“I’ve waited 40 years for this moment.”
In a congressional meeting room, somewhere on Capitol Hill, one of the world’s leading sceptical climate scientists, Dr. Tim Ball, is toasting the advent of the Trump administration.
“I don’t want to use the phrase tipping point because that’s a phrase that has been abused in the scientific area. But I think we’re on the verge of a dramatic shift,” Ball tells the small invited audience of journalists, scientists, think-tankers, lawyers and DC politicos. He’s talking about the war on the Green Blob.
Most of them are scarred veterans of the decades-long battle to expose the man-made global warming scare as what another speaker, Tony Heller, describes as “the biggest scientific deception in history.” Many have suffered personally and professionally for speaking out against the so-called “consensus.” Ball, for example, a distinguished Canadian professor of climatology, has exhausted all his retirement money defending a legal action brought against him by the notorious climate alarmist Michael Mann, creator of the discredited “Hockey Stick”. (You can hear more about Ball’s struggle for truth on my latest Delingpole podcast—he’s a fascinating, articulate man and he has an inspiring story to tell).
But with Trump’s inauguration it will be the beginning of the end for the Green Blob—that sinister cabal of corrupt politicians, UN- and EU-technocrats, bent scientists, shrill activists, rent-seeking corporatists, blood-sucking lawyers and gullible journalists which has held the world to ransom these last four decades by promoting the man-made climate change scare story and other, related environmental scams.
The protests will be fierce: the global decarbonisation industry alone is worth at least $1.5 trillion a year. So many snouts in such a vast trough—they’re not going to give up easily.
One man present, a member of one of Trump’s transition teams, describes it as the climate realists’ “Anzio Moment.” That is, the teams fighting the Green Blob now have their beach head with the arrival of Donald Trump. The only question now is not “if” they’re going to be able to break out; only “when”—and also “how long.”
If you’re a regular Breitbart reader, you’ll probably be under no illusion about just how loathsome the people in the Green Blob are. But just in case you’re not, in case you’re wondering: “Well, hang on. What if the ‘consensus’ scientists are right? What if man-made global warming is a serious problem? What if Donald Trump is about to ruin everything with his sinister right-wing anti-science agenda?” let me tell you just one story which shows why the forthcoming cleaning of the Augean stables (at institutions like NASA, NOAA and most especially the Environmental Protection Agency) is so very, very right and necessary.
The story begins in 2012 in sunny La Jolla, California. A group of key figures from the Green Blob—academics, professional activists, lawyers, scientists, PR agency heads—have gathered to discuss the heist of the century. Their plan is to terrorise big business with a form of environmentalist blackmail, which they will use, in the manner of a Mafia-style protection racket to bully their target companies (with the help of tame lawyers and complicitous government officials) into handing over millions, if not billions, of dollars. This Danegeld will end up being paid to environmental campaign groups of the kind they work for themselves, thus funding yet more vexatious, money-grubbing actions against still more blameless companies.
And the cleverest thing of all is, this heist isn’t even illegal. Environmentalists have been getting away with this sort of thing for years.
You actually know what happens next because you’ll have read it, splashed all over the mainstream media in what became a campaign called “Exxon Knew.” Hillary Clinton (who was then Secretary of State) demanded an investigation into it; a group of alarmist scientists wrote to President Obama demanding he launch a RICO prosecution of Exxon; two supposedly major journalistic exposes were published at Inside Climate News and the LA Times, then eagerly endorsed in such publications as Scientific American and the Guardian.
Sundry environmentalist politicians and activists weighed in with further demands for action, as I reported here.
These activists include Sharon Eubanks, a former US Department of Justice attorney who once helped bring a similar case against Big Tobacco; House Democrats Ted Lieu and Mark DeSaulnier; Canadian eco-loon Bill McKibben (who talks, with characteristic wry understatement, of Exxon’s “sheer, profound, and – I think – unparalleled evil”); and, of course, Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, another attorney determined to use lawfare to shut down the debate on climate change once and for all.
But what had Exxon had actually done to attract all this opprobrium? Short answer: nothing. But that was never the point. The entire scam—essentially blaming Exxon for knowing something about “global warming” it couldn’t possibly have known because, hey, nobody did at the time; they don’t even know now—was purely designed as a shakedown.
Next stage of the plan was for the politicized U.S. legal system to get involved. This it did earlier this year when the grimly inevitable Al Gore turned up in New York to grandstand at a meeting with a bunch of tame Attorneys General from Democrat states to discuss ‘the potential of commencing new investigations or joining ongoing investigations,’ on climate change.
New York AG Eric Schneiderman will appear with Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen and United States Virgin Island Attorney General Claude Walker at 11:30 a.m. at his Manhattan office, 120 Broadway, 25th Floor.
Again this was all just for show. The main purpose, as one well familiar with the case explained to me in DC, was merely to put the frighteners on the chosen target of this campaign, ExxonMobil.
ExxonMobil had been carefully selected as the Green Blob’s shakedown victim because it seemed to fulfil all the necessary criteria. It was a huge oil company with masses of money to squander (its annual revenue is around $270 billion) on environmental pay outs; and, under its CEO Rex Tillerson, it had a track record of corporate cowardice (withdrawing funding from right-wing think tanks; failing to speak up for fossil fuels; kow-towing to greens) which meant that it was considered highly likely not to contest any court action but instead to settle.
The legal case against ExxonMobil would be based on the one used so successfully against Big Tobacco. (One of the key figures in the campaign against Big Tobacco, Stanton Glantz, was present to advise at the La Jolla meeting). Never mind that there were actually no serious similarities: the Big Tobacco companies clearly knew that cigarettes caused cancer; there was no similar knowledge that ExxonMobil possessed about “global warming” that it culpably withheld from its customers. The case, had it gone to court, would have been a nonsense. But that wasn’t the point. The point was, it was never meant to go to court, because ExxonMobil—it had been predicted by the Green Blob—would settle.
Once ExxonMobil had settled, the Green Blob schemed, all the other companies would settle too.
Except it didn’t turn out that way. ExxonMobil—quite remarkably, given Tillerson’s pusillanimity and cautiousness—refused to settle.
The La Jolla plan—which might still yet have stood a chance had Hillary been elected—is now certainly doomed to failure in the Trump era.
But by describing it I hope what I’ve succeeded in doing is giving you an indication of the extraordinary tentacular reach of the Green Blob. For years, the US – and the rest of the Western world—has afforded a climate in which Attorneys General and Senators and Secretaries of State and even Presidents can conspire with university professors and heads of government science institutions and environmental PR companies and green NGOs can exploit green issues in which to wage continual war on both the economy and the consumer, often enriching themselves in the process while the rest of us get poorer and more constrained by needless taxes and regulations.
“Oh come on!” these people have always said when you try to call them on it. “What kind of deranged conspiracy theorist would you have to be to suggest that all these different groups with different interests would be working together to lie about global warming?”
You really don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to believe this stuff, though. All you need is to be cognisant of the facts. These people are crooks. A lot of them should be in prison. In fact, funnily enough, that was the joke that got Tim Ball in trouble with Michael Mann. “He shouldn’t be in Penn State. He should be in the state pen,” Ball quipped.
Not just Michael Mann. They all should.
This scam is a disgrace and has gone on far too long. Trump’s destruction of the Green Blob will come not a moment too soon.