Lord Christopher Monckton, chief policy advisor to the Science and Public Policy Institute and expert for the Heartland Institute, joined Breitbart News Saturday on Sirius XM Patriot Radio.
The Economist called the Heartland Institute “the world’s most prominent think tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate change.”
Monckton has held positions with the British press and in government, as a press officer at the Conservative Central Office in the UK, and as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s policy advisor.
In 1986, Monckton was among the first to advise the prime minister that “global warming” caused by carbon dioxide should be investigated. Monckton has since become a vocal advocate that global warming — subsequently called climate change, most recently camouflaged by the term “sustainable development,” doesn’t exist.
Lord Monckton told BNS co-hosts Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon and Editor-in-Chief Alexander Marlow that, judging by Hillary Clinton’s re-launch speech on Saturday in New York, he doesn’t expect her to give much attention to climate change in her 2016 presidential run.
The topic of climate change is “beginning to smell like a Kipper that went behind the radiator and has been there too long,” Monckton jibed. “I don’t think they’re going to play this very big. Obama’s done it because everything else he’s touched has failed.”
Monckton believes the Obama administration is spending vast amounts of money on “trashing their own economy by driving every steelworks and aluminum works overseas, by not allowing the development of the XL pipeline, interfering with fracking, and establishing a war on coal.” He contends that all of this has had “catastrophic effects on the jobs of the very people that will be foolishly voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016.”
Bannon asked Monckton why does he believe Pope Francis is getting involved in the climate change movement, which he is about to justify in a Vatican encyclical this week.
Monckton explained that if one looks at the book of Genesis (“with dominion over the earth comes responsibility”) and heroes of the church like St. Francis of Assisi, taking care of the earth has always been “part of established Catholic social teachings. Nothing new in any of that. But what happened was a communist managed to get control of the pontifical academies of sciences and social sciences—Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo.”
According to Monckton, Sorondo is an “out and out marxist who decided that climate change was useful to marxism.” Monckton said that Sorondo could care less whether climate change is true or not. He ignored information from the Vatican’s most influential scientists demonstrating that global warming was more theoretical than empirical.
Francis, who was brought up in the Communist tradition of liberation theology in Latin America, encourages Sorondo. Previous popes like John Paul II and Benedict believed you have to let skeptics have their say. Pope Francis, Monckton argues, lets Sorondo dominate his head exclusively.
Monckton further explained that Francis is influenced by extremist Professor John Schnellnhuber, founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who said in 2009 at a climate conference in Copenhagen that if we let global warming continue, six billion of the seven billion people on earth will be killed by it.
Monckton said that Schnellnhuber will be standing by the side of Pope Francis when they announce the encyclical next week. “The fact that Schnellnhuber is going to be there is an extremely bad sign,” he declared.
The influence that Schnellnhuber may have had over the papal letter worries Monckton. The fact that he will be there next to the pope suggests to Monckton that Francis is thanking him for having written the climate portion of the encyclical.