Have you ever seen The Music Man? If not, or if you don’t remember it very well, it’s the story of a wandering charlatan by the name of Harold Hill who travels from town to town persuading parents that their children can only be saved from great and immediate moral danger by getting into music, specifically a marching band led by him. All the parents need to do is fork over the cash to “Professor” Harold Hill, and he can order all the necessary musical instruments and uniforms and set these wayward youth back on the straight and narrow. Only once the parents of the town have given him their money, the infamous and unscrupulous Harold Hill never orders the instruments and uniforms. Instead he pockets the cash and quietly skips town before anyone’s the wiser.
My junior year of high school, I played a small role in a Hillsboro High School production of The Music Man. It was the first and only play or musical I ever participated in. I was a cocky, overconfident homeschool kid with a good voice and memory for lines. Coming into a public high school theater program and not knowing any better, I tried out for the lead role of Harold Hill.
And I almost got that lead role, I would add, but ended up in the barbershop quartet instead. Perhaps it was on account of my being a homeschool kid not in attendance at the public high school, much less its drama class. All the same, it wasn’t too far into rehearsals that I’d learned not only my own lines, and not just Harold Hill’s lines, but everyone else’s as well. I knew all the dialogue and all the parts in all the songs, and I’d stand around backstage during practices and the performances mouthing and singing absolutely everything when it wasn’t my turn.
Now you may be wondering. What does any of this have to do with Global Warming? I’ll explain. Just last week I found myself remembering again con artist Harold Hill from The Music Man in relation to Global Warming.
I was watching a video put out by NASA explaining that Antarctic sea ice had just mysteriously broken a record maximum, but that this somehow doesn’t disprove the doomsday Global Warming hypothesis. Please watch that video yourself and tell me if you hear an explanation of why where I didn’t. I think we can safely assume NASA scientists don’t know how this broken record doesn’t mean what we all think it means because they would surely explain it to us if they themselves understood.
All the same, whether they explain or not, these NASA scientists and many like them continue to assure us like so many Chicken Littles that, despite evidence to the contrary, the sky is indeed still falling and we need to continue being very, very afraid. Oh, and don’t forget to continue funding and empowering them so they can solve mysteries like how Antarctic ice can see a record-breaking increase when the Earth is getting hotter. it’s just like Micah Hershberger wrote in his recent 10 Reasons To Be A Global Warming Skeptic articles: “Heads I win, tails you lose.”
Now it’s been over a decade since my small part in that Hillsboro High School production of The Music Man, so the lines of dialogue and song lyrics aren’t quite as fresh in my memory as they once were. Yet as I pondered record-breaking Antarctic sea ice growth juxtaposed with German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s assertion that global climate change is driving the refugee crises, the words to the song Ya Got Trouble started randomly playing in my head.
Mothers of River City!
Heed the warning before it’s too late!
Watch for the tell-tale sign of corruption!
The moment your son leaves the house,
Does he re-buckle his knickerbockers below the knee?
Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger?
A dime novel hidden in the corn crib?
Is he starting to memorize jokes from Capt. Billy’s Whiz Bang?
Are certain words creeping into his conversation?
Words like ‘swell? “
And ‘so’s your old man? “
Well, if so my friends,
Ya got trouble,
Right here in River city!
With a capital “T”
And that rhymes with “P”
And that stands for Pool.
Oh yes, ya got trouble! Right here on planet Earth. Only it starts with a W, not a P, and that W stands for what used to be known as Weather. We now refer to it as “Global Warming.”
Al Gore starring as Professor Harold Hill.
In place of Harold Hill in this real-life Music Man, we have Al Gore. Using persuasive pieces of evidence such as clips from The Simpson’s in his well-known 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth, Gore has more ardently than anyone championed the re-branding of weather as a man-made phenomenon for which we all need to repent and pay the piper before it’s too late.
Relying heavily on rhetorical sleight of hand and a compliant mainstream media, academia, and scientific community, An Inconvenient Truth is brilliant fear-mongering and guilt-tripping designed to browbeat the developed world into believing that our use of everything from factories to automobiles is wicked and reckless.
Just like white people need not even know they are, but simply are racist by virtue of being born white; just like men need not be aware of their sexism in order to be guilty of oppressing women by opening doors for them; modern citizens of the West generally and America in particular are inadvertently destroying Mother Earth. Never you mind whether we’ve known we were doing it or meant to. We are nevertheless guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors against the planet.
This all sounds terribly dire, of course. Who wants to be guilty of murdering their own planet? Lucky for us, Al Gore offers solutions to these catastrophic problems we didn’t know we had. By calling on us like a great environmentalist evangelist to repent of our sinful reliance on fossil fuels like oil and coal, Al Gore is really issuing a rallying cry to join his green revolution and join him in a global rain dance.
Convert or die; turn from your wicked ways, ye sinful SUV drivers, and buy electric or hybrid cars. Put solar panels and wind turbines on your house instead of buying electricity generated by the burning of coal. Fork over copious amounts of cash for investment in “sustainable” companies and “green energy” – especially the companies Gore conveniently acquired significant interests in before launching his global awareness crusade. In effect, prepare to pay more to want, buy, and use less because the environmentalists want your money.
But don’t stop there!
It’s not enough for you to make these choices on your own. Al Gore implores you to prove just how much you believe in his moral crusade by lobbying your government to levy carbon taxes against oil and coal companies. Fund, lobby, and vote only for those politicians and scientists who promise to intercede on our behalf with Mother Earth. Without them there is no way we’ll be able to assuage the planet’s wrath and prevent the certain destruction she has planned for us or our beloved children and grandchildren.
Yes, Al Gore is a real-life Harold Hill on a global scale. Where the confidence artist in The Music Man railed against boys playing billiards in a pool hall in order to sell musical instruments he had no intention of delivering, this one rails against hurricanes and droughts as if their frequency and severity are our fault, as if these are man-made phenomenon. And he does this not to sell us bright jackets and shiny trombones, but solar panels, wind turbines, and a global political revolution.
Only instead of skipping town, all Al Gore has to do is point to natural disasters as old as history itself as proof of his claims, and warn of an impending disaster which wouldn’t occur in our lifetime even in the direst projections and computer models.
So long as the sea levels continue not rising by 15-50 feet as a result of melting polar ice, so long as we don’t all burn up when the Earth gets as hot as Venus, Al Gore can continue claiming that there’s still time, that perhaps we’ve achieved a small modicum of success for our efforts to date. What’s more, so long as the due date for our destruction is generations away, his predictions can’t be proven completely false. We haven’t been completely and utterly destroyed yet because not enough time has passed. Because he cleverly set the goalpost of his climate forecasts beyond all our lifetimes, Gore will be able to continue insisting we must do more to combat Global Warming for as long as he still draws breath.
The Environmentalists Want Your Money
Making claims of impending disaster within the next 50-100 years is not only convenient in this way, however. A recurring theme in speeches delivered by Al Gore and others regarding the crisis of Global Warming is the moral imperative of not ruining the environment for our children and grandchildren. Like Harold Hill coaxing dollars from parents concerned about their sons playing billiards, Al Gore urges your investment in his green revolution with a similar plucking of heartstrings to “do it for the children.”
Now obviously I care a great deal about my children. I want them to have a bright and prosperous future full of goodness, happiness, and prosperity. And likewise, I want to someday see my children grow up and have children of their own, and I want those children also to have good lives. So naturally the warning cry of Al Gore and the Global Warming alarmists grabs my attention right away as soon as it mentions that these future generations of my descendants may be put in real jeopardy by either our generation’s action or inaction toward the environment.
And yes, you did read that right. My wife Lauren and I have six children. You can assume at least two things from that fact. First, we received but ignored the memo that everyone needs to reduce their carbon footprint. So far we’ve multiplied ourselves three times over through our offspring, and don’t be so sure we’re done yet either. Second, our household suffers no shortage of laundry to wash, dry, fold, and put away. Concerned about Global Warming and curious as to what the case for it is, I recently spent an afternoon watching a series of TED Talks on the subject while I helped my wife catch up on a couple days’ worth of that laundry needing folded. Unsurprisingly, this playlist began with two Al Gore presentations back-to-back.
The first of these two speeches was ten years old. Given in 2006, Averting The Global Climate Crisis preceded Gore’s now famous film An Inconvenient Truth by a few months. It seems he was really trying to pace himself and warm the crowd up slowly given his obvious sense of urgency because Global Warming’s champion spent the first 7 of 16 minutes casually complaining and joking about what it’s like not being Vice President anymore, and how painful and tragic it is not having a chauffeur and motorcade like he would have had he assumed the Presidency instead of George W. Bush in 2000.
Once his only half-joking self-pity had passed, however, Gore launched into a list of 15 things we need to do to avert the global climate crisis. And in closing he made what I thought was a very telling appeal:
“Help with the mass persuasion campaign that will start this spring. We have to change the minds of the American people. Because presently, the politicians do not have permission to do what needs to be done.
In our modern country, the role of logic and reason no longer includes mediating between wealth and power the way it once did. It’s now repetition of short, hot-button, 30-second, 28-second television ads. We have to buy a lot of those ads.
Let’s re-brand global warming, as many of you have suggested. I like “climate crisis” instead of “climate collapse,” but again, those of you who are good at branding, I need your help on this. Somebody said the test we’re facing now, a scientist told me, is whether the combination of an opposable thumb and a neocortex is a viable combination.”
In other words, Gore was making an emotional appeal to the global leaders who show up at TED conferences – TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design – asking them to use everything at their disposal to help him manipulate the masses into changing their mind about Global Warming, which the masses weren’t really buying at that point. In effect, all his talk of advertisement and branding and persuasion amounted to one very simple request: ‘help me sell Global Warming.’
And apparently the folks at TED and others did just that. In 2008’s New Thinking On The Climate Crisis, Gore was able to report back cheerfully to his TED audience both that:
“I have given the slideshow that I gave here two years ago about 2,000 times.”
And also that:
“68% of Americans now believe that human activity is responsible for global warming.”
In this way Al Gore validated the old quote from Vladimir Lenin that “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”
The Environmentalist Green Revolution, Like Communism, Marries Government Coercion to Corporate Greed
The lie of Global Warming delivered by Al Gore is as convenient as any ever told by a Soviet propagandist on orders from Vladimir Lenin, replete with faulty and misleading statistics reminiscent of something that might have been published in Pravda back in the USSR’s heyday. Here too, once the mask of moral crusading for our children’s and grandchildren’s future is removed, we see that the reason Global Warming propaganda is sold to the masses is to achieve political as well as economic purposes.
The masses need to be swayed not only so those individuals personally convinced by the Global Warming narrative will invest their own monies in “sustainable” and “renewable” technologies and products and the companies that produce them. Just as in Communist Russia, that wouldn’t be nearly enough, and the green zealots can’t trust the realization of Utopia to the free market or the evil invisible hand of Adam Smith. The real end goal is for the masses to elect and empower politicians all over the globe who are prepared to do what’s necessary to combat the threat to humanity posed by man-made climate disruption.
In effect, Al Gore was calling for a political revolution when he stated in 2008:
“As important as it is to change the light bulbs, it is more important to change the laws. And when we change our behavior in our daily lives, we sometimes leave out the citizenship part and the democracy part. In order to be optimistic about this, we have to become incredibly active as citizens in our democracy. In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis. And we have one.”
But of course Al Gore would say we have a democracy crisis. When he made these remarks he had just spent the last two years convincing 68% of Americans that reckless human activity was making the planet hotter, and dangerously so. But when Gore delivered his update to TED, the new-found majority he was then able to tout wasn’t being reflected yet in the halls of power. The United States government still didn’t have sufficient authority or will to intervene on the grand scale he had advocated. What’s more, Al Gore still hasn’t gotten over the fact that he isn’t Vice President anymore, or that he didn’t end up getting to be President in 2000.
Yet it would seem Gore found the next best thing to being the leader of the free world in championing Global Warming as a catalyst for political revolution in America and around the world, especially when the political change he’s called for has been for the stated goal of fundamentally transforming all the economies of the world.
At almost the exact middle of Gore’s New Thinking On the Climate Crisis TED Talk, he explains:
“We need to do it for our own economy. The latest figures show that the old model is not working. There are a lot of great investments that you can make. If you are investing in tar sands or shale oil, then you have a portfolio that is crammed with sub-prime carbon assets. And it is based on an old model. Junkies find veins in their toes when the ones in their arms and their legs collapse. Developing tar sands and coal shale is the equivalent. Here are just a few of the investments that I personally think make sense. I have a stake in these, so I’ll have a disclaimer there. But geothermal, concentrating solar, advanced photovoltaics, efficiency and conservation.”
Wait, we need to do what again for our economy? What had Gore been talking about right before recommending you pour money into and help him promote companies and industries he’s already bought a significant stake in? Nothing less than carbon taxation.
For the past decade and more, Al Gore has been pressing for the election of politicians who would impose a punitive carbon tax, particularly on oil and natural gas and coal companies, in an effort to put them out of business or severely curtail their ability to operate and expand. Not content to let the free market sort it out, Al Gore presses tirelessly for the coercive force of government to hurt those fossil fuel companies and their ability to do business while at the same time promoting and subsidizing the alternatives he’s already invested his money in.
For Global Warming being such An Inconvenient Truth, how convenient a reality is this political and economic revolution for Al Gore?
Ladies and gentlemen, if this isn’t a case of crony capitalism at its finest, I don’t know what is.
Make investments in business, cook up a crisis in desperate need of being addressed by the politicians; then lobby your government connections to help your investments prosper by hurting their competitors and even subsidizing and promoting the businesses you’ve bought lots of stock in. Then, voila! You’ve got yourself some tidy little profits for your initial investments, especially if you bought low before the “need” and subsequent demand for those investments had been perceived by the rest of the market.
Al Gore’s Global Warming cause is an absolute classic, and Al Gore really is quite a clever man. But then so was The Music Man Harold Hill, and so are all good con artists.
In short, Global Warming is a scam, a con job, and a fraud on a scale probably unprecedented in human history. It doesn’t matter how you brand it or what you call it – Global Warming, Climate Change, Climate Disruption – it still amounts to an effort at scaring the masses into personally and corporately taking money and power from the people Al Gore doesn’t like and giving it to Al Gore and the people and businesses he does like. Despite all their dubious professions of good intentions and smug moral superiority, at the end of the day the environmentalists want your money, and are prepared to use every means at their disposal – entertainment, academia, political correctness, and government coercion, you name it – to make sure you give it to them.
