According to the Washington Post, which he owns, Jeff Bezos of Amazon has just given $791 million to climate activists, with $9 billion to follow. Which isn’t chump change even to him. It certainly isn’t to us, though unfortunately we’re not the climate activists he has in mind. So let’s finally put to rest the meme that climate deniers are lavishly paid hacks picking on the poor underfunded alarmists, which is not just a conspiracy theory but one that flies with particular chutzpah in the face of the evidence.
It’s curious to hear over and over again that in addition to being venal scoundrels we have disappeared entirely. As Bill McKibben just asserted, saying of “classic climate denial” that “Outside of the Trump Administration and the right wing of the Republican Party, that’s now a dead letter”. Well, to coin a phrase, “We’re not dead yet”.
Of course not having Jeff Bezos’ deep pockets to raid, while still needing to pay the rent, we must keep gently reminding you to chip in what you can. Bezos clearly doesn’t expect the alarmists to work for free, and neither should those who want to encourage the few left who are fool enough to push back against the tide.
That preliminary point dealt with, the key thing is that if we were in it for the money, we wouldn’t be climate skeptics. We’d be alarmists. Look at their fancy professorships with tenure and six-figure salaries and defined-benefit pensions and their attitude of superiority. Look at their billion dollar foundations and lavish granting programs. Look at their multimillion dollar government grants and recall Eisenhower’s warning “that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite”. Look at the kudos they enjoy from the jet set. And then just when you’re thinking life couldn’t get any better, Jeff Bezos drops by with billions in subsidies.
Or maybe they weren’t thinking it couldn’t get any better. According to the Post, “’Climate change is the biggest crisis facing humanity but, despite lots of great work, has been an underfunded area of philanthropy,’ said Jules Kortenhorst, head of the Rocky Mountain Institute, which received $10 million.” To which we at CDN can only say that if you were feeling all underfunded and impoverished there at RMI with your 260 staff members and your funding from four U.S. government agencies, the California Energy Commission, the City of Boulder, the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, the UN and the World Bank before Jeff dropped by with the latest $10 mill to add to your annual $55 million budget, we’ll swap your clothes for our barrel just as soon as we carve the word “irony” into it.
Now Bezos is a private individual and, as we believe in liberty, we think he is entitled to make money selling people things they want, and then to spend that money as he chooses. Not just legally, though certainly we support private property rights. Morally. We didn’t found Amazon or make it work, he did. And while there are certainly pitfalls in having money, ways to spend it that are not good for the soul, it is impossible to spend money in virtuous ways unless one gets to choose how to spend it. (We might add that, life being what it is, rich people like everyone else very often have to make mistakes before they can learn lessons.)
So it’s his money and he can spend it on whatever he likes. Including climate alarmism times ten. But what he cannot do, and neither can anyone else, is tell lies. For instance that the alarmists are David and the deniers are Goliath, or that they are Bob Cratchit and we are Scrooge and Marley.
The politicians are alarmists. The professors are alarmists. The bankers are alarmists. Even the oil companies are alarmists (and much good may it do them). The movie stars are alarmists, with few exceptions. The rock stars are alarmists. They have the money and the prestige and the money and also the money. So at least stop with the character assassination and instead try to explain why with all that money, you’re having so much trouble persuading people and your computer models don’t work.
Thanks for a true and heartfelt commentary. Even our outstanding men are becoming the worst of men, like Bezos.
One often wonders why is climate alarmism so prevalent. I suggest there are two reasons.
1. Climate alarmism is highly lucrative for those in a position to take advantage of it. Imagine if you will that the terms global warming and climate change had never entered our consciousness. Wind and solar energy, which is a multi-trillion dollar industry, would never have happened. Ditto electric cars. Ditto lucrative research institutes and professorships, entire government departments - the list goes on and on. Climate alarmism is a vast money-making enterprise funded by all of us via increased electricity bills and carbon taxes of one form or another.
2. With the near-demise of Christianity in the West, climate alarmism has filled a gaping spiritual void in most of us that we didn't even realise we had. Without some form of religion the only apparent purpose to our lives would be to acquire more and more material goods and consume more and more services, but even the most rabid shoppers need to stop and ask themselves in the quiet of the night whether there is any more to life than this. Climate alarmism neatly fills that spiritual void; feel virtuous by purchasing an electric car (or feel guilty if you don't), recycle your plastics, vote for politicians who say the right words about fighting climate change, and so on. The old religion is dead, long live climate alarmism!
As someone who works in the, swiftly dying, Alberta oil and gas industry, I've been disgusted by the lack of leadership. Back in 1995, when I started in engineering, I wrote a paper on "global warming". I put a great deal of effort into it, and came to the conclusion that solid evidence of any human related climate change, other than that related to cities themselves, was nowhere to be found. I also commented on the dangers of climate modelling. Having previously studied economics, and economic modelling using econometrics, I was very familiar with the dangers in the math. The industry knew this, and yet the "leaders" decided that playing along with the activists was the way to go. Similar to those now severely agitating and advocating for Covid lockdowns, their incomes were protected (or so they believed). We are now all in severe danger from the re-emergence of failed socialist ideas, and totalitarianism, under the guise of saving the world from a climate catastrophe (or virus). It reminds you of Lenin's comment about capitalists selling the rope used to hang them.
If Jeff Bezos really believed in the climate crisis, he would immediately ground all Amazon trucks and delivery vehicles, disconnect all of his warehouses from the electrical grid, stop all of his forklifts which require fuel and lubrication, stop selling anything which fossil fuels helped fabricate, lubricate or transport. He would quit making and launching his rockets. He would disconnect from the internet because every device currently operating on the internet was made with petroleum based materials. He would quit buying property at the ocean. He would quit encouraging all of us idiots and skeptics from buying from Amazon, since the vary premise of Amazon is immediate gratification and endless purchasing of wants instead of needs.
Thank you, James, for your comments, with which I agree.