On Thursday, June 14^th of this year, I attended the CBIA 2023 Energy & Environment Conference. The EPA, Connecticut’s Department of Energy, NGOs, public utilities, law firms, environmental consulting firms, and other private enterprises were represented. Four themes were prevalent throughout:

1. Green (without being defined) is good.
2. Fossil fuels (without being defined) are bad.
3. The billions of tax dollars available through the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act will fund myriad (green) energy-related programs.
4. Decarbonization = efficiency.

The audience, for the most part, was rapt in ideological agreement. And no one questioned any of it.

I had many questions. But since I was a guest of one of the conference’s sponsors, I kept them to myself then. But I’d like to ask them now. Chief among them, in no particular order, are these:

• Aside from green is good and fossil fuels are bad, how can we achieve any objectives without defining them realistically?
• How can spending billions of tax dollars and deficit-deepening dollars reduce inflation?
• How does decarbonization equate to efficiency?
• Since CO² comprises just 0.04 percent of the earth’s atmosphere, how did it get to be the Climate Change Boogey Man?
• Since plant life can’t exist at CO² levels at or below 0.02 percent, why don’t we drop the green ideology and put more green plants in the ground — you know, the ones that consume CO² and release oxygen?
• And if one of the unintended consequences of meddling with the environment is to reduce the level of CO² beyond the point at which green plant life can be sustained, how do the folks who put on the CBIA 2023 Energy & Environment Conference rationalize the green plants in their own logo?

Willful Suspension of Disbelief

Much of accepting the climate-change agenda is akin to watching a fantasy movie or a CGI-fest superhero movie. We have to suspend our disbelief. We’re supposed to take on faith the proposition that human beings — with only about 260 years or so of industry under our belts — are responsible for changing the climate of a dynamic planet, formed more than 4.5 billion years ago, and constituting some 197 million square miles. And we’re supposed to do that for two reasons:

The first is fear. It’s a fulfillment of our primal need to find bogeymen — the Manticore, Grendel, Kraken, the Griffin, Hydra, et al.— the myriad manifestations of the tyrant monsters that have sprung from our dark subconscious from time immemorial. Because of that dark subconscious and its capacity to strike debilitating fear, people still plumb the depths of Loch Ness looking for the monster. People still comb the forests and mountains in search of Sasquatch. And Al Gore still isn’t behind bars for fraud.

The second reason for climate-change hysteria is control. We’re being manipulated to surrender our independence and our empirical senses to serve The Big Machine of totalitarian bureaucracy and wealth redistribution (which might be a distinction without a difference). We’re succumbing to death by a thousand concessions of our sovereignty and self-determination to groupthink, doublespeak, and government-generated, hysteria-inducing, reality-denying, wealth-redistributing propaganda. Most telling: We’re being relentlessly conditioned to deny that reality. We’ve done those who wish to control us, frighten us, and take our Money into passive, unquestioning submission a huge favor by showing up to their dance, fully panicked and pathologically gullible on arrival. Shame on us.

Cause and Effect

Fear, fatalism, hopelessness, shock, Trauma, strained Relationships, substance abuse, loss of personal identity and control, Anxiety, Grief, Depression, conflict avoidance, helplessness, and resignation have all been attributed to climate change. That’s exactly backward: The settled-science threat of anthropogenic climate change causes and depends entirely on our being gullible enough to be induced into paranoia unto delusional pathology.

This is all about emotion. We’re not supposed to be curious and objective enough to think and to reach our own conclusions. We’re supposed to feel. To feel what? Fear.

We don’t have to see eye-to-eye on this or anything else. All of us can’t possibly have the same values, the same predispositions, the same expectations. And we don’t have to share interpretations of evidence. But we should all be unified in the conviction that every piece of ostensible evidence — every source of that evidence and the agendas behind every one of those sources — should be questioned, examined, and held to a standard higher than any political or media narrative.

If we’re not unified in that conviction, we’ll be green with stupefaction.

Originally Published on https://www.bizcatalyst360.com/category/lifecolumns/notes-to-self/

Mark O'Brien Writer, Blogger

I'm the founder and principal of O'Brien Communications Group (obriencg.com) and the co-founder and President of EinSource (einsource.com). I'm a lifelong writer. My wife, Anne, and I have two married sons and four grandchildren. I'm having the time of my life.