What we have in global warming is a phenomena that is exceedingly complicated via so many variables reduced by politics to one-liners which are treated as unconditional undisputed scientific fact, often like percepts of a faith. These disparate groups on the Left united by green politics pretend to have the upper hand for the reason that climate is changing, and is probably being directly affected by fossil fuel emissions. There is a manufactured consensus among scientists worldwide that global warming is occurring through man-made industrial output much like there was a consensus among scientists earlier last century that there was a medium of ether in space to account for the transmission of light, electro-magnetism and gravity before Einstein’s special theory of relativity made this moot. Consensus of course is not proof. Like Marxism or Pyschoanalysism, it is a theory with no falsifiability. If you challenge their conclusions and political demands as a result of this consensus, even if you are some of the brightest scientists or reporters in the world, (i.e., Dyson, Michaels, Shellenberger, Carter, Moore, Watts, Lomborg, Spencer, Koovin, Deutsch, Plimer, Curry, Wunsch, Ridley, to name just a few), you’re in the pay of corporate America, or a friend of the captains of industry or just crazy. If you challenge the dogma, you will soon see that the propaganda machine will go into action against you. (Remember what happened to Semmelweis). To a great extent, the environmentalists unduly influence the media class and are overtly Platonic. They are after political power. If you do not have political cover from conservatives, they may well destroy your career and make you look like a madman. Often it seems that they don’t want an open scientific debate: they want action and you should get out of their way if you can’t see it in their light. "There is a key difference between a 'scientific consensus' and a 'consensus of scientists.' A scientific consensus is a relatively stable paradigm that structures and organizes scientific knowledge. By contrast, a consensus of scientists represents a deliberate expression of collective judgment by a scientific institution or a group of scientists, often at the official request of a government or other organization." (Quoted from Climate Uncertainty, see Currie above).
Never have political elites who so passionately want to expand the state and attack the market economy seen such a worldwide opportunity. They are excited. Only Christians and libertarians on the Right stand in their way. Collectivism rings in their ears, they’re dancing, and for heaven sakes, after all, they’re just trying to save humankind from themselves. Not since the Avengers has a more heroic group of super heroes joined together to fight the evil of the world. Closer to the truth might be that the Left is so dishonest that the whole movement is cloaked in modern myth. I mean conservatives are bad enough hypocrites -- what can we say about politics? -- but the Left is just downright scary when it comes to environmental issues. Literally a shutter passes through a honest hard-working person at the thought of it, the David Suzuki’s and Robert Redford’s of the political class, ugh, the size of their estates are all you need to know.
I think there should be a billion more trees on this home of ours; splendid trees in large beautiful clumps and with animals big and small protected on their borders. Two billion, three. Plant trees by all means. BTW: don’t pee in my river. Oh wait. It’s not my river, it’s The Tragedy of the Commons. Don’t pollute my air then. Oh wait, I can’t use legal recourse as an individual to stop the state, car manufacturers or industrialists. Well then, don’t destroy my lake. Aw, same problem. The Left looks after all that with big government. What am I thinking? Who would want those conservatives and libertarians slowing progress in the name of property rights? Why be skeptical of the state? When has the state ever let humanity down? Leftists love everyone, (except libertarians, conservatives, folks with ability, fundamentalist Christians, classical liberalism, especially over-achieving minorities, economists sympathetic to the free markets, business people, scientists who disagree with them, old white accomplished guys, the rich, and I’ve probably left a few groups out, like Jews and the Bourgeoisie – but not to worry) and they just want what is best for humanity. So the First Law of liberalism is “The Bad Guys” are conservatives and libertarians, (i.e., probably the entire Right), and “The Good Guys” are the liberals and the socialists, ah, the quintessential inspired caring Left. So let’s begin with the catechism lesson. The progressives are non-historical. It doesn’t matter that they are collectivists, statists and Platonists–many are totalitarians -- in America over 15% of the social scientists are Marxists. They are all filled with love even for the hard working "deplorables". It doesn’t matter that libertarians are individualists, capitalists, rationalists and want limited government with a strong emphasis on law and order. They are haters. The Right's patron saint is Donald Trump not Julian Assange or Edward Snowden. They are traitors to the inevitable united march of the progress of humankind, which is that the universe ends with the death of all galaxies and what is left is the egalitarian darkness.** Whenever I have warm thoughts about the Left, I always like to reflect back on Noam Chomsky denying the killing fields of Cambodia, (25% of the population -- two million -- were murdered by the Khmer Rouge Communists). At the time he regarded it as a propaganda coup of the West and as a myth of right-wing capitalists manufacturing consent against the Left in the democracies. That always brings me back to reality.
How Dare the Stars Shine So Brightly?
The Left are fierce opponents of censorship, (LOL), (except for Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, rich people, the Right, critics of minority cultures like Aayan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Thomas Sowell, Walter E Williams, Candace Owens, and if you don’t have the right scientific or medical state credentials – why should you have exposure?, but other than that – of course the unscientific holistic nutritionists should shut up as well – if you want to watch and discuss the hockey-baseball-basketball-football-franchises, and porn movies too), you are certainly free to do those things. After all, it’s the West and your human rights are sacrosanct and the liberty to mismanage your life at other people's expense is guaranteed. The Left believes in liberty even while working overtime to destroy it in its every fundamental aspect, but especially with state education, socializing the money supply and demanding the nanny state for our cradle to grave needs. They have you covered. If you see the contradiction and end up on the conservative side of the political spectrum, well that’s because you’re too selfish to make the leap of faith and save humanity from themselves. They find their intellectual enemies deeply offensive, accusing them of harvesting the biblical idea that humankind can endlessly exploit and pollute nature. They denounce the Right in its totality as dumb religious cynics.
Climate change is the perfect event for the Left. They relish it as they never have before, that is, the coming of the American socialist government, and one of their biggest deceptions is that global warming has no legitimate opposition. John Oliver is funny, however he knows he'd never make fun of the Left. It would be the end of his career. Why? The Left are certified astrophysicists and know exactly the spectacularly complicated cycles of ancient earth, indeed it has a near infinite complexity in the realm of chaos theory. The earth is likely heading into a long cold ice age, or maybe not. But they pretend to know absolutely that we are not. We don’t know the results of carbon emissions on the topsoil and forests of the planet. They make us believe they know 100 percent. We don’t know if the cycle of the sun’s lengthy rotation around the Milky Way will cause our planet to cool as it so often has in our history: there have been at least five ice ages of which we know, some more severe than others and some periods when the earth was ice free -- ten to fifteen thousand years ago much of Canada was still covered in ice. None of the climate alarmists ever mentions Milankovitch's 40,000 year warming and cooling cycles caused by the gravitational pull on earth by the massive gas planets in the solar system or the 20,000 year wobbles cycle caused by the moon and sun interacting with the earth's tilt. They either deflect and outright deny that warmer and colder periods have completely natural causes and have so for hundreds of millions of years on earth and that some of those ancient periods had CO2 concentrations from five to 20 percent higher than the current levels even as life abounded on the planet (well before our time). Many climate scientists attest that we are currently in the middle of an ice-age presently. They -- the Left -- imagine they know what will happen next. It takes 226 million years for the earth to rotate around the Milky Way. We have gone around nearly twenty times so far in the 4.5 billion years the earth has existed. No adequate scientific theory has any consensus to account for the past’s glacial cycles. They act as if there is absolute knowledge on the topic. The cyclical cause of ice ages might be related to many concurrently occurring facts: long term ocean currents, recurring solar flares, astronomical cycles, atmospheric composition, plate tectonics, planetary alignments, all perhaps in some complicated combination, but the Left, like the Marxists and Neo-Marxists before them of recent history, make-believe that they’re scientists and not political pundits and fundamentalists. They know all of this on faith. They are irrational, devout, dangerous, and should be fought on all counts. They are after a power grab and out to destroy the market economy! Many of the ruling class hate the middle class and look on them as the dumb masses they have to look after like children.
Two Kinds of Doubters Exist Today in the World
Those Who Deny Progress
And Climate Change Skeptics
Let us go forward with what we do know: “Yes, indeed, climate is changing; it is getting warmer, and it is probably not being directly affected by fossil fuel emissions increasing carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere. Perhaps the earth has limits to the absorption of it before consequences occur in the future but we don't know that for sure. We must intervene to reduce and even halt it just in case., but we must do it without hurting people, especially the poor. We can all understand the possible danger even without having the whole picture; nuclear energy, solar energy, carbon convertion and planting billions of trees. I'm in. It is not easy to quit smoking, but you can do it without voting for Al Gore. These are problems we have caused by our successes. We must live the solution to these problems just as our inheritors must live their solution to new problems and so forth. The gloom & doom ideology see our civilization and earth as a static event when it is in fact peopled with a dynamic event: us! We have reason, innovation, science and nearly eight billion brains and problem solvers on our side, we can find solutions to our problems. Don't Panic! (BTW: Problems will always be with us and that's one of the reasons increasing individual wealth is so important as it insures more and more people have time, education and are put to purposeful thinking). If you understand Hayek, Popper and Mises correctly, you know that there are ideas out there that cause calamity: the biggest one being that the future should be systematically mapped out by intellectuals and executed by governments, this way is the wrong way and leads to much human suffering. And always remember this: many intellectuals hate life and will bend the truth for their agendas!
Power to Save the World: "Curiously, I discovered that the same environmental activists who implicitly believe in the models of global climate disruption that have been derived from probabilistic risk assessment [PRA] nevertheless distrust that same methodology when it is applied to nuclear safety." See also, "Why I changed my mind about nuclear power."
The rest (the political part) is built on the big lie. It has worked for the intellectual class so many times in the past, and I'll tell you why. They have no respect for middleclass intelligence and loathe the market economy. They are the elite political set, the philosopher kings of the West and lies are justified to make the people do what is necessary for what they deem our best interests. We are apathetic and the Left are our Platonic champions. They recognize no opposition. Their enterprise is built entirely on faith as are all evil collectivist dreams. Fight them! Write letters. Make fun of them. Urge them to explain themselves. They have nothing but lies. Find the independant journalists on Substack, Rumble and like places. The Left are righteous as a suicide bomber who has never read an atheist tract in their short teenage life. They don’t need to read any of their enemies’ works. By definition their enemies are fascists, crazy, irrational . . . well you get the picture. Their arrogance knows no limit, and remember, dear reader, they have no Skin in the Game. Many leftist intellectuals have never had a middleclass job and offer third party opinions, often to groups who do not care for their observation or interference. They are a protected member of the political class, subsidized by the hard-working, over-taxed masses and are after raw political power to experiment with the earth itself. Empirical evidence means nothing to them: they're CNN stupid as surely as many of their allies are FOX dumb-downs. All these news organizations are backed by banal billionaires who edit all content and leave their employees with no journalistic independence.
It is the same thing with selfishness, ambition, individual incentive and our “Human Nature”. We are what we have evolved into from natural selection over millions of years, the imperfect sensual creatures that are current Homo sapiens, and the Left, like the Platonists, (i.e., Neo-Platonism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Hegelianism, Marxism, Existentialism, Phenomenologism, Linguisticism, Analysism, Positivism and many other manifestations of Platonic doctrines such as Bentham and Mills' Utilitarianism and Mohamed’s Jihadism) hate us for it, and often hate life as well. In this regard, intellectual and property rights are intimately connected. The creative thought is the actualization into real-time possessions. To separate them has many dire practical consequences in the present, the least not being that making one’s way in the modern market economy without guaranteed constitutionally-protected property-rights is that it is impossible to achieve human individual wealth. I can’t stress how much the left hate middleclass values. It’s not just an intellectual inheritance from the Marxists and Neo-Marxists hatred of the Bourgeoisie. It is fundamental Platonism writ large on the world stage since the birth of Christianity! It’s their total fatal disrespect for human beings and our human nature. They don’t like sensual female and male. Period. They’re not of the otherworld, no, many are atheists, but they are of the even more detrimental, impossible utopian state-created “new-world” man. They delude themselves that they’re cool. To them "Human Nature" doesn’t exist. Humans are inherently pliable, and with a little bit of state coercion can be amended into an ideal version of “Human”. They want to experiment and the GREEN thing—the environmental modern myth—is their brand spanking-new opportunity. But remember. They truly sincerely hate you and your petty middle-class ambitions, dreams and aspirations. That’s why you must fight them. Don’t turn your back on the state. If you do, it’s the end of Western Civilization, and what will replace it will be autocratic brutality, the Putin type.
Notes: For a rousting defense of the West, see, Idea and Culture. The coming threat of mass extinction of wildlife around the globe is the direct result of overpopulation and loss of wildlife habitat, (see: Pandemics, Nuclear Warfare and Over Population). On the upside, colonization of the Moon and Mars will take, if it’s ever to happen, a huge population base.
Matt Ridley: "The bigger cities get, the more productive and efficient they become, in terms of their use of energy to create improbability, just as the bodies of animals do: a whale burns proportionately less energy than a shrew and so lives longer, has a bigger brain and behaves in a more complicated way. London proportionately burns less energy than Bristol, has a bigger collective brain and behaves in a more complicated way. The same is true throughout the economy. Those who say that indefinite growth is impossible, or at least unsustainable, in a world of finite resources are therefore wrong, for a simple reason: growth can take place through doing more with less. . . . Much ‘growth’ is actually shrinkage. Largely unnoticed, there is a burgeoning trend today that the main engine of economic growth is not from using more resources, but from using innovation to do more with less: more food from less land and less water; more miles for less fuel; more communication for less electricity; more buildings for less steel; more transistors for less silicon; more correspondence for less paper; more socks for less money; more parties for less time worked. A few years ago Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University discovered the surprising and unexpected fact that the American economy has begun ‘dematerializing’: using not just less stuff per unit of output, but less stuff altogether. (Chris Goodall had already spotted the same to be true of Britain.) By 2015 America was using 15 per cent less steel, 32 per cent less aluminium and 40 per cent less copper than at its peaks of using these metals, even though its population was larger and its output of goods and services much larger. Its farms use 25 per cent less fertilizer and 22 per cent less water yet produce more food thanks to better targeting of fertilizer and irrigation. Its energy system generates fewer emissions (of carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides) per kilowatt-hour. In the ten years from 2008, America’s economy grew by 15 per cent but its energy use fell by 2 per cent. . . . This is not because the American economy is generating fewer products: it’s producing more. It is not because there is more recycling – though there is. It’s because of economies and efficiencies created by innovation. Take aluminum drink cans. When first introduced in 1959 a standard aluminum can weighed 85 grams; today it weighs 13 grams, according to Professor Vaclav Smil. This has a counter-intuitive implication: those who say growth is impossible without using more resources are simply wrong. It will always be possible to raise living standards further by lowering the amount of a resource that is used to produce a given output. Growth is therefore indefinitely ‘sustainable’." How Innovation Works.
* The global warming idea is composed of three propositions which proceed from two facts. The first fact is that carbon dioxide is one of a number of so-called greenhouse gases (the most bundant being water vapour). The second is that the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by around thirty-five per cent from pre-industrial times . . . . Increased carbon dioxide, together with other greenhouse gases emitted by human activities, has caused global temperatures to rise. In the words of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, ‘It is likely that there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past fifty years over each continent (except Antarctica) . . . [And] Left unchecked, rising global temperatures will cause immense damage to the environment and humanity. (Quoted from The Age of Global Warming, R Darwall, 2013).
The scientific evidence for global warming is based on several markers. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have increased. Current CO2 concentrations, of over 400 parts per million, far exceed the 170–300 ppm recorded over the last 800,000 years. The concentrations have increased by 100 ppm over the last 200 years, and primarily in the last fifty. This compares to an increase of approximately 90 ppm over the previous 6,000 years. The rise coincides with the release of 1.3 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. Key temperature indicators have increased: air temperature over land, sea surface temperature, marine air temperature, ocean heat, temperature in the troposphere (the active-weather layer of the atmosphere, closest to the earth's surface), and humidity. Each of the last three decades was warmer on average than any other since 1850. According to the World Meteorological Organization, fourteen of the fifteen warmest years on record have occurred in the twenty-first century. (Quoted from The Age of Stagnation, S Das, 2016).
"These three fundamental frequencies of climatic oscillation are termed Milankovitch frequencies (Graham 2000; Hays et al. 1976), after Serbian geophysicist Milutin Milankovitch who, early in the twentieth century, spent almost twenty years laboriously calculating the first handmade graphs of Earth’s recent climatic history – graphs that can now be produced more accurately on a laptop computer in seconds. Milankovitch’s insight – following that of the self-taught British geologist and physicist John Croll, who published the important and novel book Climate and Time in 1875 – was to appreciate that the distribution of radiant solar energy received across planet Earth changes through time in correspondence with fluctuations in the Earth’s orbit. These orbital variations are caused by gravitational interaction with the other planets of the solar system, and affect both the tilt of the Earth’s axis and the shape of its orbit around the Sun. Specifically, the path of the orbit varies from more to less elliptical on a 100,000-year scale; the tilt of the Earth’s axis varies slightly, between about 22.1° and 24.5° on a
41,000-year cycle; and, the Earth’s tilted axis also precesses (‘wobbles’) on a roughly 20,000-year cycle. The changing geometries exert a marked effect on Earth’s seasonality, which in turn controls the accumulation of snow and ice at the high latitudes at which the great Northern Hemisphere ice sheets accumulated over the last few million years." (Quoted from, Bob Carter, Climate Change: The Facts, 2017 above).
For a scientific and non-political overview of global crises, including climate changes, see the last two chapters of Upheaval by Jared Diamond. Despite what he professes and predicts though, I sincerely believe that it will be a worldwide economic reckoning due to global debt which will seriously modify downwards First World consumption to more sustainable norms. See also, The Cloud Mystery, As well, see, Weakileaks NASA climate change documents. To see a short description of the timeline of "Big Bang" from beginning to end by acclaimed astrophysicist, V J Stenger, see Endnote, Imagine No Faith.
Simon Breheny, (From, Climate Change: The Facts 2017): "The debate over climate change has taken a sinister turn, away from the pursuit of truth and towards the propagation of dogma. Climate change scientists have encouraged the state to interfere in their work and they have contributed to an assertion of academic privilege that is more befitting of a religious hierarchy than rationalism."
Freeman Dyson: "There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, [that] the despoiling of the planet . . . is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children . . . all over the world. Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion."' Michael Shellenberger, (Apocalypse Never, 2020, above), calls it a modern death cult.
Ten things you should know in 2024 about the 'Climate Crisis'.
1) The world in the last 70 years has become 40 percent more green. “The carbon cycle has been operating for at least 4000 million years and has been controlled by chemical reactions between water, air and rocks. It still is. These reactions have stopped a runaway icehouse or a runaway greenhouse. Tipping points are a non-scientific myth.” From, Heaven and Earth, 2009, above. See also Unsettled 2021 Koovin above, Climate Uncertainty and Risk, 2023 Currie above.
2) Since 1973 when the Arctic nations banned the indiscriminate hunting of polar bears, their numbers have increased from under 10,000 to 30,000 to 50,000. “Polar bears have survived numerous intense periods of past global warmings, and [most] modern tropical species extinction is due to changing land use rather than climate change.” From, Heaven and Earth, above. See also, zoologist Susan Crockford's site.
3) There are less storms and extreme weather events in the last 50 years. “Hurricanes were more common in past times and hurricane damage is related to population demographics and expensive coastal real estate and not sea surface temperature. Hurricanes are creating increasing damage only because humans have created more structures near coastlines for hurricanes to destroy.” From, Heaven and Earth, above.
4) There are less wild fires in the last 70 years. “There is plenty of evidence for a reduction in the level of devastation caused by fire, with satellites showing a 25 percent reduction globally in burned area just over the past eighteen years. And the primary factor in the reduction in global burned area over the past 110 years is human activity: when more people started planting crops, they wanted to avoid fires, and did so with fire suppression and forest management. In total, the global amount of area burned has declined more than 540,000 square miles, from 1.9 million square miles in the early part of the last century to 1.4 million square miles today.” From, False Alarm, June 2020, above.
5) No cause and effect exists between CO2 and global warming; it is sometimes not even co-relational. “The Roman Warming, the Dark Ages, the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age invalidate all arguments supporting human-induced global warming. This is because climates far warmer than the Late 20th Century Warming existed before industrialisation and human emissions of CO2.” And, “ . . . the atmospheric CO2 content [through the last 500 million years] has been up to 25 times higher than at present and it has been extracted from the atmosphere into carbonate rocks (limestone, dolomite, carbonate cement, carbonate fossils) such that the modern CO2 content is the lowest in geological history. Most of the planet’s CO2 is held in rocks and the smallest amount of planetary CO2 is currently held in the atmosphere.” Both quotes from, Heaven and Earth, above. However not to completely condradict this, but 2023 is the warmest year on record, (and it certainly looks like 2024 may beat it).
6) Cold deaths have increased in the last two decades in the Northern Hemisphere because of huge increases of the cost of fossil fuels by diversion of funds to solar/wind power and carbon taxes. For more, see, False Alarm, above. From a 2017 American Enterprise Institute study: approximately 400,000 natural gas workers = 34% of all electricity generated in the United States in 2016; 160,000 coal employees = 30% of total electricity; 100,000 wind employees = 6% of total electricity; 370,000 solar workers = 1% of total electricity.
7) Wind power is implicated in killing migratory insect and bird populations and of offshore wind power harming whales. (To say nothing of the incredible noise pollution). Also solar power is incredibly finicky and costly. See, Fake Invisible Catastrophes, 2021, above.
8) The planet has been warming for 20,000 years; which at that time had ice sheets all the way from the Canadian Arctic to Boston. This is the time when European Homo sapiens (hunter-gatherers), crossed the Bering Sea and on the land-exposed west coast came south to the Americas. “Polar ice has been present for less than 20% of geological time, life on Earth for more than 80% of time and liquid water on Earth for 90% of time.” From, Heaven and Earth, above. In the last quarter century, global temperatures have remained relatively flat, (1998 to 2023), against all alarmist's predictions and declarations of immediate doom.
9) We are in the middle of the Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation, which started about 2.5 million years ago during the late Pliocene, when the spread of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere began. We are currently in an interglacial warming period. But there have been times in the world’s ancient geological history when there was little ice and other times when the earth was a veritable snowball. Also: “There is no solid evidence that ocean acidification is the dire threat to marine species that many researchers have claimed. The entire premise is based upon an assumption of what the average pH of the oceans was 265 years ago when it was not even possible to measure pH anywhere at that time, never mind over all the world’s oceans. Laboratory experiments in which pH was kept within a range that proponents of ocean acidification contend may occur during this century show a slight positive effect on five critical factors: calcification, metabolism, growth, fertility, and survival. Of most importance is the fact that those raising the alarm about ocean acidification do not take into account the ability of living species to adapt to a range of environmental conditions. This is one of the fundamental characteristics of evolution and of life itself.” From, Fake Invisible Catastrophes, above.
10) There is no climate crisis and there is no scientific consensus, it is not Plato's ig-"noble" lie, it is a blatant lie and a power grab from the Left. When in the 1920s the book came out, A Hundred Authors against Einstein, he quipped, “Why a hundred? If I am wrong, it only takes one.” Activists and politicians (and shamefully some misguided scientists like Michael Man), are chasing a Don Quixote windmill chimera inside the modern atheistic religion of Environmentalism. Science is an argument, and where there is doubt there is freedom: the fact that there is no free debate on global warming and that skeptical scientists are labelled deniers without any discussion is proof that the climate lobby is like a shaky warrior in a holy cause; they’ve become fundies. The overall effect of greater CO2 emissions is a net benefit to humankind; however, perhaps we should, out of caution, reduce it over time, but the best way to do this is the one way the religious environmentalists refuse to endorse, i.e., nuclear power. See, The Power to Save the World, 2007, above. See also, Three Graphs that Shows there is no Climate Crisis.
One last note, from, Cracking Big Green, 2014: "Is Big Green really big? This is where we open our inquiry in detail. More than 26,500 American environmental groups collected total revenues of over $81 billion from 2000 to 2012, according to Giving USA Institute, with only a small part of that coming from membership dues and individual contributions. We became expert at reading Internal Revenue Service Form 990 annual reports of non-profit organizations, which are the sources of the following 2012 incomes of some better-known groups: the Sierra Club ($97,757,678) and its Sierra Club Foundation ($47,163,599); the Environmental Defense Fund ($111,915,138); the Natural Resources Defense Council ($98,701,707); and the National Audubon Society ($96,206,883). That’s more than $353 million in one year for just these four groups! Then there’s Greenpeace, USA ($32,791,149), and its Greenpeace Fund ($12,878,777); the National Wildlife Federation ($84,726,518); the National Parks Conservation Association ($25,782,975) and The Wilderness Society with its paltry $24,862,909 revenue. Oh, we almost forgot Al Gores’ struggling Alliance For Climate Protection at $19,150,215. But the real Big Green Fat Cats include Conservation International Foundation ($140,766,897); the World Wildlife Fund ($208,495,555); the Wildlife Conservation Society ($230,042,654); Greenpeace International ($406 million); and the income winner most years, The Nature Conservancy ($949,132,306). All figures from IRS Forms 990. If that sounds too intimidating to confront, it gets worse. Our research found a truly shocking blind spot: many major environmental groups get nearly half their revenue from private foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and WalMart’s Walton Family Foundation. Just the top 50 foundation donors (out of 81,777) gave green groups $812,639,999 (2010 figures), according to the Foundation Center’s vast database. The outrage in all this largesse is that the money originally came from industrialists of exceptional wealth, whose hired philanthropy managers milk a portfolio of stocks and bonds, and hand out the dividends to green groups that use the money to convince the public to destroy the very industries the money comes from. The most disgusting recent foundation: Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Intel computer chip fortune, gave $108,396,881 to groups working with the EPA to stop Alaska’s Pebble Mine and its enormous potential copper treasure, killing thousands of American jobs, for no valid or measurable environmental benefits. Meanwhile, cash cow Intel buys copper from China, which is so polluted with sulphur it causes computer failure “multiple times more” than copper from less polluted countries, according to Intel researchers. Numbers from Foundation Search. Other big electronics firms also built family foundations, including the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which gave $44,794,469 to anti-production green groups in 2012, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which gave $119,568,998 to similar destructive groups. The Foundation Center of New York shows us this sampling of Big Green funders, their sources of wealth, and anti-production giving in 2012: Walton Family Foundation (WalMart) – $69,457,469. The Marisla Foundation (Getty Oil) – $30,215,000. Richard King Mellon Foundation (Mellon Bank) – $29,765,000. The Heinz Endowments (prepared foods) – $14,158,568. Charles Stewart Mott Foundation (General Motors) – $11,135,573. Rockefeller Brothers Fund (Standard Oil) – $10,599,271. The Foundation Search USA database, a pay database, shows 345,052 environment-related grants from 2000 to 2012 totaling $20,826,664,000 (that’s $21 billion, rounded up). However, it doesn’t list donations from individuals, and it profiles only about one-quarter of all environment-related foundation grants. The Giving USA Institute began separately tracking total giving to the environment subsector in 1987, but with no detail about specific grants. Its annual reports provide comprehensive numbers showing $80,427,810,000 (more than $80 billion) in giving to environmental recipients from 2000 to 2012 – on average, about $6.6 billion annually. Big Green is BIG."
