Climate Challenges Ahead

Climate regulation will cost Americans wealth, jobs, liberty and privacy, argued talk show host Brian Sussman at a June 15 Heritage Foundation event.

The author of Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam, Sussman argued this June that the Senate would soon pass a climate bill which could later be married to the House-passed climate bill.

“When you begin to tax energy and when you begin to regulate energy the cost of everything will rise,” he said.

In Climategate, Sussman traces the environmental movement back to what he calls Karl Marx’s “godless philosophy of ‘organized collectivism’—a.k.a. communism, or, for the more politically correct, socialism,” he argues.

“The tentacles of Marxism have been steadily reaching into the United States for decades,” writes Sussman. “Red-flag-waving propeller-heads in academia faithfully undermine American values in the classroom; useful idiots associated with a variety of nongovernmental organizations work as tireless, agitating activists; and slimy, liberal politicians craftily seek ways to undermine constitutional principles through, as stated by Lenin, political means.”

Sussman has been criticized for calling Barack Obama “halfrican” while at KSFO-AM radio and for asking a caller to insult Allah to prove that he wasn’t a Muslim, comments for which the radio host later apologized, according to the New York Times.

“Global warming is the grandest of all tyrannical schemes,” he writes in Climategate.

At Heritage Sussman described what he saw as the evolution of the book, which, originally, was to be titled No Way. In November 2009, Sussman said, he was asked to integrate the then-recently-leaked ClimateGate emails into the book and change the title.

“I said this [is] perfect because all of the characters in those emails are already in my book,” he recounted. “This just confirms everything I’ve always thought about these guys, and that is this: the temperature record of the Earth is rigged.”

MSNBC’s Climate Change section reported on July 15 that the National Climatic Data Center had just reported that “[g]lobal land and ocean surface temperatures in the first half of 2010 were the warmest January-June on record,” but that it remains to be seen whether the entire year would surpass the 2005 temperature record. (The NCDC records, according to MSNBC, “go back to 1880.”)

“I know this sounds outlandish but data has purposefully been manipulated to make it appear as if these are the warmest years on record when in fact they are not,” argued Sussman while at Heritage. “We’ve been led to believe that carbon dioxide is a pollutant where in fact it’s a wonderful nutrient for life and the planet has seen carbon dioxide levels six to twelve times what they are today, and back then the Earth was basically a jungle and there were dinosaurs.”

“Earth Day and [Rachel Carson’s] Silent Spring were my first tastes of environmental fraud,” he writes in Climategate.

“A few years after Carson’s book stole the minds of many,” he later adds, “a second screed claimed more hostages in 1968—Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb.”

“Ehrlich, a professor at Stanford University, has authored many bestselling social engineering books during his decades at the liberal Bay Area institution, but the Bomb was his first hit,” he writes. Ehrlich and his wife, Ann, coauthored Ecoscience: population, resources, and environment with President Obama’s Science and Technology Policy czar, John Holdren. The 1970s book describes a series of population control measures such as involuntary sterilization and forced adoption for single mothers which had been promoted by other scholars, according to Cliff Kincaid, Editor of Accuracy in Media, AIA’s sister organization.

Sussman described what he sees as the next wave of “no way” changes as occurring with a Smart Grid and demand response technology.

He writes that in 2008 the California Energy Commission tried to amend the California Building Code that year to mandate “that remotely controlled home thermostats be installed in all new or remodeled homes or in existing homes in which the furnace or air conditioner was being replaced.”

“The public had 30 days to respond.”

“When a government can control the amount of energy you consume, they control your lives to a greater degree, I believe,” said Sussman at Heritage.

A March 2006 U.S. Department of Energy’s “[Energy Policy Act of 1992] EPACT Report to Demand Response in Electricity Markets” powerpoint presentation (pdf) by DOE employee Larry Mansueti indicates that the DOE recommended that year to Congress that “A voluntary and coordinated effort should be undertaken to strengthen demand response analysis capabilities.”

“This effort should include participation from regional entities, state regulatory authorities, electric utilities, trade associations, demand response equipment manufacturers and providers, customers, environmental and public interest groups, and technical experts,” it states. “The goal should be to establish universally applicable methods and practices for quantifying the benefits of demand response.”

“DOE and the Environmental Protection Agency should explore efforts to include appropriate demand response programs and pricing approaches, where appropriate, in the ENERGY STAR® and other voluntary programs,” it states.

The Department of Energy powerpoint presentation also educates members of Congress about the U.S.’s cooperation with the International Energy Agency’s Demand Side Management program.

“For over a decade, the IEA has been providing analyses on the energy dimension of climate change and the energy implications of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its Kyoto Protocol,” states the IEA website.

The House-passed bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, contains a section on Smart Grid technologies.

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.