The following is a chapter out of my 2009 book Unlawful Government: The Gathering Threat Of

Global Hegemony. Although some of this material is now dated, the message about the lunacy of
environmentalism remains as true as ever. Endnote citations have been removed.

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

~ G.K. Chesterton, 1930

Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully
separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable
will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your
researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. . . . This gives birth to
strong mass prejudices, blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era.

~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn, to the Harvard graduating class of 1978

ENVIRONMENTALISM’S POETIC LIE

No matter how superior modern man fancies himself over his ancestors, he still displays
the overriding urge to believe an all-encompassing story of his place in the cosmos, to believe in
myths. There is no shame in this need, for myths are not lies – myths are poetic truths. Shame
should emerge only when a poetic lie overpowers the truth, as it did with the twentieth-century
scourges of fascism, Nazism, and communism. Those lies gained ground because mankind had
discarded the hereafter for the here, yearning to transport the kingdom of heaven to Earth. The
defeat of those particular lies did not, unfortunately, defeat modern man’s ongoing hunger for a
worldly religion that will save his body rather than his soul. Environmentalism feeds that hunger
and counts as the poetic lie of the moment, reaching its zenith (or nadir) with the coronation of
former Vice-President Al Gore as Nobel laureate for his malum opus, An Inconvenient Truth. As
always, shame will have to wait until the moment has passed.

“Environmentalism” does not, of course, connote people who enjoy the countryside; who
scrupulously avoid polluting; who disdain cruelty to animals; or who shun meat in favor of
vegetables. Much more than a personal lifestyle choice, “environmentalism” prophesies the
Earth’s death or irreversible degradation at mankind’s hands, an apocalyptic faith claiming
dominion over other people’s lives and overshadowing all competing concerns for individual
rights and justice. If this obsession with our material surroundings counts as modern man’s
religion, then government undeniably counts as modern man’s church, possessing as it does
authority over the things of this world. One catechism in the environmentalist creed has assumed
primary status: government must reduce mankind’s carbon-dioxide footprint so as to combat
climate change. Because the global climate is at issue, this catechism has proved most receptive
to global governmental control, handing the political class an incredibly effective mechanism for
crushing national sovereignty and individual freedom. Wagging his finger, U.N. Secretary General
Ban Ki-moon once proclaimed that global warming is undeniable and that “only urgent, global
action will do.” So the cynical government and the spiritually-starved governed find common
cause here, even more so than with “democracy” or “human rights,” thus rendering any attempt at
reasoned discussion supremely futile if not outright dangerous. For what it’s worth, I will present
an opposing view on the global-warming hysteria, a view grounded on the universal reason
available to anyone willing to use it.

The Philosophical Quicksand Beneath The Global-Warming Hysteria

Perhaps the surest method for exposing the flaws in a proposition is to assume its truth. So
let us assume that what environmentalism preaches is true, namely that human activity contributes
too much carbon dioxide to the amounts already flooding into the atmosphere “naturally”;1 that
our carbon dioxide indeed causes global warming; and that government is therefore justified in
dictating the types and amounts of energy we use in our daily lives. How much atmospheric carbon
dioxide, then, constitutes an acceptable amount? No credible source proposes outlawing our entire
contribution; the U.N. Kyoto Protocol (discussed below) aims to take us back to the approximate
emissions levels of 1990. But there’s the rub: the 1990 emissions themselves were once portrayed
by the U.N. as excessive,2 meaning that full Kyoto compliance would see us continuing to pump
supposedly toxic amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and imperiling the environment
– only this time, at the price of our liberty as well.

Let us concede even more ground by assuming that Kyoto is only a “first step,” meaning
that government – in all its disinterested and selfless wisdom – knows exactly how much carbon
dioxide the Earth can tolerate from us and will implement policies that target the proper output.
What then, pray tell, is the correct temperature that we should nurse the Earth back to? We know
that the Earth was both far cooler and far warmer in the past, long before mankind graduated into
the industrial age: the most recent Ice Age ended 10,000 years ago, and global temperatures some
6,000 years ago (the “Holocene Maximum”) were higher than they are today. Temperatures were
also higher during the Medieval Warming Period from roughly A.D. 1000 to 1300, again long
before the Industrial Revolution. Last but not least, temperatures tended to oscillate up and down
much more rapidly before civilization even developed, and we have occupied an unusually stable
interlude in the Earth’s temperature. So just where do we set the global thermostat? How do we
know when our “harmful” influence is fully remedied, given that a “healthy” Earth will continue
to experience drastic climate changes all its own? It appears that there is no end in sight, somewhat
similar to the United States’ unending crusade of affirmative action – racial disparities and climate
anomalies are twin facts of life that will never disappear, thus perpetually justifying governmental
interference to “fix the problem.” For example, environmentalist prophet Al Gore seized on a
deadly Myanmar cyclone as proof of his religion, while likeminded others have gone so far as to
blame everything from kidney stones to shark attacks on mankind’s environmental sins as well.
Just as primitive peoples might conduct human sacrifice upon the occurrence of a solar eclipse,

1
I place this word in quotes because of ongoing philosophical confusion over what constitutes “natural” versus
“unnatural.” On the one hand, environmentalists tend to claim that mankind is merely a part of nature and has no
unique status or rights over anything else on planet Earth. On the other hand, environmentalists tend to claim that
mankind is somehow outside nature and has a unique responsibility to avoid influencing the environment in any
noticeable way, even if it falls far short of the cataclysms and extinctions that preceded mankind’s appearance.
2
In 1990 the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (“IPCC”) issued its first major report, which
concluded that man-made carbon dioxide had caused the previous century’s warming trend, and which recommended
drastic cuts in existing carbon-dioxide emissions.
the high priests of modernity will re-enact that sorry spectacle on a massive scale during every
environmental novelty that befuddles the public mind.

Let us disregard all these qualms and assume that: 1) mankind introduces too much carbon
dioxide into the environment; 2) mankind’s carbon dioxide is to blame for excessive global
warming; 3) government can calculate how much carbon dioxide the Earth can tolerate; 4)
government can calculate the “natural” global temperature; and 5) any “natural” changes in climate
will honestly and successfully be distinguished from changes that mankind has caused. Even
yielding each one of these very dubious points fails to produce the environmentalist conclusion
that governmental interference will rescue us from the brink of destruction. Only wealthy countries
are capable of adopting “green” policies, since the wealthy can best afford to humor
environmentalist agitation; people in poor countries are more preoccupied with daily survival than
with the atmosphere, often making their treatment of the environment far worse. The Kyoto
Protocol itself acknowledges this by imposing its most onerous obligations on the nations that can
best afford them. Rather than safeguard and spread the free-market principles underlying this
wealth, environmentalists propose quite the opposite: to cripple the engine of wealth where it
exists. Private property, freedom of contract, and profit motive all make environmentalism
possible, yet environmentalism has declared war on its parents and seeks to curtail or abolish them.
Bolivian president Evo Morales once proudly admitted this fact when agitating at a U.N.
conference concerning biofuels: 3 “If we want to save our planet Earth, we have a duty to put an
end to the capitalist system.” An honest effort to remedy the supposed menace of man-made global
warming would reject this noxious ideology of central planning as a proven failure at generating
the wealth and technology needed to accomplish environmentalism’s own ambitious program.
Since environmentalism’s methods are self-defeating, they hardly merit serious consideration.

One final concession drives the point home: even if mankind’s technological progress is
somehow shortening the Earth’s hospitable lifespan, mankind represents the only hope of
transporting life away from this mortal planet that will eventually be scorched and/or swallowed
as the Sun balloons into a red giant. Even long before that inevitable demise takes place, we face
the high probability of an asteroid impact that will terminate human life and much of the sacred
biodiversity. To the extent that environmentalists succeed in hobbling mankind’s progress with
their schoolboy socialism, they will have condemned to death what they claim to hold dear, and
Earth’s life will remain trapped to perish as if it never were. One can honestly say that mankind
represents the Earth’s seeds, and that mankind is very much part of nature’s effort to spread life as
far and wide as possible. From this macro-perspective, environmentalists represent the Earth’s
deadliest foes.

3
The biofuels saga presents its own tragicomedy of modern man’s undoing: governments take our money in order to
finance a food-based fuel source (e.g., ethanol) that we have not chosen to finance on our own, driving up the price of
food to the point that poor people find it harder than ever to subsist. Man freely and peacefully transitioned from whale
blubber to kerosene to petroleum as fuel sources, and there is no reason that the free market cannot also encourage the
next transition whenever the scarcity of petroleum drives up its price and makes alternative fuels profitable.
The Truth Persists, All Cries Of “Consensus” To The Contrary

Conceding virtually all of the global-warming catechism has offered scant reason to
sacrifice our freedom and prosperity on environmentalism’s altar. If we “come back to Earth” for
a moment and acknowledge that man-made global warming remains at best a debatable
proposition, the folly of entrusting environmental power to government becomes even more
obvious. Yet even this humble acknowledgment of controversy proves impossible to secure from
the other side, because like any religion run amok, environmentalism denounces and persecutes
non-believers as heretics. One example of this zealotry unfolded during 2007 at “Live Earth: The
Concerts for a Climate in Crisis,” a cathartic spectacle worthy of 1930s Munich. During the
American leg of this tour, throngs of spiritual orphans listened with rapt attention as political scion
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ranted that all environmentally-hesitant politicians should be condemned
as “traitors.”

Public pathos and a juggernaut of government-greased “scientific consensus”

notwithstanding, 4 true scientific inquiry never ceases and is constantly revealing more about the
mechanisms behind global climate change, mechanisms that surpass anything that mankind could
hope to accomplish for good or for ill.

First, mankind’s contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts to at most four

percent (4%) of the total generated by “natural” sources such as animals, volcanoes, forest fires,
plate tectonics, and the oceans. Moreover, all carbon-dioxide sources together comprise only 385
parts per million, or 0.0385%, of the atmosphere. So, if we succumbed to the most rabid
environmentalist agenda by returning humanity to the Stone Age, ninety-six percent of the carbon
dioxide entering the atmosphere would continue to do so unabated, bringing the carbon-dioxide
content of the atmosphere down to 0.0369%. The decrease would be even less significant if we
enacted the liberty-destroying measures that most environmentalists advocate. So much drama,
and despite the fact that Earth has experienced carbon-dioxide levels of 1000 to 2000 parts per
million, or 0.1% - 0.2%, an order of magnitude greater than anything humans have ever witnessed.
Such elevated levels of carbon dioxide likely explain the incredible biodiversity of the dinosaur
era, which makes the modern mission to “save the planet” by curtailing carbon dioxide supremely
ludicrous, as illustrated below:

4
The notorious “hockey-stick” graph that illustrates a recent spike in global temperatures – and that erased the
Medieval Warming Period in the process – epitomizes the intellectual corruption that always accompanies politics.
Both the United Nations and the European Union latched onto this graph and touted it as proof positive for their
designs, even after it came to light in 2003 that the graph is a farce of disjointed data cobbled together to produce a
pre-determined outcome. An American physicist had generated the graph by intentionally ignoring contrary data and
utilizing a computer algorithm certain to produce the conclusion that he (and his benefactors) sought.
 2000

1800

1600

1400

1200

1000

800

600

400

200

0
Today (man- Today Dinosaur Era Dinosaur Era
made) ("natural") (minimum) (maximum)

Atmospheric CO2 (measured in parts per million)5

Environmentalists demand that we submit to open-ended, global political control in order

to shave the first bar of this graph ever so slightly. I think not. Supposing we should or could make
a meaningful difference in total carbon-dioxide output – both man-made and “natural” – recent
research strongly suggests that this would prove fruitless because carbon dioxide likely does not
even cause global warming at all; rather, global warming may very well precede and cause the
periodic surges of atmospheric carbon dioxide. In other words, the arrow of causation may run in
the opposite direction: as the Earth experiences occasional increases in energy from the Sun and/or
other cosmic sources, the Earth’s oceans slowly warm up and, centuries later, expel larger amounts
of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. One very articulate proponent of this theory is Dr. Sallie
Baliunas, who received her doctorate from Harvard University, and who astutely compares the
political rhetoric of today to the frenzied European witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries – an age when many women were executed on accusations of “weather cooking.”

And again for the sake of perspective, it helps to remember that Earth existed for billions
of years before we arrived on the scene, and it has experienced conditions far more radical than
the grimmest scenarios painted by today’s prophets of doom. When we consider a pre-historic
atmosphere brimming with carbon dioxide; recurring mass extinctions that have wiped out the vast
majority of all previous life on Earth; ongoing asteroid impacts that dwarf man-made nuclear
weapons (as well as any man-made “climate change”), we can safely conclude that the Earth has
seen it all before and will continue to see it long into the future.

5
Levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are thought to have greatly exceeded 2000 parts per million at various times
prior to the Dinosaur (Mesozoic) Era, but employing this conservative ceiling makes the point nonetheless.
 Only a mind saturated with self-hatred could conceive that humanity’s infinitesimal blink
of activity is so menacing that it must be stopped or severely curtailed by force. Earth is quite
capable of taking care of itself, which is more than man can say when he cripples his potential with
lies born of idleness and spiritual poverty. That poverty has settled like a dense fog on many hearts
and minds in the once-proud West, causing its people to beg for the very deprivations that modern
governments are all too happy to supply. Mainstream news sources habitually report on man-made
global warming as if it were unquestionable fact, discussing with grim sobriety the varying statist
proposals to combat it. Captive audiences of schoolchildren receive lessons portraying this mania
as information to be uncritically absorbed along with their multiplication tables (if those are even
taught anymore). An emeritus professor at a prestigious Australian university once went so far as
to co-author a book – The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy – that
condemns the West’s (dwindling) protections of individual rights as an obstacle to centralized
environmental planning by “experts.” A jury in the United Kingdom refused to convict six
Greenpeace activists who had destroyed private property at a power station, since their end of
combating “global warming” excused their vandalistic means. And in a collective spasm of self-
flagellation worthy of the Middle Ages, numerous cities in countries ranging from Thailand, the
Philippines, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Greece, and
the United States imposed blackouts on their populations in order to “heighten awareness” about
man-made global warming.

People used to remark that the lights went out over Europe at the start of World War One,
but posterity may very well note that the lights went out literally and figuratively over us all today.6
Such a cultural collapse renders almost futile any discussion of what is happening on the
international legal stage in environmentalism’s name, since so many nations have already
surrendered the philosophical fight to their domestic governments and thereby empowered them
to perpetrate legitimized vandalism on a daily basis. On the other hand, however,
environmentalists continue to rage that the “global community” is not doing enough, so perhaps
there is some value in analyzing the international picture in the hopes of prolonging or deepening
the environmentalists’ frustration.

A Global-Warming Bureaucracy Is Born

The international effort to rid the world of its eternal habit of climate change began in
earnest at the 1992 Earth Summit, officially known as the United Nations Conference on
Environment and Development. Politicians from more than one hundred fifty nations lounged in
lush Rio de Janeiro to collaborate on how we the people should be allowed to pursue our happiness,
such as the “proper” number of automobiles we drive; the kinds of fuels we use; the settings where
we choose to live; and the industries in which we choose to work. Totalitarian ideology rarely has
found so thorough an exposition as this, with reams of declarations operating on the unspoken
presumption that the governments of the world have the unfettered right to micromanage human
life. While most of this polluted verbiage amounted to mere political theater, the Earth Summit did
produce a more noxious offspring: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(“UNFCCC”), a treaty calling for periodic such meetings into the future so as to devise ways and

6
One heroic exception is Václav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, who consistently denounced the global-
warming dialectic as a politically-driven fraud. National sovereignty again proves its merit in challenging mass lunacy.
means of forcing us to obey the global-warming religion. Staying true to his amoral establishment
credentials, President George H.W. Bush ratified the UNFCCC upon securing the Senate’s
approval, likely because he saw political advantage in claiming that he was “doing something”
about the environment.

Predictably, it did not take long for the perpetual UNFCCC gabfests to conjure up
something even worse: the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. This proposed addition to the UNFCCC
attempts to regulate and reduce the carbon7 output of entire nations, specifically those few
designated under Annex I to the UNFCCC who are wealthy enough to afford the honor (i.e., the
ones who have benefited from freedom so much that they are now capable of paying to snuff it
out). Over one hundred seventy nations have rushed forward to ratify this suicide pact, but with
only forty-odd of them obligated to drink the Kool Aid.

To its credit, the United States thus far has refused to join and stands as the last major
country to do so, despite furious denunciation from the decaying Western world. If the United
States were to join, it would undertake to straitjacket American citizens so that by 2012 our carbon-
dioxide emissions be reduced to approximately 1990 levels (an entire generation prior). To
accomplish that pointless and emasculating objective, the federal government would oversee our
collective activities and submit a greenhouse-gas inventory each year to the U.N. in order to
demonstrate Kyoto compliance. As an alternative to outright servility of this sort, the United States
could opt for international welfare-statism by sending taxpayer money abroad to subsidize carbon
reduction where it is cheaper to do so, thereby earning “carbon credits” from the bureaucratic
benefactors at the UNFCCC. Better yet, the federal government might graciously allow us
purchase “carbon credits” from one other, so that citizens who need to emit more carbon dioxide
than normally permitted could purchase that ability from citizens who emit less than their allotted
portion.

The UNFCCC is laying the foundation for a new protocol to succeed Kyoto, which expires
in 2012, and it is apparent that the federal government plans to participate every step of the way.
Having embraced the environmentalist religion, the federal government in February of 2007 signed
the Washington Declaration with various other nations, agreeing to devise a mutually-acceptable
plan for imposing emissions controls on us. In June of 2007 the federal government announced
that it was seriously considering a pact with Europe to cut our emissions in half by the year 2050.
And more recently, a U.N. “climate conference” in Bali, Indonesia saw proposals for a global
carbon tax, proposals that met with the approval of a former Vice-President of the United States.

Welcome to the future. Our experiment in limited government that sprouted for one brief
moment in history – and which already has suffered major setbacks – is faced with oblivion as the
United States marks the days until it adopts Kyoto or its kin as a pretext for massive new
deprivations of life, liberty, and property. An American populace stripped of transcendence and
schooled with the blunt implements of modern pedagogy stands spiritually and intellectually
unequipped to do anything other than swallow environmentalism’s poetic lie. Mark Twain once

7
Technically, the Kyoto Protocol casts a net over multiple “greenhouse gases,” of which carbon dioxide is the most
highly featured. Simultaneously, the Kyoto Protocol ignores water vapor, by far the most abundant greenhouse gas of
all, but which is not man-made and therefore offers no political rewards.
observed that a lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. Let
us hope that the truth gets its shoes on quickly.