WASHINGTON, DC, July 14 — There he goes again. Gregory Wrightstone, the well-known activist, who dismisses the claims of climate change proponents, recently opined on a little-known effort by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to require publicly-held companies to reveal their carbon emissions.
Wrightstone is a geologist, the Executive Director of the CO2 Coalition and the author of a book that offers some Inconvenient Facts: The Science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know. It’s a layman’s expose of the “apocalyptic predictions about our ever dynamic climate.”
As he put it in a recent article he wrote for the RealClear Energy website, “By proposing that companies take extraordinary measures to account for climate risks, the SEC embraces a false climate emergency based on a premise that emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from human activity threaten earth with catastrophic warming. None of this is true. Yet, the SEC — mimicking a climate-industrial complex that demonizes carbon-emitting fossil fuels — presents an apocalyptic outlook with the certitude of pre-Reformation popes 500 years ago.”
Climate change — whether it is a real threat to the future of the world or an exceptionally controversial theory that has become a political issue, particularly among Democrats and the progressive left, doesn’t seem to be resonating with the public at large. Gallup polls that ask “what is the most important problem” facing this country today show that a mere 3% of respondents answered, climate change. Yet lawmakers and enforcers on the left have managed to use it to make our lives more and more uncomfortable and expensive.
A few weeks ago, on June 30, as the Supreme Court got ready to shut down its most recent session, it handed down a decision in the West Virginia v. EPA case, striking down the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. But the Court has at least two more climate change cases to decide when it returns in the fall. In Louisiana v. Biden the court will determine whether the Federal government is allowed to use the social cost of carbon for making decisions. Social cost refers to economic costs, or damages, of emitting one additional ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere without looking “at any of the benefits of carbon dioxide,” Wrightstone told Newsmax. The second focuses on the validity of the Securities and Exchange decision requiring public companies to keep track of their carbon footprints.
There’s no doubt that our government’s “apostles of climate change” will find other ways of regulating greenhouse gasses.
There are many of us who believe that climate change has been with us since the beginning of time, that the earth’s climate is not and never has been static and is ever changing. And among the “many” are tens of thousands of experts in the field. The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine conducted a survey that resulted in at least “31,000 scientists [saying] there is ‘no convincing evidence’ that humans can or will cause ‘catastrophic’ heating of the atmosphere.”
In his interview with Newsmax, Wrightstone said that to put global warming in a proper context there are several facts that need to be taken into account. “We have some of the lowest levels of carbon dioxide currently in all of earth’s history. We’re at 420 today. The average for all of earth’s history is 2,600 parts per million…It’s gotten as high as seven or eight thousand.” He went on to say that global warming began some 300 years ago. But, he added, “We really began adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in significant amounts in the mid-20th century. So, the first 250 years of that warming trend had to have been entirely naturally driven.”
Dr. William Happer, professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University, got the proverbial last word in the Newsmax coverage of the issue: “There isn’t a climate crisis. There will not be a climate crisis. It is utter nonsense.”