All Smoke, No Fire

First, The Book is up to about 38,000 words now. Chapter 7 is about half done and Chapter 8 is yet to go. It’s a good thing I didn’t realize what a project this would turn out to be or I wouldn’t have started.

OK, where was I … wingnuts say many things that, on the surface, make no sense. Well, they don’t make sense, period, but it’s not hard to ascertain why the nonsensical thing is being said, anyway.

One of their more nonsensical claims is that climate change is a hoax being promoted for profit. Exactly how 97 percent of climate scientists could be in on this hoax is never explained, but whatever. I found a great example of right-wing literature on this subject that skillfully combines innuendo and guilt by association to make what feels like proof of climate change profiteering, but which doesn’t actually document climate change profiteering.

Bret Stephens writes at the Wall Street Journal that John Kerry’s recent speech on climate change included a quote from somebody named Maurice Strong. Strong is a Canadian who has been in leadership positions in some climate advocacy organizations, plus other organizations. He was a director at the World Economic Forum for a time, for example. Stephens says that in 2005 while Strong may or may not have been on a UN panel about something that appears to have nothing to do with climate change (Stephens’s wording doesn’t make this clear) accepted a check for almost a million dollars from a South Korean businessman with a history of bribing people, and this businessman was then sent to jail for attempting to bribe UN officials for something that had nothing to do with climate change, and Strong himself was cleared of wrongdoing. But, my goodness, that’s a lot of smoke, isn’t it? And this makes John Kerry a bad person. Stephens continues,

The secretary devoted much of his speech to venting spleen at those in the “Flat Earth Society” who dispute the 97% of climate scientists who believe in man-made global warming. “We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists and science and extreme ideologues to compete with scientific fact,” he said. Once upon a time people understood that skepticism was essential to good science. Now Mr. Kerry is trying to invoke a specious democracy among scientists to shut down democratic debate for everyone else.

This is of a piece with the amusing notion that the only thing standing in the way of climate salvation is a shadowy, greedy and powerful conspiracy involving the Koch Brothers, MIT’s Dick Lindzen, Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe and this newspaper’s editorial page. Oh, the power!

And yet there goes Mr. Kerry extolling Mr. Strong, who really does stand at the obscure intersection of public policy, private profits and the climate science that joins the two. “I have to disclose my own association with this process in my earlier role in the United Nations negotiations which established the basis for the development of these new [market] opportunities,” Mr. Strong said in a 2007 speech, noting his roles in the Chicago Climate Exchange and the China Carbon Corporation.

There is innuendo so thick it can be cut with a knife. But Stephens never actually says how Strong is personally enriching himself by promoting climate change science. Nobody is denying that many climate change acceptors are encouraging climate-change related business opportunities as one way to combat climate change. Everyone’s been pretty open about that, actually.

If George W. Bush had left office and immediately joined the boards of defense contractors building MRAPs for Iraq, hard questions would be raised. When Maurice Strong, Al Gore and other climate profiteers seek to enrich themselves from policies they put into place while in office, it scarcely raises an eyebrow.

When was Maurice Strong in elected office? Exactly how are he and Al Gore seeking to enrich themselves from policies they put into place? Which policies, exactly? How are Strong and Gore making money? Other than from Al Gore’s documentary, I don’t know how Al Gore is directly making money from the climate change issue. Maybe he is, but Stephens doesn’t explain it. In the final paragraphs he hints darkly that Strong, Gore, and others are involved in “carbon-trading schemes” and the sustainable energy “craze,” which of course are economic disasters, but if so, how are Strong and Gore making money from them?

And Mr. Stephens seems not to have thought the implications of believing that energy cannot be sustainable.

This is classic stuff, I tell you. Joe McCarthy himself couldn’t have done a better job.