A Lot of Green Behind Climate Change Alarmism

President Donald Trump’s economic adviser, Stephen Moore, says that when it comes to climate change, “going green” takes on a whole new meaning, arguing that American politics – especially the Democrats’ green agenda – adheres to the “first iron rule,” which is “follow the money.”

“[O]ne reason so many hundreds of scientists are persuaded that the sky is falling is that they are paid handsomely to do so,” Moore stated in a piece posted on WND.

Billion-dollar business

Moore stressed that billions of dollars are spent each and every year so that “hysterical” climate change scientists can sound the alarm to generate even more green to “save the planet.”

“In America and around the globe, governments have created a multibillion-dollar climate change industrial complex,” Moore restated from a claim he recently made on CNN. “A lot of people are getting really, really rich off of the climate change industry. [According to a recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office], federal funding for climate change research, technology, international assistance and adaptation has increased from $2.4 billion in 1993 to $11.6 billion in 2014, with an additional $26.1 billion for climate change programs and activities provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009.”

He pointed out how climate change scientists rely on their predictions of cataclysmic events triggered by man-made pollution to move their green agenda forward and rack in the billions of dollars every year.

“[T]he tidal wave of funding … reveal[s] a powerful financial motive for scientists to conclude that the apocalypse is upon us,” Moore continued. “No one hires a fireman if there are no fires. No one hires a climate scientist – there are thousands of them now – if there is no catastrophic change in the weather. Why doesn’t anyone in the media ever mention this?”

The economic expert shared how those not aligned with the green agenda and its claims of impending doom are often targeted as haters and deniers of ultra-environmentalists’ so-called “truth.”

“[W]hen I lifted this hood [and brought up that the fact that the predicted climate or atmospheric disasters are simply not happening], it incited more hate mail than from anything I’ve said on TV or written,” Moore recounted. “Could it be that this rhetorical missile hit way too close to home? How dare I impugn the integrity of scientists and left-wing think tanks by suggesting that their findings are perverted by hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer handouts. The irony of this indignation is that any academic whose research dares question the ‘settled science’ of the climate change complex is instantly accused of being a shill for the oil and gas industry or the Koch brothers.”

Public vs. private money …

One argument that climate change scientists often fall back on is that their money is taxpayer-funded, which they assert means that their findings are non-partisan or unbiased, while they insist that privately funded studies are naturally skewed by personal interests or agendas.

“Apparently, if you take money from the private sector to fund research, your work is inherently biased, but if you get multimillion-dollar grants from Uncle Sam, you are as pure as the freshly fallen snow,” Moore pointed out in his column published by the Heritage Foundation, where he serves as a distinguished visiting fellow for its Project for Economic Growth.

Green money growing on trees?

He went on to note how massive today’s climate change industrial complex has become, emphasizing that most Americans are oblivious of how many deep pockets the money-making machine has tapped into.

“A few years ago, Forbes magazine went through the federal budget and estimated about $150 billion in spending on climate change and green energy subsidies during President Obama’s first term,” Moore informed. “That didn’t include the tax subsidies that provide a 30-percent tax credit for wind and solar power – so add to those numbers about $8 billion to $10 billion a year. Then add billions more in costs attributable to the 29 states with renewable energy mandates that require utilities to buy expensive ‘green’ energy.”

The economist noted that the amount of money spent on climate change “solutions” is even more astronomical on a global scale.

“Five years ago, a leftist group called the Climate Policy Initiative issued a study that found that ‘global investment in climate change’ reached $359 billion that year,” Moore recalled. “Then to give you a sense of how money-hungry these planet-saviors are, the CPI moaned that this spending ‘falls far short of what’s needed’ – a number estimated at $5 trillion. For $5 trillion, we could feed everyone on the planet, end malaria and provide clean water and reliable electricity to every remote village in Africa, and we would probably have enough money left over to find a cure for cancer and Alzheimer’s.”

He put this into perspective so that those old enough to remember the United States’ lunar landing nearly 50 years ago could understand just how much American taxpayers and other citizens of the world are forking out to sustain the so-called fight against global warming.

“The entire Apollo project to put a man on the moon cost less than $200 billion,” Moore noted. “We are spending twice that much every year on climate change.”

The Heritage Foundation fellow stressed that unless scientists are in emergency mode and sounding the alarm to avoid an impending disaster, they simply would not get the billions of dollars they take in annually.

“This tsunami of government money distorts science in hidden ways that even the scientists who are corrupted often don’t appreciate,” Moore explained. “If you are a young eager-beaver researcher who decides to devote your life to the study of global warming, you’re probably not going to do your career any good or get famous by publishing research that the crisis isn’t happening, but if you’ve built bogus models that predict the crisis is getting worse by the day, then step right up and get a multimillion-dollar grant.”

Not winning the war on climate change?

Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars used to win the war on heat, no victories have been made, but billions of more dollars continue to be poured into the green agenda that is supposedly saving the Earth from imminent doom.

“Now here’s the real scandal of the near trillion dollars governments have stolen from taxpayers to fund climate change hysteria and research,” Moore impressed. “By the industry’s own admission, there has been almost no progress worldwide in combating climate change. The latest reports by the U.S. government and the United Nations say the problem is getting worse, and we have not delayed the apocalypse by a single day.”

Those taking in the billions of dollars are held to little to no accountability, as their efforts have changed virtually nothing and rendered no measurable results.

“Has there ever been such a massive government expenditure that has had such miniscule returns on investment?” Moore posed. “After three decades of ‘research,’ the only ‘solution’ is for the world to stop using fossil fuels, which is like saying that we should stop growing food. Really? The greatest minds of the world entrusted with hundreds of billions of dollars can only come up with a solution that would entail the largest government power grab in world history, shutting down industrial production – just look at the catastrophe in Germany when they went all in for green energy – and throwing perhaps billions of human beings into poverty? If that’s the remedy, I will take my chances on a warming planet.”

Trumping the green agenda

Moore would love to see the president hold climate change panderers as accountable as those he axed on his former TV show, The Apprentice.

“President Donald Trump should tell these so-called scientists that, ‘You’re fired,’” Moore expressed. “And we taxpayers should demand our money back.”

But the president has been under great scrutiny by left-leaning journalists, educators, environmentalists and governments worldwide for not bowing down to the green agenda.

Despite the leaps and bounds by which America’s economy has grown under the Trump administration, the president was warned late last month via a U.S. Climate Report that a damaged environment and shrinking economy will result from his reluctance to join climate change alarmists and shell out untold billions of dollars to help cool the Earth down.

“A major scientific report issued by 13 federal agencies [late last month] presents the starkest warnings to date of the consequences of climate change for the United States, predicting that if significant steps are not taken to rein in global warming, the damage will knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy by century’s end,” the New York Timesreported on Nov. 23. “The report, which was mandated by Congress and made public by the White House, is notable not only for the precision of its calculations and bluntness of its conclusions, but also because its findings are directly at odds with President Trump’s agenda of environmental deregulation – which he asserts will spur economic growth.”

Because Trump refused to join leagues with the global community’s campaign to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into green industries to curtail the man-made pollutants allegedly causing global warming, the leftist mainstream media has essentially accused him of turning his back on “Mother Nature” and ushering in cataclysmic events such as rising sea levels submerging low-lying islands, killing off polar bears due to “melting” Arctic ice caps, and intensified – and more frequent – natural disasters, such as hurricanes, floods and tornadoes.

“Mr. Trump has taken aggressive steps to allow more planet-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes and power plant smokestacks, and has vowed to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement – under which nearly every country in the world pledged to cut carbon emissions,” the New York Times’ Coral Davenport and Kendra Pierre-Louis announced. “Just this week, he mocked the science of climate change because of a cold snap in the Northeast.”

As weather trends appear to be the opposite of what climate change alarmists predicted, Trump took to Twitter to poke fun at the naysaying scientists.

“Whatever happened to Global Warming?” Trump tweeted last month.