Paul Driessen is a senior fellow with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, nonprofit public policy institutes that focus on energy, the environment, economic development and international affairs. Paul Driessen is author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power, Black death
Growing numbers of companies, banks, universities and investment houses are adopting Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) standards and disclosure rules. They're pressured to do so by activists, legislators and regulators. Many expect to get rich via taxpayer-subsidized "renewable" energy projects.
Environmental activism was already nasty and lethal when I wrote Eco-Imperialism: Green Power--Black Death 18 years ago. It's gotten steadily worse since then, especially with hysteria about the "looming manmade climate apocalypse" driving ever more extreme demands that we rid the world of fossil fuels and prohibit or roll back modern living standards.
If we’ve learned anything from the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s the importance of solid, up-to-date scientific information – and the regulatory flexibility necessary to respond quickly to new information. At least with some aspects of Covid prevention and treatment, “follow the science” became the guiding mantra, as sustained inquiry into the corona virus progressed at warp-speed, leading to scientific breakthroughs and three vaccines in only months, rather than the normal years or even decades.
Five years ago, I said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) behaves like Torquemada, using Inquisition-like tactics to harass "manmade climate crisis" skeptics, and threatening to prosecute them for racketeering. Tomas de Torquemada was the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition that interrogated, tortured, imprisoned and executed thousands for religious heresy.
The senator took great umbrage, and denounced me in Senate chambers where I once worked. But he didn't change his ways. If anything, he has become more intolerant and vindictive.
The 2020 fire season is nearing its end. But monstrous wildfires continue to rage across America's western states, devastating towns and habitats, and killing hundreds of people and millions of animals. Politicians and environmentalists continue to rage that climate change is the primary factor, allowing few responsible, commonsense forest management actions that could actually reduce the risks.
During the cantankerous September 29 presidential "debate," candidate Joe Biden proclaimed "I am the Democratic Party." He is in charge, he insisted, and his views will be Democrat policy. Others aren't so sure – about that, about what his views actually are, or about how far to the left he would be pushed, prodded and pressured by Kamala Harris, AOC, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Antifa mobs, and coastal and blue city governing, academic and technology elites.
Weekly, daily, even hourly, we are told that global temperatures are rising, ice caps are melting, and hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, floods and droughts are all getting more frequent, intense and destructive because of climate change. Not just climate change, of course, but manmade climate change, due to humanity's use of fossil fuels – which provide 80% of all the energy that powers America and the world.
The claims assume Earth's climate and weather were unchanged and unchanging until recent decades. That presumption is belied of course by multiple glacial and interglacial periods; the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods; the Little Ice Age; the Dust Bowl, Anasazi and Mayan droughts; the Galveston, Texas hurricane of 1900 and Great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935; the 1925 Tri-State Tornado; and countless other climate eras and extreme weather events throughout history.
In what has become an annual summer tragedy, wildfires are again destroying western US forests. Millions of acres and millions of animals have been incinerated, hundreds of homes reduced to ash and rubble, dozens of parents and children killed, and many more people left missing, injured or burned.