Fighting Climate Change Oppresses the Poor

Is Global Warming a Hoax?

By Rick Brinegar

 

The atmosphere contains “greenhouse effect” gases which trap some of the heat we receive from the sun and prevent it from bouncing back into space. “Warmers” believe that we are increasing earth’s temperature by increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as we burn fossil fuels. “Deniers” generally believe mankind’s impact on warming or cooling climate trends is insignificant and that the prediction of a man-made climate catastrophe is a “hoax,” or even “the greatest scientific fraud in history.”

 

Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., of the Cornwall Alliance, believes that the climate change alarm sounded by Pope Francis and President Obama is a political agenda that pushes policies which directly hurt the poor. An environment of economic growth enables people to thrive in any climate, and adapt to climate changes. A switch from affordable and abundant fossil fuels to more expensive “sustainable” alternative energy sources slows economic growth, and actually prolongs or induces poverty. Spending billions or trillions of dollars fighting global warming, according to Dr. Beisner, will have “devastating impacts on the poor.”

 

George F. Will, of the Washington Post, notes that, “Poverty has probably decreased more in the past two centuries than in the preceding three millennia because of industrialization powered by fossil fuels,” and that, “Only economic growth has ever produced broad amelioration of poverty.” According to The Spectators’s James Delingpole, it is not global warming that harms third-world native peoples, but the measures adopted to fight it. According to Delingpole’s information, when precipitous climate alarmism agendas are implemented, green taxes force the vulnerable into “fuel poverty,” renewable energy, carbon-offset and palm-oil projects drive up food prices, virgin forests are laid waste, and the poorest native peoples are deprived.

 

Some people believe that, because the “science is settled”, we must immediately take drastic measures to prevent the destruction of the earth, no matter how it impacts humanity. Others hold the view that it is arrogant to believe that man-made pollution is profoundly affecting the seasons which God has ordained. Still others might agree with Professor Judith Curry, who has said that human-caused, greenhouse-gas related global warming is, “a theory whose basic mechanism is well understood, but whose magnitude is highly uncertain.” In other words, according to at least one credentialed climate scientist, we basically don’t know enough about it to figure out whether our impact on warming trends is worth being concerned about.

 

Finally, both “warmers” and “deniers” need to understand that, whether or not efforts to reduce man’s influence on weather patterns are helping to save planet earth, these efforts are certainly harming the most vulnerable of earth’s inhabitants.