Trump’s Executive Orders May Help Cure the Cancel Culture of Climate Hysteria
President Trump’s recent Executive Orders, aiming at neutralizing harmful net-zero policies and leftist globalist green absurdities, couldn’t have been issued at a better time.
In his memorable account of the Soviet prison camp system, The Gulag Archipelago, Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes (pp. 27-28):
At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for…. For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, “the stormy applause,” rising to an ovation, continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.
However, who would dare to be the first to stop? …
The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! … Insanity!
To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! …
Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down….
That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:
“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.”
Today, in traditionally democratic societies, we can discern the same totalitarian stifling of free speech and thought in the violent intolerance toward opponents of the cancel-culture dogma. Dissenters are publicly shamed and demonized. We see this in mainstream and social media, on university campuses, in major athletic organizations, and increasingly, in the corporate world.
Universally beloved writer J.K. Rowling and creator of the Harry Potter series instantly became the target of vitriolic hatred for her alleged “transphobia.” Her golden handprints in Edinburgh were vandalized with red paint intended to symbolize “the blood on her hands” for daring to state a simple scientific fact—that sex is biologically defined.
Even more alarmingly, some climate activists have demanded jail time for those who question the accuracy of predictive computer modeling that forecasts global warming of apocalyptic proportions. “Climate change denial should be a crime,” declared a September 1, 2017, piece in the Outline. In an article, published in the Nation on September 6, 2017, and titled “Climate Denialism Is Literally Killing Us,” Mark Hertsgaard argued that “murder is murder” and that we should “[p]unish it as such.”
Ayn Rand aptly exposes the anti-humanist nature of the modern ecological movement: “Now observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists—amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for ‘harmony with nature’—there is no discussion of man’s needs and the requirements of his survival.” (p. 277)
Environmentalism originated with the positive goal of reducing pollution and protecting natural beauty. Many conservationists launched worthy initiatives to create parks and national reserves. Traditional organizations, such as the Boy Scouts of America, have educated generations of children to respect and protect nature. According to the North American Forest Commission, for example, “[b]y 1997 forest growth exceeded harvest by 42 percent and the volume of forest growth was 380 percent greater than it had been in 1920.”
Such initiatives should serve to benefit humanity by creating a healthier, aesthetically pleasing environment. Modern environmentalists, on the other hand, demand that people refrain from procreating, eating meat, and using airplanes, among other absurd demands. They do not care about improving the human condition but seek to impose population control and destroy free market economies and industrial progress. They advocate extravagant government spending on utopian “green” policies with proven damages—both economic and environmental. In contrast, renowned scientists such as Freeman Dyson, Richard Lindzen, Steven Koonin, to name just a few among nearly 2,000 to date, have refuted the theory that an increase in CO2 emissions poses an existential threat.[*]
Regardless of whether one agrees with the critics of the cancel-culture dogma, they are entitled to free speech. They should not be silenced, slandered, or forced to lose their jobs on account of exercising their constitutional right to free expression. Disagreement is not violence, and neither is silence. Claiming the opposite is nothing short of totalitarian groupthink.
Fortunately, most people are naturally averse to groupthink. If armed with a historical and philosophical understanding of totalitarian theory and practice, and especially if they gain firsthand experiences to enrich this knowledge, most sympathizers of totalitarian policies will redefine themselves as classical liberals and unequivocally reject socialist ideology, including radical environmentalism. Totalitarian fanatics, though unduly influential in intellectual and elitist circles, are but a small percentage of mankind.
There is strength in numbers—and so we must speak out and eradicate cancel culture. Moreover, we must educate each generation to honor the fundamental American traditions of political and economic freedom. This would create a well-informed mass opposition to the tyrannical grip of political correctness, cancel culture, the Great Reset, or any other totalitarian metamorphoses of our times. That is why President Trump’s recent Executive Orders, aiming at neutralizing harmful net-zero policies and leftist globalist green absurdities, couldn’t have been issued at a better time.
* Cf. the detailed analysis and scientific references in Bernstein 2023; Lomborg 2011; Koonin 2021 as well as the informative documentary Climate: The Cold Truth.
Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
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Comments
Ms. Clinton is a fine addition to L.I. She expresses a love of liberty and freedom, clearly reinforced by her background in Bulgaria. But I must question her premise that most people are adverse to group think, My experience is that most people go along to get along, and that the independent thinker is the exception rather than the rule. Yes, education (particularly classical liberalism) yields independent thought, yet academia is a bastion of Marxist dogma. Only some of its graduates are sufficiently independent to cast that away.
My students often comment that I’m “wasting trees” when I pass out work.
I reply, “Tree grow back. Paper companies have a vested interest in maintaining them.”
Exploding heads ensure.
More exploding heads:
Based on current data, significantly more trees are destroyed by wildfires than are used to make paper in this country.
President Trump’s executive orders have mainly focused on reversing the Biden Net Zero policy and the EPA endangerment finding. However, both of these are based on the results from fraudulent climate models that were initially developed back in the 1960s. The climate fraud started with Manabe’s group at the old US Weather Bureau. In 1967 Manabe and Wetherald (M&W) claimed that a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration from 300 to 600 ppm would produce an increase in the ‘equilibrium’ surface temperature of 2.9 °C. This is a mathematical artifact created by the simplistic climate energy transfer assumptions made in the one dimensional radiative convective (1-D RC) model. The same artifact was incorporated into every unit cell of the ‘highly simplified’ global circulation model (GCM) described by M&W in 1975. Additional errors related to a ‘slab’ ocean were introduced by Manabe and Stouffer in 1979.
The 1967 M&W model was copied by the NASA Goddard group in 1976 and used to create warming for 10 ‘minor species’ including methane and nitrous oxide [Wang et al, 1976]. Later, in 1981 Hansen et al added a slab ocean to their model and ‘tuned’ it to match a global mean temperature record. They used a combination of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration and changes in both the solar energy and volcanic aerosols to adjust the model warming artifacts so that they resembled the temperature record. This provided the foundation for the pseudoscience of radiative forcings, feedbacks and climate sensitivity still used by the climate models today. The warming artifacts created by these early climate models became such a lucrative source of research funding that the climate model errors have never been corrected.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 to address only human induced climate change. The US deep state version of the IPCC, the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) was established in 1990 to address both human and natural climate change. Instead, it has copied the IPCC and only considered human caused (anthropogenic) change. The climate modeling fraud is clearly demonstrated in Figures 1.5, 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 of the Fifth National Climate Assessment Report (NCA5) published by the USGCRP in 2023. Figure 1.5 shows a global mean temperature record that has nothing to do with CO2 induced climate change. Figure 3.1 claims that the observed increase in the meaningless global meant temperature record is caused by radiative forcings. Figure 3.2 shows the various feedbacks used to manipulate the radiative forcings and Figure 3.3 shows the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) created by the climate models from the 1979 Charney Report through all six of the IPCC Climate Assessment Reports.
NCA5 is a pack of lies that was largely copied from the Sixth IPCC Climate Assessment Report. There is no CO2 induced global warming. Nor can CO2 have any effect on ‘extreme weather’. The fraud in NCA5 can be traced back to the 1967 paper by Manabe and Wetherald. This fraud is easy to detect. Any climate model that has a climate sensitivity (temperature increase produced by a CO2 doubling) that is more than ‘too small to measure’ is fraudulent. This includes all of the large scale climate models currently used by NOAA, NASA, DOE/National Labs and universities (NSF funded climate models). All of the ‘research’ groups associated with these models should be shut down along with all of the secondary ‘economic impact’ models – cost of carbon etc. The USGCRP should also be shut down. At present it has a budget of about 5 billion dollars.
The climate modeling fraud is considered in more detail in ‘A Nobel Prize for Climate Modeling Errors’[https://doi.org/10.53234/scc202404/17]. The reasons for rejecting NCA5 are discussed in the Tom Nelson podcast # 271 [ https://youtu.be/PsM4aOmCb_U%5D. The invalid use of the global mean temperature record as a measure of climate change is addressed in the Researchgate preprint ‘A Proposed Definition of Climate and Climate Change for IEEE PP2030 and Related Standards’
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/386555762_A_Proposed_Definition_of_Climate_and_Climate_Change_for_IEEE_PP2030_and_Related_Standards#fullTextFileContent].
Detailed references are given in the ‘Nobel Prize’ paper
The climate started changing as soon as there was a climate. The Earth has been both warmer and cooler than it is now. Which one is correct, and who gets to choose? The real hoax is the notion that humans can control earth’s temperature. It is just a scheme to control trillions of dollars, tax dollars.
Financial scheme, yes, but it’s also about population control in both senses of the word: not only limiting the number of humans, but micromanaging every aspect of an individual’s life.
Climate cultism is fundamentally anti-human.
We’re witnessing a moment similar to when the kid observes that the emperor is naked, in the fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” It takes one person to point out the obvious and underscore the charade that has been going on. #47 is exposing the destructive and self-defeating charades of the “transgender” cultists, the racial grievance cultists (“DEI”/”Affirmative Action”), the environmental cultists (“ESG,” “green” energy and “climate change”). There’s plenty of Dhimmi-crat hustlers and hustles to be exposed.
Wonderful article,. very thought provoking; and I love the tie in to the inane speech is violence and silence is violence era we appear to be exiting from. When merely saying something irreverent or even offensive was suddenly and act of violence and then not jumping on a band wagon and condemning and canceling that person was also violence. 2019 to 2021 was really scary, It saw friends calling each other racists on-line and ending relationships over supposed “violence” that was really just a bad joke, a disagreement and/or offensive remark etc. etc. No actual violence of course had occurred and real violence of rioting, destructive protests that shut down highways etc. was being justified and declared “mostly peaceful.” Free speech is so fragile and so easily brusheed aside by whoever is in control in the name always of advancing some lofty abstract goal: diversity, equity, climate justice. It’s easy to dupe young people into suspending their own right to free speech for these “goals,” without them ever realizing that they are sacrificing their very humanity, self agency and independence. I hope we are emerging from this delusion, as we all grow as people when we allow diversity of thought and engage in real debate and conversation with people who think differently from ourselves; instead of scolding, threatening, shaming, and canceling.
I bet 9 out of 10 members of the Climate Cange Cult would say “yes” if asked whether having zero carbon dioxide would be good. In fact, the only thing good about it would be a sharp drop in the need for Ozempic, due to universal starvation.😊
One thing that always saddened me about the whole Climate Change fraud was the destruction of “Science” as a discipline. “Science” is a methodology which rigidly adheres to empiricism. However since the 1980’s (?) Science has become diluted because we’ve allowed anyone with a B.S. degree to self-assume the title of Scientist. Jesus? Out! Believe the man in the white coat!
Up into at least the 1970’s Scientists were the new priests of our culture. They’d proven their power and authority with their successes with curing polio, creating plastics, creating the transistor, creating the computer, and, of course, the atomic bomb.
Now they are in disrepute, because unlike Medicine or Law they have had no governing body to keep the charlatans out. The charlatans often have knowledge but they don’t have any ethical code that stops them from spinning their data or building nonsense extrapolations. This will ruin their authority with the populace. Think what Doctor Fauci has done to trust in science. Climate Change is another fraud being exposed, The failure of electric cars is also a loss for trust.
However a new God has appeared on the eastern horizon and is ascending fast. There are still doubters but I predict in 20 years this new God will be seen as infallible. His name is A.I. and all will worship his wisdom.*
*Sadly I am personally a non-believer but the masses will adore him because of his (supposedly) dispassionate desire to “do the right thing”