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 Vijay Jayaraj

“Facts don’t care for your feelings.” Ben Shapiro’s frequent use of it in debates has made this statement popular.

Facts, as commonly understood, are objectively true, and indicators of the reality around us. They are solid and unassailable. Feelings are subjective and constantly subject to change. This is important, regardless of what one thinks of Shapiro’s politics.

President Obama said much the same in his 2018 Mandela lecture. He stressed the need to make key decisions based on facts. “You have to believe in facts,” said Obama. “Without facts there is no basis for cooperation. … If I say this is a podium and you say this is an elephant, it is going to be hard for us to cooperate.”

Of course, no one is saying we should completely disregard feelings. The point is simply that it’s a mistake to let feelings, which may or may not correspond to reality, play the decisive role in public policy debates.

Sadly, too many political leaders today are concerned more about feelings than facts. It is not unusual to see facts sacrificed at the altar of feelings and emotion. Such an attitude encourages people to live in a bubble that leaves them unprepared and dumbfounded when facts challenge their imaginary worlds.

All of this is particularly relevant in the climate change debate. Increasingly, climate science has become a victim of empathy-based doomsday propaganda. Our world has been inundated with climate doomsday theories that are detached from real world facts.

Ironically, President Obama contributed to that tendency in that very lecture, despite his emphasizing the importance of facts. In addressing the issue of climate change, he remarked that there are facts which comprehensively prove climate change to be real.

Well, to be sure, climate change is real in the sense that the climate is always changing. But what has become increasingly unclear in the debate is how much the magnitude of change in our climate has been exaggerated and how much scientific facts have given way to feelings as advocates appeal to people’s empathy rather than feeding their intellect by presenting real-world climate facts.

Since the early days of “The Climategate Scandal”—when leaked emails from my university’s climate research center revealed how climate scientists worldwide manipulated temperature data to make global warming appear dangerous—it has become increasingly clear that climate policies are forced on people based on scaremongering tactics.

Previously, we’ve seen concerns about over-population, ozone depletion, and ocean acidification promoted as events that will result in global catastrophe. When the apocalyptic claims associated with these earlier doomsday events did not materialize and facts eventually showed that they posed no risk to the planet or life forms, these issues faded.

Doomsayers, in the mid-2000s, then turned their focus to global warming. This time, however, they were more innovative in dealing with contrary information. When global temperatures failed to increase to significant levels and consensus emerged among scientists that current warming is not unprecedented, the key phrase was changed from “global warming” to “climate change,” which conveniently allows for both warming and cooling.

Further, in order to prevent any skepticism toward their theory, the doomsayers now attribute every weather event to “climate change,” i.e., human-induced global warming. Record cold and record snow are now termed “evidence and signatures” of global warming.

From the imaginary sea-level rise and disappearance of beachfront real estate properties in Miami, to ice-free Arctic summers, the mythological fantasy of climate doomsayers has no bounds.

In the mid-2000s, they exploited the sympathy tactic by expressing concern about the effect of warming on polar bears. And when polar bear populations increased and were proven to be much healthier than before, the doomsayers came up with the yet ridiculous claim that climate change will trigger a mass extinction of a million species.

From claims about the rate of increase in temperature to those detailing the impact of carbon dioxide on our temperature levels, the entire climate doomsday movement is based on emotion-based reasoning. The doomsayers continue to make extraordinary claims without scientific proof, deliberately exaggerating and manipulating facts to suit their doomsday narrative with the objective of instilling climate-fear in people and encouraging them to join the doomsday movement. Despite humans’ being called a “cancer on earth,” people still fall for this trick. The movement has been particularly successful with school children, persuading many to believe that their world is doomed, leading them to protest in the streets against an imaginary doomsday that is nowhere to be seen.

All of this inhibits real progress in meeting the challenges facing our world. Both fear and guilt—indoctrinated among the masses by the mainstream media and doomsayers—act as stumbling blocks to communicating climate reality to the people. And the progress of the climate sciences too, is currently stuck in the matrix of political climate games and biased academicians who manipulate data to support their political objectives.