A good question for today would be whether a fraud on the scale of the one being consummated at the Copenhagen “Earth summit” has even been attempted before in human history.
I’ve been trying to think of examples. Things like the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion come to mind—a hoax out of Russia around the turn of the last century. It has been very consequential in the lives of Jews, and remains an issue in most Middle Eastern countries today, where state media continue to present this most vicious of all anti-Semitic slurs as historical fact.
But it is different from the “anthropogenic global warming” myth. It was published with murderous intentions, which takes us beyond fraud. Whereas, the numbers cooked up to support the global warming hysteria in such places as the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were for the purpose of extorting money, which is fraud in the more conventional sense.
This “man-made crisis” is the successor to many previous environmental scares, each designed as a means to shake down western taxpayers, and justify the creation of huge, intrusive, national and international bureaucracies for the benefit of their sponsors. One thinks of everything from the pioneering DDT scare of the early 1960s, forward—including the various Club of Rome forecasts from the 1970s, and even the “global cooling” scare of the previous generation, now conveniently buried in the mists of the world before Google.
Older readers will remember how we were going to run out of oil in the 1980s, among other commodities; or perhaps the “population bomb keeps ticking” mantra. And then there was “nuclear winter,” quite distinct from the impending Ice Age forecast, and successor to it. It has become harder to remember the profligate United Nations and other institutional efforts to mobilize planetary missions against these imaginary threats.
As these frauds have been perpetrated by largely the same class of people, each environmental scare has benefited from experience gained in publicizing the previous one, through supine liberal media. “Environmentalism” has moreover ballooned since the fall of the Berlin Wall, as the Reds of this world, defeated in the ambition to impose socialism directly, have turned Green in pursuit of the same end: the creation of an international command economy, under their own “expert” direction.
One might consider “private enterprise” frauds in passing—the great Ponzi schemes of history, from that of Charles Ponzi himself to the more recent efforts of Bernard Madoff. But at a mere $50 billion, this last and largest remains miniscule compared with “public sector” achievements. Consider the unfunded liabilities of all Western “social insurance” schemes—countless trillions of dollars owing in what have been, in accounting terms, very plain Ponzi schemes, made legal only because governments were doing it.
But there again, fraud requires active, conscious planning, not simply a general decay of moral and intellectual standards. The politicians who created the “welfare states” seldom had any clear idea what they were doing; and neither, really, did the generations of “Keynesian” economists who were advising them.
So the answer is probably no, nothing quite compares. Copenhagen takes the prize, for consummating the biggest fraud in history—a vast scheme of financial appropriation, premised upon rogue science, from tainted research. This conclusion has become irresistible after the exposure of thousands of e-mails and other documents, revealing the heart of the enterprise: the creation of convenient climate models from massaged numbers, after discarding raw data to make the findings uncheckable.
But what began as a method to extort research money has spread—through successive world political jamborees at Rio, Kyoto, and now Copenhagen—into something out of all proportion to conventional fraud. Parasitical vested interests (including now the organized kleptocracies of the Third World) have been assembled on such a colossal scale, that even the revelation of the original fraud can do nothing to break their momentum; any more than the 31,000-plus signatures of dissenting scientists on a U.S. petition last year could convince the media that there is no scientific consensus whatever behind the “anthropogenic global warming” propaganda.
The very premise is ludicrous: demonizing carbon dioxide as a “pollutant,” when it is a vital part of the Earth’s atmosphere, absolutely essential not only to plant life but everything that depends on plants.
This week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, under the usual radical Obama appointment (Lisa P. Jackson), did something that could be fairly described as insane. It declared carbon dioxide and five other benign atmospheric “greenhouse gases” to be threats to public health, thus awarding itself extraordinary regulatory power over the entire economy, beyond reach of the U.S. Congress. Yet this is only one of innumerable strange and unnatural acts, being performed under the veil of Copenhagen.
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