Now they’re retreating to a cloud of smoke [to] congratulate themselves on being masters of the universe.
– Rose DeWitt Bukater (from Titanic, portrayed by Kate Winslet)
Who knew how well the screenplay writers of the 1997 blockbuster film, Titanic, would describe the clown-show that annually occurs in Davos, Switzerland?
Absent the “cloud of smoke,” Kate Winslet’s character aptly describes the mentality on display last week at the World Economic Forum (WEF) by numerous attendees who believe themselves to be “masters of the universe,” or at least the planet Earth.
President Biden’s “Climate Ambassador,” John Kerry, who twice married into wealth, at Davos this week confirmed the stereotype: “It’s pretty extraordinary that we, a select group of human beings … are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet.”
The man really believes that about himself.
But Kerry didn’t stop there. He said fighting climate change is going to take “money,” a word he repeated nearly a dozen times in a single breath.
Then there is the perennial False Prophet of Global Warming, former Vice President Albert Gore, who again displayed his anger management issues while he peddled a laundry list of climate hysteria’s greatest hits: “boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers, and the rain bombs and sucking the moisture out of the land, and creating the droughts, and melting the ice and raising the sea level, and causing these waves of [soon, a billion] climate refugees.”
Mr. Gore’s climate tirades have long become shopworn from his more than three decades of provably false claims and predictions. Yet, he still makes them on camera, impervious as ever.
Ambassador Kerry wants every nation to go on “wartime footing” and create “the largest solar field in the world, every day, for the next years” in order to avoid the average global temperature increasing by 1.5 degrees by 2050. “We have to be deploying renewables six times faster than we are today,” he said. Kerry never explains how doing so — at the cost of trillions of dollars that do not exist, using countless square miles of land, and the fossil-fuels needed for backup power — would have any tangible effect on temperature.
Al Gore also presented his Climate TRACE program of satellites being used to identify sources of carbon emissions in “every country, every region and every sector…we can tell you the top [carbon] emitting assets in every country.” Indeed, he acknowledged the program monitors 70,000 sites currently, which will increase to 70 million by year’s end. Call it climate spying on the legal activity of every American, the implications of which are ominous, including harassment and pressure to impose economic and lifestyle limitations. Count on it.
The climate hysteria at the World Economic Forum can be boiled down to two basics: money and power. Messrs. Kerry and Gore and their fellow climate travelers are all about societal control and extracting more money, primarily from U.S. taxpayers.
Except the U.S. Treasury cupboard is bare and we are living on fake, printed dollars. The U.S. is $31 trillion in debt, now with rising interest rates, which makes it way more expensive to finance, and is the main driver in the worst inflation in 40 years. There is no money for solar panels to blanket the planet to fulfill John Kerry’s fantasy, and which would bring no demonstrable benefit besides.
While Kerry and Gore gasbagged their absurdities about the planet to WEF attendees nodding in agreement, lost on all of them is how ultimately pointless, irrelevant and bereft of science is their charade. It’s all talk, including their embellished diagnosis and purported solutions.
While the WEF climate blatherfest proceeded, a trenchant perspective was presented at an Oxford Union Society in England by a comedian named Konstantin Kisin, who co-hosts the podcast, Triggernometry.
Mr. Kisin stipulated climate change as a problem, then nonetheless schooled his audience that climate change will be decided in Asia and Latin America “by poor people who don’t care about saving the planet … because they’re poor.” Twenty percent of households in his native Russia, a middle-income nation comparatively, use out-houses comprised of “a wooden shack with a hole in the ground,” he said — and 120 million people in China do not have enough food and suffer from malnutrition. “You’re not going to get these people to stay poor” to address the climate, which is the invariable result of current climate policies.
Stopping climate change will require “scientific and technological breakthroughs that will create the clean energy that is not only clean but also cheap,” Kisin said. Complaining and protesting by “throw[ing] soup on paintings” won’t improve anything.
Of course, clean and cheap natural gas and nuclear power are readily available now, but that’s another discussion.
Konstantin Kisin’s argument certainly applies to young, climate-brainwashed minds on college campuses but also applies to the self-important elites flying private jets in and out of Davos. But don’t count on the latter group to heed; it’s too enjoyable and lucrative pretending to be “masters of the universe.”
Peter Murphy is Senior Fellow at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a D.C.-based not-for-profit that promotes free market and technological solutions to environment and energy challenges.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.
