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.

Written by Peter Heck

I struggle to even make the effort to outline my opposition to the so-called “Green New Deal” because it seems flatly absurd that anyone could take it serious enough to justify my time spent.  Retrofitting every building in America, spending almost $100 trillion (an amount four times more than the current astronomical national debt), providing a job for every person that wants one and paying for those who don’t – these are the kinds of juvenile ideas that get laughed out of high school government classes.

But we live in unserious times and are led by unserious politicians in every corner.

I’m opposed to the Green New Deal economically – it isn’t feasible, and would go much further than merely crippling the American economy.  It would destroy it.

I’m opposed to the Green New Deal philosophically – the history of mankind demonstrates that progress is best achieved through man’s creativeness and ingenuity, rarely if ever through central planning and demands of a taskmaster (in this case, government).

But most significantly and seriously, I’m opposed to the Green New Deal morally.  The lawmakers who have proposed these policies, and the media who champion it are intentionally favoring the wealthy over the poor, the elite over the undistinguished, the powerful over the plain.

The immediate impacts of its implementation would be higher energy costs for every American household – costs that the wealthy can afford, but the poor can not endure.  This winter alone saw far too many low-income minorities living in the Northeast had to choose between heating their homes and buying groceries.  This isn’t because of scarcity.  It’s because lack of pipeline infrastructure has prevented ample natural gas – a resource that burns much cleaner than other fossil fuels – from being utilized in communities where it is most desperately needed.

Those truly concerned about the plight of the poor would act immediately to alleviate this energy poverty.  Instead, we see the introduction of the Green New Deal that would actually escalate such poverty dramatically.  It is morally offensive to ignore the pain that would be experienced by our country’s needy if the onerous and energy-depriving demands of this backwards policy were implemented.

Not only does the Green New Deal fail to propose energy sources to improve the lives of the poorest Americans (say like safe and reliable nuclear power which the Green New Deal foolishly abolishes), it doesn’t even propose energy sources to adequately replace what it would take away.  For instance,

As Sam Thernstrom of the Energy Innovation Reform Project points out, renewables get all the love, but they are simply incapable of meeting the energy demands of our whole economy. It’s not that the sun goes down at night and the wind doesn’t always blow. It’s that in some regions, the sun gets weak and the wind stops blowing for months at a time. Batteries are improving, but not fast enough to make an all-renewables power grid practical for some time.

Meanwhile, basic humanity should require us to think about the consequences of our actions outside our own borders.  It is the height of privilege and conceit to forbid policies that would lead to the industrialization of the third world.  That is precisely what the Green New Deal would accomplish.  By shuttering fossil fuel companies and strangling their expansion, Green New Dealers effectively lock the earth’s impoverished in squalor as they jet around the world in climate-controlled luxury vehicles to brag about their contributions to the environment.  Pretending they are solving an unrealized catastrophe, they callously perpetuate the one visited upon the third-world every day.

It is the grotesque exploitation of the neediest people of our world that should be first in our minds when rejecting this latest policy proposal of those who seek to expand their own power at the expense of the powerless.

This article was originally published at PeterHeck.com.

Learn More: Climate Change & The Christian [VIDEO]

Last year I was at lunch with an evangelist. After the meal, he handed our waitress a Gospel tract. I wanted to reinforce his compassion, so I told the young lady that her relationship with God was the most important thing in the world. She responded, “Yeah, that and global warming!” She proceeded to tell us that she wakes up in fear of what may happen to the earth during her lifetime. I was shocked. I asked her if she was familiar with the old Sunday school song, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” She said, “Yes.” I told her it was true.

I left that meeting with a deeper awareness of the politics of fear.

The Left uses fear to get people to act. Environmentalists argue that a growing human population using growing amounts of energy from fossil fuels is causing catastrophically dangerous global warming. The Left prescribes two cures.

First, replace fossil fuels with wind, solar, and other renewables. But as Dr. E. Calvin Beisner (of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation) explains, abundant, affordable, reliable energy is indispensable to lifting and keeping any society out of poverty, and fossil fuels are and for the foreseeable future will remain our best source of that energy. Wind, solar, and other renewables are diffuse, expensive, and unreliable. Substituting them for fossil fuels makes energy more expensive, thus slowing, stopping, or even reversing the conquest of poverty in the developed world while impoverishing many in the developed world.

Second, slow, stop, and finally reverse population growth. Environmentalists openly advocate reducing the world’s population to 500 million, i.e., getting rid of 9 out of 10 human beings. How? Partly through homosexuality and transgenderism, but also through government-run “family planning” programs that invariably involve highly incentivized and often even forced use of contraceptives, sterilization, and abortion.

Efforts to control population have unintended consequences. For example, from its start in 1979 China’s one-child policy has led to sex-selected abortions, with male births outnumbering female by about 115 to 100, resulting in about 33 million more Chinese men than women. In turn, this has fueled demand for pornography and prostitution, much of which is met by sex-trafficking that has become so bad that the U.S. State Department has named China among the world’s worst offenders.

All of these things led to our inviting Dr. Beisner to speak for our events in April. I was convinced that the climate change debate had to be addressed from a Christian perspective.

Dr. Beisner did an amazing job helping people of faith to understand why this issue is a conservative, pro-life concern. He ably integrated Biblical worldview, theology, and ethics with excellent science and economics to help our audiences understand how climate alarmism threatens family, freedom, and prosperity—and how to respond to it.

Yes, climate change is a pro-family issue.

As anyone knows who has counseled couples on the verge of divorce, one of the most common causes is financial stress. Poverty harms families. Driving up energy prices increases poverty and so undermines the family.

To that end, it is a very good thing, indeed, that President Donald Trump decided to withdraw from the Paris Accord on climate change.

Learn More:  If you’d like to learn more, Dr. Beisner’s presentation was video-recorded and is now posted on the IFI YouTube channel. This 90-minute presentation will leave you much better informed and with a deeper understanding of why Christians should actively oppose the climate alarmist agenda. You can watch it here below, or click HERE.

Please subscribe to the IFI YouTube channel.

Read more about Dr. Beisner and the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and please visit their blog, EarthRisingBlog.com.

You can also follow them on Twitter @CornwallSteward, and “like” their Facebook page HERE.

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