What do we have to lose?

This is a frequent response when someone questions the idea that human caused runaway global warming should be addressed. At the 2015 Paris Climate Conference President Obama offered a terrifying vision of the future if global warming is not addressed. He presented “a glimpse of our children’s fate if the climate keeps changing faster than our efforts to address it. Submerged countries. Abandoned cities. Fields that no longer grow. Political disruptions that trigger new conflict, and even more floods of desperate peoples seeking the sanctuary of nations not their own.”

So what have we to lose? If the worst case scenarios do not come to fruition Obama has said, we would still be taking positive and morally correct action. Two decades ago U.S. Senator Tim Wirth adopted the same attitude saying, “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing anyway, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

The correct social and political response, according to Obama, Wirth, and other global warming alarmists, is to redirect ever larger portions of the world economy into the control of bureaucrats who will enforce policies to reduce human carbon dioxide emissions.

One way to do so, said Barack Obama, will be to “bankrupt” conventional coal fired power plants. Given that coal is the fuel that produces over fifty percent of American energy, the little people will have to sacrifice and feel pain—a fact Obama was honest enough to admit. “Under my plan of a cap and trade system,” said he, “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

This is why a Time Magazine report challenged politicians to do all they can to “raise the price of gas. We already know that higher gas prices discourage driving and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.” In recent years the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been used as a tool to achieve these goals with standards and red tape that are more and more difficult for the energy industry to achieve. At the United Nations conference in Copenhagen in 2009 Tim Wirth, mentioned a moment ago, hinted his approval of this strategy,citing the “enormous regulatory authorities at the EPA.”

Other departments of the government are also used as blunt instruments to enforce global warming dogma. It’s been a long time coming and now there are reports the Department of Justice has been in talks with the FBI about possible civil action against those who don’t believe in climate change and oppose it for economic reasons.

I can see at least two prominent reasons for not acting as Obama, Wirth, and others insist vis a vis CO2.

First, the current hiatus in global warming of over 19 years is not merely a pause in the midst of a long term trend of rapid and dangerous manmade warming. It is rather more embarrassing than that to global warming alarmists. The primary hypothesis of global warming theory is that rapidly increasing concentrations of CO2 gas, due to increased energy use and the ensuing human improvements in quality of life, must inevitably be followed by rapid rises in global temperature.