By Rick Manning
The opening words on the website introducing the United Nations Climate Summit read, “Climate change is not a far-off problem. It is happening now and is having very real consequences on people’s lives. Climate change is disrupting national economies, costing us dearly today and even more tomorrow.”
In the spirit of the left-wing newspaper fact checkers who labor under the pretext of objectivity while providing cover to their more honest liberal political advocates, this statement needs to be evaluated for its veracity.
Could the U.N. climate cronies have gotten it right? Before people scoff at that notion, they need to read what the U.N. says closely.
The U.N. statement is correct that climate change is happening now. Otherwise we would not need weathermen to tell us when it is likely to rain or not. The weather is always changing, and the deliberately obfuscatory language of the environmental left is designed to make this natural phenomenon seem like something that needs action to solve.
It was so much cleaner when they claimed “global warming,” but as any honest, sentient person knows, the warming has been on pause for the past eighteen years, creating a semantic issue for those in search of a problem to be solved. Hence the undeniably obtuse climate change description shift.
The U.N. goes on to claim that not only is the weather changing, but it is having very real consequences on people’s lives. Once again, they are correct. In the United States electricity costs are rising, and a significant portion of the electric generation plants are scheduled to go off-line due to EPA regulations promulgated under the guise of climate change.
So, yes, the attempt by the U.S. government to deal with climate change, at a time when temperatures have paused for a generation, “is having very real consequences on people’s lives.” It is having a particularly nasty impact on those who are on fixed incomes and struggling economically, and cannot easily fit a few extra dollars to pay for increased costs regulated into existence by the climate jihadists.
And in this same vein, the U.N. conveniently continues on by claiming, “Climate change is disrupting national economies, costing us dearly today and even more tomorrow.”
Once again the U.N. gets it right.
Those creating environmental policies have it as their mission statement to disrupt national economies, particularly developed one’s like those in Europe and the United States. How else can you explain why the coal rich United Kingdom decided to stop burning coal in one of its largest electric generation plants replacing the local and available fuel for wood chips imported from the United States. This disruption was not exactly good news for the coal workers or the national economy that their taxes used to support.
Similarly, the tens of thousands of workers who have not been hired due to President Barack Obama’s failure to allow the Keystone XL pipeline to be built has a disruptive effect on the U.S. economy as these uncreated jobs leave people without alternatives and the hope that a good job provides.
Any objective analysis would reveal that the United Nation’s statement is correct – just not in the way they meant to be. For this reason, they get a completely accidental four smiley face rating for veracity. However, the faces are red in the cheeks, because they really didn’t mean to be caught telling the truth.
Rick Manning (@rmanning957) is vice president of public policy and communications for Americans for Limited Government.
