The massive turbines being planned are as high as 853 feet, with turbine blades longer than a football field. Credit: New York State. License: https://on.ny.gov/3XjqDSX.

The Greatest Heist in World History

Net Zero Is Unattainable

One of the Biden administration’s stated goals is to “deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030 and achieve a net-zero carbon economy by 2050.” As already pointed out, this will only increase offshore wind’s contribution to 4.5 percent, and then only with massive government spending, loan guarantees, and mandates because green energy, especially offshore wind, is not profitable.

Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act has turbocharged the agenda, already well under way. But that is a drop in the bucket compared to a full implementation of the Green New Deal, estimated to cost between $51 and $93 trillion.

But could “net zero” be achieved, even with the spending envisioned by the Green New Deal? Non-carbon energy comes from four main sources: solar, wind, nuclear and hydroelectric. (There is also a modest amount of geothermal and hydrogen.) Existing hydroelectric dams in the U.S. are already being dismantled at an unprecedented rate, so constructing new ones will be unlikely. We are left with solar, wind and nuclear.

Ignoring the fact that the Left will almost certainly oppose new nuclear plants, it is literally not possible to construct enough “clean” energy plants, including nuclear, to achieve net zero by 2050 or even much further out.

The Chicago-based Exelon Corp. was planning a merger with Maryland’s Constellation Energy. To obtain approval for the merger, Exelon agreed to pay the state $1 billion. Credit: Taylor McKnight. License: Shutterstock.

The Greatest Heist in World History

How the Green Graft Works: One Example

The state of Maryland had a unique opportunity to fix Chesapeake Bay pollution in 2011—supposedly the big concern among Maryland’s elite—but instead, it squandered the chance by focusing on pet ideological projects and/or wasteful boondoggles for then-Governor Martin O’Malley’s political pals. The Chicago-based Exelon Corp. was planning a merger with Maryland’s Constellation Energy. Exelon owns the 100-year-old Conowingo Dam, which needs dredging. Every time a big storm comes along, the Dam spills massive amounts of sediment and nutrients into the bay, smothering the oyster beds, now almost nonexistent in the upper bay. The Conowingo is the greatest single source of Bay pollution, dwarfing all others.

To obtain approval for the merger, Exelon agreed to pay the state $1 billion. No analysis of merger benefits or costs, just a big payoff. If O’Malley were truly interested in the environment, he would have demanded Exelon spent some of the $1 billion cleaning up the Conowingo. But none, zero, was requested to address the sedimentation problem. Instead, O’Malley showered that $1 billion on green projects that, just like Obama’s program, guaranteed lots of green for the governor’s friends, but saddled Marylanders with expensive, unsustainable, green energy.

My favorite was $89–$157 million for a new powerplant fueled by chicken excrement. The idea was a favorite of O’Malley buddy and Attorney General Doug Gansler. As of 2021, when Gansler geared up for a second run for governor, he was still talking about it, but that’s all it was: talk. What happened to the money?

The end-of-the-world prediction by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is now the basis for public policy, and the Biden administration has taken it to heart. Credit: Senate Democrats. License: https://bit.ly/44dkSZ1.

The Greatest Heist in World History

Obama’s Trial Run: The $80 Billion Boondoggle

The Obama administration’s $80 billion green energy program was a small-scale trial run compared to the monies already enacted under the Biden administration, but it provided a window into the true motive. In his book, Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom, Patrick Moore writes:

You have heard the news on climate change that says human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide are going to make the world too hot for life. So now as you drive down the highway in your SUV, you are afraid that you are killing your grandchildren by doing so. As this makes you feel guilty and accountable, you vow to send a hefty donation to Greenpeace, or any of the other hundreds of “charities,” selling you this narrative. It is a very effective strategy on their part, as stirring a combination of fear and guilt is the most powerful motivator to get people to open their wallets in an effort to help avoid this alleged disaster. And all this inevitable doom due to an invisible gas that is essential for life and even now is only 0.0415 percent of the atmosphere. (p. 26)

In his best-selling book Throw Them All Out, author Peter Schweizer compiled a partial list of Democrat financial supporters who donated a total of $457,834 to either Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign or to the Democratic Party. Companies run or invested in by these insiders subsequently received U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) grants and loans for $11.3 billion—a payoff rate of 25,000 to 1 (pp. 87–88).

(Photo of the climate strike and march in Pittsburgh on September 24, 2021.) Some radical environmental groups have been supported by hostile foreign governments. Credit: Mark Dixon. License: https://bit.ly/3r4ETmc.

The Greatest Heist in World History

Green Graft

Some environmental groups have also expressed concern that offshore wind farms and construction of windfarms are disrupting marine life and may be responsible for the unusual number of whales dying recently. Amid this growing concern, the Save Right Whales Coalition has produced a report detailing conflicts of interest in that offshore wind companies have made extensive payments to many environmental organizations. These include:

• Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Net assets of $385.7 million as of 2019. Accepted $500,000 from Orsted Wind around 2018 and has supported offshore wind since.
• New England Aquarium Corporation. Net assets of $55.4 million as of 2019. Received donations from three separate offshore wind companies—Vineyard Wind, Bay State Wind, and Equinor—between 2018 and 2020. Now supports offshore wind.
• Environmental League of Massachusetts. Net assets of $1.5 million as of 2019. Received $5,000–$9,000 from Vineyard Wind in 2020. Has supported offshore wind since 2010.
• National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Net assets of $243.5 million as of 2020. Has received $100,000–$499,999 from Avangrid Renewables and Apex Clean Energy in 2019 and 2020. Apex has promised to donate $1,000 per megawatt of its commercial generating capacity. The foundation is silent on offshore wind.
• National Audubon Society. Net assets: $585.2 million as of 2021. Has received monies indirectly from the Avangrid Foundation, associated with Avangrid Renewables, a large wind and solar firm. Audubon supports wind.
• The World Wildlife Fund. Net assets of $375 million as of 2019. Received undisclosed donations from Orsted in 2019. WWF supports offshore wind.
• Other recipients include The Nature Conservancy, the Wetlands Institute, Blue Planet Strategies, Maryland Coastal Bays, Assateague Coastal Trust and others.

Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro recently remarked that “I have made climate one of my top priorities since the first day I came into office.” Credit: U.S. Navy. Public domain.

The Greatest Heist in World History

Summary: President Joe Biden has enlisted all federal agencies in pushing his climate agenda as a top priority. As a result, the United States will slowly abandon its vast conventional energy infrastructure. Energy costs will skyrocket, crippling the economy, and when government subsidies run out, the entire green energy infrastructure will collapse, just as it did under President Obama’s Green Energy program. But this time there will be nothing to fall back upon because we will have left our carbon-based energy infrastructure fallow. Without reliable energy, our nation will be crippled.

While imposing this new, expensive, inefficient energy regime, the Left is opening the spigots of government spending once again to finance an unsustainable activity. To compete, companies are being forced to invest in the political market rather than their own markets and products. In essence, the Left is incentivizing corruption, luring private companies away from free market capitalism to crony socialism, and literally threatening the continued viability of our market economy, our standard of living, and perhaps even our survival.

Executive Order 13990

In one of his first acts as president, President Joe Biden signed Executive Order 13990, which ordered all agencies to review any relevant regulation promulgated under President Donald Trump and rescinded those actions that enabled our nation to become energy independent for the first time since the 1970s. Following a lawsuit by many Republican-led states, a federal judge recently blocked implementation of Executive Order 13990.

But they have not relented. Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro recently remarked that “I have made climate one of my top priorities since the first day I came into office.”

Czechoslovakia’s famous leader Vaclav Klaus has called global warming a religion, whose motivating ambition is greed and power. Credit: Marben. License: Shutterstock.

The Greatest Heist in World History

Save the Planet?

CO₂ is a greenhouse gas in that its molecular structure tends to absorb and re-release heat, trapping some of it in the earth’s atmosphere. But does it contribute to global warming? The historical evidence suggests not. But let’s grant the global warming fanatics their day in court and assume they are correct. If so, what will our actions to reduce atmospheric CO₂ actually accomplish?

The global warming fanatics often show pictures of smokestacks billowing black smoke to suggest massive air pollution from CO₂. Another lie. Never mind that technology has significantly reduced smokestack output of unburned hydrocarbons and other byproducts. The facts, as usual, are radically different. Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is a colorless, odorless gas which currently comprises a little over 400 parts per million (ppm), that is 0.04 percent of all atmospheric gasses—an infinitesimal amount. CO₂ concentration has increased by about 40 percent or 120 ppm (0.012 percent of atmospheric gasses) over the last 200 or so years. During that time, world mean temperature has increased by about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

Let’s generously assume that all of the CO₂ increase since colonial times was caused by man’s activity and that the 1.8˚F temperature increase was entirely attributable to CO₂. The U.S. has contributed less than 20 percent of that. (The U.S. contributed 15 percent in 2014, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).) But we’ll use the 20 percent figure to keep the math easy. So if we buy the Left’s argument entirely, the United States—the imperialist destroyer of the global environment that promiscuously burns carbon fuels to satisfy its insatiable appetite for warmth, air conditioning, and automatic dishwashers—has raised global temperatures over the past 200 years a whopping 0.36˚F (1.8 x 0.2).

Al Gore’s rants have only grown more maniacal as time progresses. But they are only one example. The Left is demanding that something must be done right now to avoid catastrophic climate change. Credit: stocklight. License: Shutterstock.

The Greatest Heist in World History

Extreme Climate Leftists

Despite these facts, or perhaps because of them, Al Gore’s rants have only grown more maniacal as time progresses. But they are only one example. The Left is demanding that something must be done right now to avoid catastrophic climate change.

In early March, the New York Times cited a recent report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with the headline, “Climate Change Is Speeding Toward Catastrophe”:

Earth is likely to cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade, and nations will need to make an immediate and drastic shift away from fossil fuels to prevent the planet from overheating dangerously beyond that level.

Commenting on the report, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said:

The climate time bomb is ticking. But today’s IPCC report is a how-to guide to defuse the climate time bomb. It is a survival guide for humanity.…

This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every time frame. In short, our world needs climate action on all fronts, everything, everywhere, all at once.

Climate time bomb? One would think this should be cause for genuine alarm. However, note that the IPCC website has a disclaimer: “IPCC endeavors to ensure, but cannot and does not guarantee the accuracy, accessibility, integrity and timeliness of the information available on its Website” (emphasis added). How many websites have a disclaimer regarding supposed “facts,” the accuracy of which cannot be guaranteed—especially on such an important topic? Yet “immediate and drastic” changes to the entire world economy are necessary?

The fact rarely heard among the climate fanatics is that carbon is the basis for all life on earth. And the source of carbon is carbon dioxide (CO2) taken from the atmosphere. Plants require carbon dioxide to survive. Credit: BlueRingMedia. License: Shutterstock.

The Greatest Heist in World History

But there is much more. Figure 3 is a chart tracking temperature and CO₂ levels over a much longer period in earth’s history. It is reprinted from Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom, by Dr. Patrick Moore, former Greenpeace co-founder and founding director of the CO2 Coalition based in Washington, DC.

Figure 3. Geological Timescale: Concentration of CO₂ and Temperature Fluctuations

Source: Patrick Moore, Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom (Comox, BC, Canada: Ecosense Environmental, 2021).

Figure 3 suggests no correlation between rising temperatures and rising CO₂ levels. Indeed, Moore states:

The fundamental question is whether or not the claim that carbon dioxide is the “control knob” of global temperature is valid. The chart [Figure 3] shows very clearly that CO2 and temperature are out of sync more often than they are in sync. This does not support the claim that there is a strong cause-effect relationship between CO2 and temperature over the long-term history of the Earth; in fact, it rules against this conclusion. We are being told that the correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature both rising concurrently over that past 170 years, out of 570 million years of Earth’s history, proves a cause-effect relationship. It does not, and the historical record indicates the opposite….

The simultaneous rise of carbon dioxide and temperature over the last 170 years in no way supports a strong cause-effect relationship, in fact it is sufficient to reject that conclusion.

In an interview with Conversations that Matter, Dr. Moore explained that, if anything, we need more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not less. Moore published a 2015 piece titled “The Positive Impact of Human CO₂ Emissions on the Survival of Life on Earth,” in which he asks:

The most important question facing a species on Earth today is how long would it have been in the absence of human-caused CO₂ emissions until the gradual depletion of CO₂ in the atmosphere fell to levels that began to decrease biomass due to starvation, thus signaling the beginning of the end of life on Earth?

Dr. Moore concludes that prior to the latest boost in CO₂ from the industrial age, if CO₂ had fallen much further, it would have snuffed out all life on earth.

During the last glacial maximum, 20,000 years ago, CO₂ fell to about 180 ppm, only 30 ppm above the level where plants begin to die from CO₂ starvation…. This is not a very desirable outcome as it would threaten the survival of every living species on Earth. One might think this would have been noticed by those who claim there is “too much” CO₂.

Dr. William Happer, a climate expert and Princeton Professor, agrees. He says that we are actually experiencing a “carbon drought, and that more CO₂ in the atmosphere would be a good thing.”

We all have seen the iconic pictures of a lone polar bear floating on a small piece of ice, implying that the bears will drown as polar ice receded due to global warming. Credit: Michal Bednarek. License: Shutterstock.

Summary: In 1974, the media began broadcasting warnings of an impending ice age. Today, we are supposedly being threatened by end-of-the-world catastrophic global warming. Which end-of-the-world scenario should we believe? Or should we believe any of it? Anyone who questions the current climate change narrative is vulnerable to being vilified, cancelled, or worse. In America, indeed the entire Western world, we have been lied to so persistently, so overwhelmingly, so convincingly, that the lie has worked its way into almost every aspect of our lives. Yet the science—the actual observational data—does not support the climate change narrative.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

—Carl Sagan

In November 1974, the Guardian published an article with this breathless conclusion: “The facts have emerged, in recent years and months, from research into ice ages of the past. They imply that the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind” (emphasis added). Two years earlier, Walter Cronkite had reported on the same thing. Today, we are supposedly being threatened by end-of-the-world catastrophic global warming.

Each scenario forecasts an end-of-the-world calamity at polar opposites. What are we supposed to believe? Should we believe any of it? Carl Sagan’s quote describes exactly where America, indeed the entire Western world, finds itself today. We have been lied to so persistently, so overwhelmingly, so convincingly, that the lie has worked its way into almost every aspect of our lives.

The socialist aspect of sustainability and indeed every UN agenda must be understood in the context of the UN’s creation. UN General Assembly. Credit: Drop of Light. License: Shutterstock.

UN History

The socialist aspect of sustainability and indeed every UN agenda must be understood in the context of the UN’s creation. Since its 1945 founding, the UN has engaged in an almost nonstop effort to obstruct, criticize, and undermine U.S. policy, despite receiving more financial support from the U.S. than any other nation—on average, the U.S. provides about one-fifth of the total UN budget.[1] There is a reason for all of this.

The UN Charter was drafted by Soviet agent-of-influence Alger Hiss, one of the most notorious traitors in American history.[2] Hiss was appointed secretary-general to the 1945 UN Charter organizing conference.[3] Time Magazine noted at the time, “As secretary-general, managing the agenda, [Hiss] will have a lot to say behind the scenes about who gets the breaks.”[4] He did.

Hiss had a lot of help from other notorious Soviet spies, including Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster and Frank Coe (of the Silvermaster spy ring), Harold Glasser, Lawrence Duggan, Victor Perlo, and others. [5]^,[6] Also included was a long list of prominent American officials who had attempted to create its predecessor, the League of Nations. Communist Party leader Earl Browder stated, “American Communists worked energetically and tirelessly to lay the foundations for the United Nations, which we were sure would come into existence.”[7]

During the initial Dumbarton Oaks organizing conference in 1944, Hiss worked alongside Vyacheslav Molotov, USSR leader Josef Stalin’s deputy.[8] Hiss guided UN discussions at the 1945 Yalta Conference, where he convinced President Roosevelt to give the Soviet Union three votes to America’s one.[9] The additional votes for the USSR were for Belarus and Ukraine. Both republics were part of the USSR at the time, and the USSR created missions for each. It was compared to giving America extra votes for Texas and California.[10] Hiss traveled to the USSR immediately after Yalta, where the Soviets congratulated him for his work.[11]