THE Greatest Threat To The Environment Is Not Affluence, It’s Poverty

Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic: Guess which country contains eco-criminals that can afford to use fossil fuels, and which country contains nature-lovers who are dependent on natural renewable organic biomass for energy? (99% of Haiti’s forests have been decimated, not for building materials, but for cooking fuel.)

WHEN the New York Times hired climate ‘Lukewarmer’ Bret Stephens as a contributing columnist in late April 2017, a collective cry of treasonous rage was heard throughout the deep-green environmental community. How dare anyone question whether we should accept absolutely every pronouncement of imminent eco-doom at face value?!

A snippet of the enraged reporting at the time from the usual suspects…

Climate Scientists Cancelling Their New York Times Subscription Over Hiring of Climate Denialist Bret Stephens

By Graham Readfearn • Thursday, April 27, 2017 – 16:59

A New York Times defence of its hiring of a climate science denialist as a leading columnist is pushing high-profile climate scientists to cancel their subscriptions.

Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany, is the latest scientist to write publicly to the New York Times detailing his reasons for cancelling their subscriptions.

The NYT has hired former Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens as a writer and deputy editorial page editor.

Stephens wrote several columns while at the WSJ disparaging climate science and climate scientists, which he has collectively described as a “religion” while claiming rising temeperatures may be natural.

The NYT has been defending its decision publicly, saying that “millions of people” agree with Stephens on climate science and just because their readers don’t like his opinions, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be heard.

But the NYT defence has angered scientists.

Climate Scientists Canceling Their New York Times Subscription Over Hiring of Climate Denialist Bret Stephens | DeSmogBlog

*

Huffington Post also joined the fun…

13 Better Things To Read Than Bret Stephens’ First New York Times Column

The Gray Lady’s newest hire used his debut column to defend his record of climate science denial.

29/04/2017 9:09 AM AEST
Alexander C. Kaufman Business & Environment Reporter, HuffPost

The New York Times took a lot of heat for hiring Bret Stephens, a former opinion writer at The Wall Street Journal, as its newest columnist. There was a lot to criticize. In his storied tenure on some of the most radically conservative pages in print journalism, Stephens accused Arabs of suffering a “disease of the mind,” railed against the Black Lives Matter movement and dismissed the rise of campus rape as an “imaginary enemy.”

But Stephens’ views on climate change ― namely that the jury is still out on whether burning fossil fuels is the chief cause ― drew the widest condemnation. ThinkProgress admonished the Gray Lady for hiring an “extreme climate denier,” and famed climatologist Michael Mann backed them up in the critique. DeSmog Blog, a site whose tagline reads “clearing the PR pollution that clouds climate science,” reported on a letter from climate scientists who are canceling their subscriptions to the newspaper over its latest hire. In These Times’ headline pointedly asked: “Why the Hell did the New York Times just hire a climate denier?”

Even the Times’ own reporters publicly questioned the hire.

13 Better Things To Read Than Bret Stephens’ First New York Times Column |HuffPo

(via WUWT)

*

STEPEHENS has recently written another reasoned column in the Times that has no doubt sent the eco-freaks into another predictable tailspin!

IN the Feb 8 opinion piece, “Apocalypse Not“, Stephens argues that a healthy environment is dependent on a healthy economy first, namely a capitalist one.

“The foolish idea that capitalism is the enemy of the environment misses the point that environmentalism is itself a luxury that few poor countries can adequately afford. If you doubt this, contrast the air and water quality in New York City with that of any similar-sized city in the developing world.”

A view not shared by radical environmental groups who, including the UN, believe that in order to “save the planet” we must fundamentally change the current economic development model. Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN’s Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC) herself admitted that the goal of environmentalists is to destroy capitalism.

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years since the Industrial Revolution.” – Christiana Figueres Brussels February, 2015

FIGUERES even went so far as to affirm that “Communism is the best model to fight global warming.“

IN other words, the real agenda is concentrated political authority. Global warming is the hook.

GLOBAL Warming theory has long abandoned any connection it has with actual science. It is has become as ideology. A new religion. Australia’s former Prime Minister Tony Abbott likening it to, “socialism masquerading as environmentalism“.

IN 2013, UN IPCC co-chair of Working Group 3 Dr. Ottmar Endenhoefer unleashed this stunning revelation…

Flashback: IPCC official admits UN climate meetings redistribute wealth in one of the “largest economic conferences since WWII” « JoNova

HIGHLIGHTS from Stephens’ must read column in the times…

Apocalypse Not

Norman Borlaug, the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.CreditMicheline Pelletier/Sygma, via Getty Images

By Bret Stephens

Feb. 8, 2018

In 1919, the director of the U.S. Bureau of Mines offered a dire warning for the future. “Within the next two to five years the oil fields of this country will reach their maximum production, and from that time on we will face an ever-increasing decline.”

Nearly a century later, in July 2010, The Guardian ran a story with an ominous headline: “Lloyd’s adds its voice to dire ‘peak oil’ warnings.” Citing a report by the storied London insurer, the newspaper warned that businesses were “underestimating catastrophic consequences of declining oil,” including oil at $200 a barrel by 2013, a global supply crunch, and overall “economic chaos.”

I thought of these predictions on seeing the recent news that the United States is on the eve of breaking a 47-year production record by lifting more than 10 million barrels of crude a day. That’s roughly twice what the U.S. produced just a decade ago, and may even put us on track to overtake Saudi Arabia and even Russia as the world’s leading oil producer. As for global production, it rose by some 11 percent just since the Lloyd’s report, and by almost 200 percent since 1965.

Call it yet another case of Apocalypse Not.

—–

“In best-selling books and powerful speeches, Vogt argued that affluence is not our greatest achievement but our biggest problem,” Mann writes. “Our prosperity is temporary, he said, because it is based on taking more from than earth than it can give. If we continue, the unavoidable result will be devastation on a global scale, perhaps including our extinction.”

In our own day, people like Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein have made careers saying more or less the same thing. This is a world where the clock is permanently set at two minutes to midnight, and where only a radical transformation of modern society (usually combining dramatic changes in personal behavior along with a heavy dose of state intervention) can save us.

—–

The foolish idea that capitalism is the enemy of the environment misses the point that environmentalism is itself a luxury that few poor countries can adequately afford. If you doubt this, contrast the air and water quality in New York City with that of any similar-sized city in the developing world.

I fall in the Borlaugian camp. That’s worth noting because one of the more tedious criticisms by the environmental left is that people like me “don’t care about the environment.” But imputing bad faith, stupidity or greed is always a lousy argument. Even conservatives want their children to breathe.

—–

Borlaugians are environmentalists, too. They simply think the road to salvation lies not through making do with less, but rather through innovation and the conditions in which innovation tends to flourish, greater affluence and individual freedom most of all.

—–

If environmental alarmists ever wonder why more people haven’t come around to their way of thinking, it isn’t because people like me occasionally voice doubts in newspaper op-eds. It’s because too many past predictions of imminent disaster didn’t come to pass.

(Climatism bolds)

Read Stephens’ excellent piece in full here…

•••

PLEASE Tip The Climatism Jar To Help Keep The Good Fight Alive!

(Still waiting for that “big oil” cheque to arrive in the mail!)

Click this link for brief info…TQ

•••

Related :

• Sleepwalking to extinction, or maybe communism? | Climatism
• DRACONIAN Climate Change Policies Making World Hunger Worse | Climatism
• UN Climate Chief Says Communism Is Best To Fight Global Warming | Climatism
• Shock news : UN Carbon Regime Would Devastate Humanity | Climatism
• WESTERN Nations, Driven By A Global Agenda Of Climate Alarmism, Are Destroying Their Industries With Carbon Taxes And Promotion Of Expensive, Intermittent Green Energy | Climatism
• LIFE In A Fossil-Fuel-Free Utopia | Climatism (P.Driessen MUST READ)

Climate Science related :

• 100% Of Climate Models Prove that 97% of Climate Scientists Were Wrong! | Climatism
• THE Great Global Warming “Pause” | Climatism
• THE Climate Change Farce Explained By Two Expert “Scientists” | Climatism
• WORLD Leading Authority : Climate and Sea Level Science Is A “Quasi Religion” Hijacked By An Activist Agenda | Climatism