Murphy: In the Senate and the
House and on Capitol Hill, there’s a debate on the Cap and Trade
Bill, known as the Waxman-Markey bill, which has devastating
effects on rationing energy. What other effects will the bill
have?
Monckton: The first effect is that this is the largest
tax increase ever to be inflicted on a population in the history
of the world. And it is also the most pointless and unnecessary
tax increase. Winston Churchill used to say that the only
legitimate purpose of taxation is to raise revenue. But what has
happened on the left in politics is that the left are now using
taxation not only as an instrument of raising revenue, but as an
instrument of policy, to try to make people behave in a way
which the left thinks is desirable.
So they have decided that “global warming” as they used to call
it, “climate change” as they began to call it, and “energy
security” as the bill now calls it - and “absolute rubbish,” as
I call it - is a problem that needs to be addressed by
inflicting taxation on the entire population.
However, it occurred to them, after
I testified in front of them and told them so, that if they were
to put up the cost of energy, then that cost would fall
disproportionately on the very poorest taxpayers. Or even if
they weren’t taxpayers, it would fall disproportionately on
them, because energy costs form a far larger proportion of the
household budget of poor people than of wealthier people.
And the first response I got when I said this to the committee
was,
“Why are you calling them ‘poor
people’? We call them ‘low income families.’”
And I said,
“That means that they are poor,
and if they are poor, we should say that they are poor, and
we should do something about it, rather than making them
poorer still. And I’m not here,” I said, “to bandy words
about what is the politically correct phrase about somebody
who is poor. Somebody who is poor is disadvantaged by not
having enough money to live on.”
“And so, let’s call a spade a spade. This bill will in
particular needlessly, pointlessly, extravagantly, hurt the
poor.”
Now, of course, the Democrats
eventually realized this.
So they decided that they would use
some of the revenue from taxing the richer purchasers to
subsidize the poorer purchasers so that they can go on using
energy.
But of course, the moment that you
do that, you undermine the purpose of the bill, which is to stop
people from using lots of energy.
Lord Christopher
Monckton
Raise the Standard of Living!
Murphy: In the past you’ve described the global warming
scare, fraud, hoax - you’ve used numerous words to describe this
- as a “genocidal” policy, similar to the policy of how AIDS was
handled, or to the ban on DDT. Is that still your view?
Monckton: What we have here, is a faction in politics,
and it’s a worldwide faction, that really came out of the
Marxist extreme left when the Berlin Wall collapsed, and found
its new home in the environmental movement. And it got into the
environmental movement and took it over.
A friend of mine is one
of the founders of Greenpeace, and he said,
“All of us who are genuine
environmentalists left after a year, because the Marxists
moved in and took it over.”
So, what we have, is what I call the
traffic light faction: the greens too yellow to admit that
they’re really red.
And it’s they who are trying to say to us
that this climate scare is real, so that they can impose upon us
measures that would drastically reduce the human population by
direct intervention, if necessary.
But why does this fail, even if they are eventually granted the
authoritarian powers that would be necessary to enforce the
sterilization of the male population, or to enforce a one-child
policy?
These were policies that were tried,
respectively, in India and China, and both have abjectly failed.
The only way to prevent the population in the poorer countries
(or the “lower-income countries”) from rising rapidly beyond the
resources of that country being able to cope with them is to
raise the standard of living of the general population of these
countries. Nothing else works.
This is perhaps the fundamental fact of demographics: that if
you want to stabilize populations in poorer countries, you must
raise their standard of living. Nothing else works whatsoever.
So, we come along and we say, even to China and India, and this
is what the Democrats have been saying,
“Either you agree that you will
not ever burn CO2 into the atmosphere at the rate
we did, that you will keep yourselves poor, or we will
impose protectionist trade sanctions upon you.”
I heard the Democrats arguing this
when I was testifying in front of them, and I told them what an
extremely bad idea that was.
And why it’s a bad idea, is because
even if protectionism worked - and, of course, it always, in
fact, backfires on the person who tries to impose it - all it
would do is to keep China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, and
other large countries, poor.
If it keeps them poor, their
populations will continue to increase rapidly. If their
populations continue to increase rapidly, their carbon
footprints will increase rapidly in the long run, if not in the
short, and probably even in the short.
So you will have achieved the precise opposite of what you say
you’re intending to do, and you will have a growing population,
when the left’s real aim is to reduce population. So what they are advocating at the
economic and political level, simply doesn’t work.
And it works
no better than their attempts to ban DDT, which led to the
deaths of 40 million children in the poorer countries. A totally
unnecessary ban. DDT is not dangerous! You can eat it by the
tablespoonful - do you no harm at all.
But they invented a scare that it
causes cancer, which it does not. They invented a scare that it
might thin the eggshells, which it does not - unless you happen
to deprive the birds of calcium in their diet, before you do the
measurement, which is how they got the bogus result they based
it on.
So, we’ve seen these lies and manufacturing of data before. Same
with HIV, where, as with any other fatal, incurable infection,
it should have been treated as what’s called a notifiable
disease, carriers isolated immediately to protect the rest of
the population.
This was not done.
The result? Twenty-five million
dead, 40 million infected and going to die, and heaven knows how
far the epidemic will continue to spread.
In
Washington, D.C., here, where
we’re speaking from, 3% of the population is now infected with
HIV, and that means that there’s a good chance that Congressmen
and Senators rubbing shoulders with cleaners and other basic
labor inside Congress, some of them are going to get infected
before very long, because the correct public health measure
wasn’t taken, because yet again, the left had a policy on this
and the policy did not accord with scientific reality at any
point.
Figure 1
The arithemetic
mean of the Hadley and NCDC (terrestrial surface) and RSS
and UAH
(satellite lower-troposphere) temperature anomalies
shows global
temperature falling at a rate equivalent to 2 C°/century for
more than seven years.
The IPCC’s
predicated path for global temperatures is shown by way of
comparison.
Source: Science
and Public Policy Institute’s monthly CO2 report for
March 2009
So we’ve seen it with DDT - they
acted against the science: 40 million killed.
We’ve seen it with AIDS - they acted
against the science: 25 million killed, 40 million infected and
going to die. And already people are now dying, all over the
world, of starvation, as a result of the biofuels scam
which came out of the global warming scare and has taken, for
instance, one third of all the agricultural land of the United
States out of producing food, for people who need it. Now it’s
producing fuel for automobiles that don’t.
In any view, whichever aspect of this scare you look at, the
policies of the left are not just heroically stupid, but deeply
damaging for the future of humankind, and particularly damaging
for the very poorest.
The Goal Is World Government
Murphy: That is very true. What is coming out - you’ve
identified the biofuels scam as hurting the poor with food
starvation, which is listed as one of WHO’s top causes of death.
Now, [United
Nations Secretary-General] Kofi Annan has just
issued a bizarre, bogus report stating that 300,000
people have died already as a result of global warming or
climate change per year, and more deaths are possible.
But the policies that he’s
advocating to solve this will kill billions of people, and will
eclipse that, even if it were true.
Monckton: Let’s look at this report. It’s produced by the
usual crowd of rent-seekers wanting to enhance the role of the
UN as a world government. That’s what is really behind this:
It’s world government that the left are after. And world
government, of course, does not mean democratic government. It
means autocratic government, rather like the EU writ large.
And this report they produced is plainly nonsense, and you can
just look at one simple fact, and that is that for the last 15
years, as [MIT climatologist] Dick Lindzen is about to
tell us, there has been no statistically significant global
warming. For the last eight and a half years, there has actually
been a trend of
global cooling, and quite a rapid one.
So, why is Kofi Annan coming along
now, 15 years after the warming stopped - and, of course, the
warming was pretty unremarkable even while it was happening; it
was entirely within natural variability - but the warming
stopped 15 years ago, and only now do they tell us that this
warming was killing people. It certainly can’t have been killing
people recently, because we’ve been having global cooling. And
that one fact is enough to establish what complete nonsense this
UN report is.
All it is, is another way of keeping this flagging, failing
scare in the headlines between now and the Copenhagen Climate
Summit organized by the UN for December 2009. And at that
summit, they are hoping the first steps to turn the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change into a world
government will be taken.
They are not frankly particularly
worried about whether they get a deal on who should cut global
emissions by how much. It is not, and never was, about that. It
is not and never was about the climate.
As Vaclav Klaus, the
president of the European Union at the moment, has rightly said,
“It’s not about climatology;
it’s about freedom.”
They want to take our freedom away.
They want to set up a
world
government which will tell the rest of us how to behave, and
which will certainly not be subject to any democratic recall or
accountability or constraint. And they will do this by saying
that, of course, the peoples of the world if left to their own
devices, would screw up the planet, because of the emissions of
carbon dioxide.
Therefore, to save you from
yourselves, we are going to ask your government to hand over
their sovereignty and their powers - of course in our democratic
countries, their powers are peoples’ powers - to unelected
bureaucrats, technocrats, and dictators, so that they will
govern us in the future.
That is what this is all about, and they have to be stopped,
which is why I am here.
The Climate Can Look After Itself
Murphy: There was an interesting report that didn’t get
much play, that came from the Center for International
Cooperation at New York University. This had different scenarios
- in the one they were promoting, there would be no deal at
Copenhagen; everything falls apart. And in another scenario,
there is a deal at Copenhagen, but it falls apart.
And then there’s one where you agree
over time to make emission cuts.
But the key to the one they are
pushing is that they want two things:
-
One, to set up an IAEA-type
of agency to govern all nations, willing or unwilling, on the
carbon emissions, so your world government question is there.
-
And, two, they want to use carbon
credits as - and this is really wild and outlandish, but based
on the
credit crisis we’re having right now, the economic
downturn, the breakdown crisis - they want to use carbon credits
as the new currency, with the IMF as the clearing house, central
bank for the world.
This is just ridiculous.
Monckton: Well, no, it isn’t ridiculous, you see. It’s
dangerous. That’s what it really is.
This is exactly the type of
mechanism which those who are in the small cabal that is
plotting all this are working on in order to bring about world
government before anyone notices. That is why they’re so very
angry with us.
Because what we’re saying is that as
far as the science is concerned, there is no basis for doing
anything whatsoever about the climate, which has looked after
itself for four and a half billion years and will continue to do
so.
Our perturbations of it are so small as to be entirely
insignificant, so insignificant that they cannot hope to be
distinguished from natural climate variability, as even NASA
itself said the other day.
There is no basis scientifically for doing anything. The correct
policy to address a non-problem is to have the courage to do
nothing. However, they are not concerned with whether there is a
problem or not.
They merely wish to pretend that
there is a problem, and try to do so with a straight face, for
long enough to persuade, not the population, because we have no
say in this, but the governing class in the various
member-states of the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change: That they should hand over their powers as
government to
the United Nations or to a new agency, or possibly
just to the existing climate panel, merely restructured a bit.
So that we would no longer be free
to decide what our currency would be, or how much of it there
should be, or what we could burn, or what we could do. These
things would be dictated to us by the dictators at the center.
And this is an extremely dangerous moment, because it repudiates
freedom, it repudiates democracy, it denies us both of those.
It repudiates any form of justice.
It is a kick in the teeth for the poor. It has no merit
whatsoever except to enhance the wealth and the power of the
governing elite, and that really what we’re seeing here is a
conspiracy of the governing class against the governed.
And if the governed continues to be
as passive, and acquiescent, and as unquestioning as too many of
them are being in Europe (it’s a little better in the States),
then this faction is going to get its way, and when it gets its
way, we shall realize that it’s far too late for us to do
anything to throw it into reverse.
