“Global expenditures to ‘stop global warming’ already exceeded $1.5 trillion a year in 2015, or approximately $4 billion a day,” says Joe Bast, president and CEO of the Heartland Institute. And the “progressives” who are leading the global warming alarmist campaign and promoting the climate hysteria, he charges, are doing so “not to protect the environment, but to wage war on capitalism.”

On March 23 and 24, at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, D.C., Heartland sponsored the 12th International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-12), its latest effort in an on-going endeavor to provide a platform for distinguished scientists, economists, and climate policy experts who challenge the fearmongering and statist proposals of the climate alarm lobby.

With the new Trump administration poised potentially to reverse the Obama administration’s global warming war on capitalism, energy production, states’ rights, property rights, and human freedom, the ICCC-12 could not have come at a more critically-important time. Although, as a candidate, Donald Trump pledged to withdraw the United States from the UN’s Paris Accord on Climate Change, some of his advisers and his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have sent contrary signals. However, the very persuasive presentations by the conference participants, which were streamed live via the Internet and are now freely available, could play a large role in prodding President Trump and Congress to fully dismantle this dangerous legacy of President Obama and Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

As has been par for the course at past Heartland climate conferences, the lineup of speakers and panelists for this year’s event was stellar. Among the distinguished experts at the Grand Hyatt symposium were:

• Dr. S. Fred Singer: legendary atmospheric and space physicist; founder of the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP); founder of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC); founding dean of the School of Environmental and Planetary Sciences, University of Miami (1964–67); first director of the National Weather Satellite Service (1962–64); and director of the Center for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Maryland (1953–62).

• Dr. Don J. Easterbrook: emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, where he has conducted research on global climate change in western North America, New Zealand, Argentina, and various other parts of the world for the past 48 years; author of three textbooks, several other books and about 150 papers in professional journals; past president of the Quaternary Geology and Geology Division of the Geological Society of America; U.S. representative to the United Nations International Geological Correlation Program; associate editor of the Geological Society of America Bulletin for 15 years.

• Dr. William Happer: the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics (emeritus) at Princeton University; has specialized in the interaction of atoms and nuclei with radiation; pioneered the development of adaptive optics, and invented the sodium guide star to eliminate astronomical imaging blurring due to atmospheric turbulence.

• Dr. Willie Soon: an astrophysicist, geoscientist, and a leading authority on the relationship between solar phenomena and global climate; the author/co-author of numerous scientific peer-reviewed articles and two scholarly books; recipient of the “Courage in Defense of Science Award” from the George C. Marshall Institute.

• Lord Christopher Monckton, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley: held positions with the British press and in government, including Special Advisor to Margaret Thatcher as U.K. Prime Minister from 1982 to 1986; author of numerous articles on climate issues in both the popular press, as well as for leading peer-reviewed scientific journals. (See the video of his latest presentation here).

• Dr. Indur Goklany, who has worked with federal and state agencies, think tanks, and the private sector for over 40 years, including 30 years working on climate change issues. He was involved with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since before its inception — as an author, U.S. delegate, and reviewer.

• Walter Cunningham: astronaut, entrepreneur, best known as pilot of Apollo 7, the first manned flight test of the Apollo Program to land a man on the Moon; a retired Marine Corps fighter pilot with the rank of colonel and 4,500 hours pilot time.

• Dr. J. Scott Armstrong: professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; a founder of the Journal of Forecasting, International Journal of Forecasting, and International Symposium on Forecasting.

• Dr. Susan J. Crockford: zoologist and adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, B.C.; co-owner of a private scientific consulting firm, Pacific Identifications. A leading polar bear expert and owner/publisher of the popular blog PolarBearScience.com.

• Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas): chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, with jurisdiction over the EPA, NASA, the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

“Most Consequential Political War of our Era”

“What to do about global warming, or ‘climate change,’ is the most consequential political war of our era,” says Heartland president Joe Bast. “Progressives have declared war on capitalism and the technologies, fuels, and industries critical to its survival. This is why they took over the environmental movement in the 1980s and 1990s; not to protect the environment, but to wage war on capitalism.”

As we reported above, Bast notes that governments are already forcing us to squander in excess of $1.5 trillion a year, or approximately $4 billion a day. But, he warns, “Progressives want to spend even more. They claim stabilizing the global climate would require reducing carbon dioxide emissions 80 percent or even more by the middle of the century.”

The solar and wind energy these progressives favor “typically costs five to ten times as much as energy produced from fossil fuels,” Bast observes. And because they are intermittent and unreliable sources of energy, they cannot be scaled up to meet current levels of demand for energy, much less the higher levels of demand that are expected to prevail decades from now.

“Energy in the Progressive’s fantasy world would have to be rationed,” the Heartland president concludes. “Choices of housing and occupations and cars, among other goods and services, would be severely limited. Economic growth would slow to a crawl. Capitalism will have been destroyed, and along with it the standard of living we all now take for granted.”

“In the science community, we recognize that the human impact [on the environment] is small, hard to predict and probably not worth trying to stop,” Bast told the conference attendees. “I think the American people understand that. I think we’ve essentially won the public opinion battle. What remains to be done is the political battle. That means repealing a lot of laws, regulations, taxes and subsidies passed over the last eight, even 12 years.”

ICCC-12 speaker Dr. Kevin D. Dayaratna, the senior statistician and research programmer at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis (CDA), provides additional sobering data on the horrendous consequences of not reversing the radical Obama-Clinton climate agenda — including a price tag that reaches into the trillions of dollars. “Our analysis finds,” says Dayaratna, “that by 2035, the country would experience an average employment shortfall of 400,000 lost jobs, a total loss of income over $20,000 for a family of four, a 13-20% increase in electricity prices, and an aggregate $2.5 trillion loss in GDP."

Mainstream Media Smears Conference — No Surprise There

Not surprisingly, the same MSM corporate media that have been flogging the global warming bogie man for two decades either ignored the Heartland conference or portrayed the organizers and participants as "deniers," as well as shills for Big Oil, Big Coal, and the Koch Brothers. The Washington Post, Huffington Post, Yahoo News, PBS FRONTLINE, and others took shots at the gathering. Chris D'Angelo, writing for the Huffington Post, referred to Rep. Lamar Smith as "one of Congress' most outspoken climate change deniers," and quoted the discredited climate "scientist" Michael Mann using the denier label against Smith and Heartland three times.

PBS FRONTLINE used the Heartland ICCC-12 conference as an opportunity to spread fear about another major Heartland project that involves mailing its glossy new report and DVD entitled, "Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming" to tens of thousands of science teachers nationwide. The tax-funded PBS piece quotes educators who worry that this Heartland effort will increase "tensions" and "polarization" in science classrooms. The obvious message from PBS is that "science" would be far better served for all teachers and students to adopt the hive mentality and, like dutiful automatons, march in lockstep obeisance to the phony "scientific consensus" on human-caused global warming.

It is likely that very few viewers of the PBS program (or readers of the online text article) saw the notation at the end of the piece stating: "This story was produced as part of a collaboration between FRONTLINE and The GroundTruth Project examining climate change and its impact on women and children." Any honest individual who checks out The GroundTruth Project would have no difficulty immediately recognizing it as a rabidly alarmist Al Gore-Bill Nye echo chamber. According to The GroundTruth Project's own website, its partners and funding partners include the same suspects in Big Media and Big Foundations that have been driving the climate alarmist bandwagon for decades: the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, PBS NewsHour, PBS FRONTLINE, PRI's TheWorld, WGBH, NOVA, Boston Public Radio, ABC News, MSNBC, AlJazeera,Columbia Journalism School, Harvard School of Public Health, USCAnnenberg, and the Fletcher School-Tufts University.

As long as taxpayers allow their federal and state governments to continue funding these media outlets directly, and for the tax-exempt foundations and institutions to engage in this openly political propaganda, we will have little hope of draining the swamp. However, we have an opportunity now, unlike anything in many decades, to cut off the flow of government funding and tax-exempt foundation funding not only to these pro-UN global warming propagandists, but also to the the UN IPCC, the UNFCCC, the UN Environmental Program (UNEP), and the United Nations itself.

Related video interviews:

Reporters and camera crews for The New American have attended and reported on past Heartland-sponsored climate conferences in New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, and Paris (see here, here, here, and here, for instance).

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