climate from CO2, how can the CCP be the new leader? It’s beyond absurd.

Despite all this, the Biden administration continues to intensify “cooperation” on “climate action” and the Paris Agreement with Beijing, no doubt causing amusement and joy among members of the CCP’s Politburo.

It’s not just China that benefits. In fact, congressional researchers discovered that state-backed Russian energy interests were funding U.S. “green” groups opposed to U.S. energy via a shell company in Bermuda called Klein Ltd.

The regime in Venezuela, too, is laughing all the way to the bank as the Biden administration sabotages U.S. energy and begs the Maduro dictatorship to send oil to America.

To be clear, I don’t begrudge the CO2 emissions of China or anyone else. In fact, many scientists have told me that more of this “gas of life” would be enormously beneficial for the planet and humanity.

Retired Princeton physics professor Dr. William Happer, who served as Trump’s climate adviser, told me years ago at a climate conference we both spoke at that the planet needed more CO2 and that plants were designed to live in an atmosphere with quite a bit more CO2 than the planet currently has.

Plus, human emissions of CO2 make up a fraction of 1 percent of all the so-called “greenhouse gases” present naturally in the atmosphere.

To summarize, if one truly believes that CO2 is bad for the climate, shipping U.S. production and industry to China is the worst possible way to deal with it. Logically, then, the policymakers behind this must have an ulterior motive.

Of course, the CCP loves the Paris deal: They do nothing but build more coal plants to power the industries and factories fleeing America for China as the U.S. government forces the United States to commit economic suicide.

This isn’t just an economic or “climate” issue, either. As the United States is “de-developed,” the economic destruction produces a major threat to national security. A strong military can’t be funded without a strong economy, obviously.

It’s time for lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives to shut down the administration’s “climate” policies that do nothing but expand CCP CO2 emissions and harm the United States.





Why Christians Should Oppose Calls to Punish ‘Climate Skeptics’

Written by Dr. Calvin Beisner

Since human nature hasn’t changed, it should come as no surprise that, even in our supposedly enlightened age, some people still want to use force, masquerading as law, to end debate.

It started with people just voicing their opinions that “climate skeptics,” or “climate deniers” (both deceptive caricatures) should be punished somehow. A few examples?

In 2006, the eco-magazine Grist called for Nuremberg-style trials for skeptics. In 2008, NASA scientist James Hansen called for trials of skeptics for “high crimes against humanity,” and Obama advisor Joe Romm warned that climate skeptics would be strangled in bed.

In 2009,  the left-wing website Talking Points Memo provocatively asked, “At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers?” and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called coal companies “criminal enterprises” whose CEOs “should be in jail … for all of eternity.”

Since then similar calls have surfaced repeatedly, but those who made them had no means to carry out their wishes.

More recently, things have become more serious. Fundamental liberties of free speech and free press, guaranteed by the First Amendment, are in jeopardy.

Last May, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), on the Senate floor, compared what he called “the misinformation campaign by the fossil fuel industry about the dangers of carbon pollution” to “the tobacco industry’s misinformation campaign about the dangers of its product.”

Writing in The Washington Post he said corporations that support “the climate denial network” should face prosecution under RICO— the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (which Congress designed to target organized crime!).

In September, a group of 20 warmist scientists, apparently prompted by Whitehouse, wrote to President Barack Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Obama’s chief science advisor, John Holdren, calling for “a RICO … investigation of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change.”

(Ironically, the group’s leader, Jagadish Shukla, then came under investigation for abuse of millions of dollars in government grants to his non-profit organization!) When World magazine quoted me calling the Shukla 20’s letter a “direct attack on the rights to freedom of speech and the press guaranteed by the First Amendment” and “horrifically bad for science,” Whitehouse responded angrily, naming me personally, on the Senate floor.

Free Speech, or Fraud?

Whitehouse claimed that the First Amendment didn’t apply because he was targeting only fraud, and the First Amendment doesn’t protect fraud.

True, but the legal definition of fraud is “intentional misrepresentation of material existing fact made by one person to another with knowledge of its falsity and for the purpose of inducing the other person to act, and upon which the other person relies with resulting injury or damage.”

The problem with Whitehouse’s call is that with the enormous range of opinions among scholars about:

  •  how each of the thousands of subsystems of the climate system will respond to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.
  •  how much warming will come from the added CO2.
  •  how much harm and benefit will come from that warming.
  •  how much benefit will come from the fertilizing effect of rising CO2 on almost all plants.
  •  how to balance those harms and benefits against the benefits of the energy derived from fossil fuels; and
  •  what would be the costs and benefits of efforts to reduce CO2 emissions by substituting other energy sources for fossil fuels

With all the legitimate scientific controversy over all those questions, proving that anyone who holds any particular position …

  •  intentionally misrepresented material existing fact,
  • with knowledge of its falsity,
  •  to induce others to act,
  • with the result that others actually did act,
  • with resulting damage

… would be next to impossible, and at the rate at which climate is changing would take decades or centuries to determine because damage specifically traceable to human action, if it did occur, rather than natural factors won’t be clear for that long, if ever.

Comparing “climate skeptics” with defenders of the tobacco industry is patently absurd. The connection between tobacco smoking and cancer is infinitely simpler and more straightforward than that between CO2 emissions and (not simply global warming but) dangerous, man-made global warming.

Earth’s climate system is one of the most complex natural systems ever studied. It consists of thousands of subsystems — feedback mechanisms — most of which we still don’t understand. We don’t know how strong they are or in some cases even whether they increase or decrease warming or the balance of benefits and harms from it.

Providing energy to everyone is one of the most complex activities ever undertaken. The cost of reducing fossil fuel use — which now delivers about 85% of all energy in the world — is scores of trillions of dollars that could be used otherwise with far more benefit.

In the face of all the scientific and economic uncertainties, to prove that someone has (1) intentionally misrepresented an established fact, (2) knowing its falsity, (3) to induce others to act, (3) with the result that others do act and (4) are injured because of their acts, would, as I said, be almost impossible.

The only path to conviction would be for governments to judge which of the thousands of scholars were right, and which wrong, on hundreds of contested points.

In other words, our government would need a “Ministry of Truth” like that warned of in George Orwell’s 1984.

That is why I stand by my opinion that what Whitehouse and the Shukla 20 demand is a direct threat to First Amendment freedoms.

Nonetheless, on March 29 eighteen attorneys general calling themselves “AGs United for Clean Power” announced their intention to launch RICO investigations of organizations that challenge belief in catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming (CAGW).

One, the AG for the U.S. Virgin Islands, has subpoenaed ExxonMobil and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a CAGW-skeptic think tank, for over a decade’s worth of records.

Law or Politics?

The evidence is overwhelming that “AGs United for Clean Power” are clearly motivated not by concern for law but by partisan politics.

Their name incorporates part of the name of Obama’s legacy environmental regulation, the EPA’s “Clean Power Plan.” Al Gore, one of the world’s most outspoken climate alarmists, stood with them at their initial press conference. There’s not a single Republican among them.

And while they threaten fossil fuel corporations and organizations that question CAGW, they ignore renewable power companies that, despite federal subsidies of billions of dollars, have, like Solyndra, gone bankrupt, or, like SunEdison, are on the verge.

In short, the “AGs United for Clean Power” are abusing their legal powers to pursue a political agenda.

A Conspiracy to Deprive Citizens of their Rights?

And they might be committing a felony. Federal law—18 U.S.C. Sec. 241—says:

If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person … in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same; … They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both ….

University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds wrote of that in USA Today shortly after “AGs United for Clean Power” announced their intentions. But since U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, an Obama appointee, has announced her desire to investigate and prosecute climate skeptics, they aren’t likely to be held to account.

If they aren’t, they can wreak havoc on any person or organization that has voiced skepticism about CAGW. Even if they could never get a conviction, they could ruin their targets financially with legal and court costs.

Even if they never file indictments, the very threat has a chilling effect, and that’s dangerous — dangerous most importantly to our God-given rights to freedom of speech and press, yes, but also to the integrity of science.

That’s because science absolutely depends on free, wide-open, robust debate to progressively reduce error and replace it with truth. The appeal to “scientific consensus” to justify claims of CAGW and silencing skeptics is anti-scientific, because consensus is a political value, not a scientific one.

Want to know who won an election? Count votes. That’s politics.

Want to know how much an added amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will raise global average temperature? Study the climate system, try to understand how it works, make predictions based on your understanding, and compare your predictions with real-world observations. If the observations agree with your predictions, you might be right. And if the observations disagree with your predictions, you certainly are wrong. That’s science.

In short, science is the systematic process of testing all things and holding fast what is good — exactly what God commands us to do in 1 Thessalonians 5:21 — and you can’t do that if “all things” can’t be voiced.

So free inquiry and free speech are indispensable to good science.

Christian Faith and Freedom of Speech, Press, and Scientific Debate

They’re also implicit in the Christian faith because they are implied by the image of God in man. That image makes reason possible, and reason makes free choice possible.

When two billiard balls meet on a table, they don’t stop and discuss which will go where at what speed. They exchange energy and, by sheer force without reasoning, ricochet in their respective directions. But people, because we’re made in God’s image, have the capacity of rational choice.

That’s why, over the centuries, as Christians came to understand better and better the implications of their Biblical worldview and its doctrines of God, humanity, and sin, they became advocates of liberty — including freedom of speech, press and inquiry.

That’s why one of the earliest and most important defenses of intellectual freedom was by the Puritan poet John Milton (better known for Paradise Lost). His book Areopagitica, named for the Areopagus, the hill in Athens on which Paul debated over Christ’s resurrection.

The appeal to force to silence opponents in debates is consistent with an atheistic, materialist worldview, the one increasingly dominant among American progressives/liberals, but it’s utterly contrary to the Biblical worldview.

And indeed, because some people never tire of using force to silence truth, prison is a familiar place to God’s servants. Indeed, our word “martyr” comes from the Greek for “witness”: martus. And it’s not only for testifying of Christ that people suffer — they suffer for standing for many truths.

Joseph (Genesis 39), the prophet Hanani (2 Chronicles 16), Jeremiah (Jeremiah 37), John the Baptist (Matthew 14) and Peter and John (Acts 5 and 12) all went to prison because they stood for truth.

And before his conversion Paul imprisoned many Christians for their faith (Acts 8). Later, as an apostle, he spent years imprisoned in Philippi (Acts 16), Jerusalem (Acts 22), Caesarea (Acts 24), and throughout a long land and sea journey ending in Rome (Acts 27–28).

As Hebrews 11 says of heroes of the faith:

Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated — of whom the world was not worthy …. (Hebrews 11:35–38)

So Christians must not roll over and play dead in the face of bullies like “AGs United for Clean Power.” Instead, we must stand up to them, insist on our God-given and Constitution-guaranteed rights, and avail ourselves — as the Apostle Paul did (Acts 25:11) — when those rights are threatened.


Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., is Founder and National Spokesman of The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, and a former Associate Professor of Historical Theology and Social Ethics at Knox Theological Seminary (2000–2008) and of Interdisciplinary Studies at Covenant College (1992–2000).


This article was originally posted at the Stream.org website.