Tom Harris: The Latest Example of Leftwing Climate Hypocrisy

Ceres, the infamous leftist nonprofit supposedly devoted to the sustainability cause, recently released a report on America’s worst greenhouse gas emitters. Of course, mainstream media, including The New York Times and Yahoo News, have eaten up Ceres’ findings and promoted them far and wide.

But the organization’s apparently hypocritical actions paint another story, however. A case could certainly be made that Ceres’ routine work with fossil fuel-related companies and other organizations demonstrates how the “terrible” corporations focused on in its report are really only the worst emitters which have yet to provide donations to Ceres’ ostensibly coin-operated outrage machine.

If emitting carbon dioxide (CO2) is so sinful, then why does Ceres routinely work — and cover for — organizations that release vast quantities of the gas? And why have they focused only on American companies in this report? The developing world now emits far more greenhouse gases than developed countries and communist China’s emissions are now double that of the United States. China also has an out clause under United Nations climate change rules, meaning that it never has to reduce emissions. They must regard Ceres as yet another of the free world’s useful idiots helping advance China’s goal of world domination.  

So, it should surprise no one that China helps fund Ceres. After receiving $5 million from a nonprofit that has an arm in the country and direct ties to their government, Ceres praised the regime’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative without mentioning any of the program’s environmental implications or the fact that the China is obviously enemy number one to true believes in the climate change cause.

And how about Norway? Their government owns “Oil Fund,” a sovereign wealth fund that is the largest of its kind in the world and is, as the name would imply, riddled with oil money. And, of course, the country is one of Europe’s largest oil producers. Yet Ceres is still happy to take money from the Norwegian government’s “Norwegian International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI)?” And when the NICFI announced a bilateral partnership with Guyana in 2013, Ceres’s CEO president Minday Lubber praised the actions in Forbes magazine: “Norway is paying for measured results by Guyana in delivering services that cool the planet’s climate by avoiding the destruction of trees.”

Oh, and how about Ceres accepting money from Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), whose mismanagement caused wildfires Lubber embarrassingly blamed on climate change? That makes no sense, of course. Rising temperatures and increasing CO2 both act to increase soil moisture and so reduce the potential of fires. When temperatures rise, evaporation increases, causing more precipitation which increases soil moisture and so lessens fire risk. As CO2 rises, stomata, the pores in plant’s leaves, are open for shorter lengths of time. Plants therefore lose less water to the air and so more of it stays in the soil, again reducing fire potential. Yet Ceres’ boss even testified before Congress that PG&E became bankrupt because of, you guessed it, climate change, not the company’s misguided behavior. 

Last year, the Heritage Foundation’s Steve Moore explored further the issue of Ceres’ hypocrisy.

To be clear, the companies that Ceres mentioned in its worst emitters report — and even many of those Ceres has received donations from — haven’t done anything wrong. Far from it. These businesses are just making sure the world remains fueled throughout the worst energy crisis it’s faced since the stagflation-filled 1970s. The problem isn’t them, it’s Ceres.

Intentional or not, Ceres’ selective outrage gives off the “donate to our organization or else be tarred and feathered by us and our powerful friends in the mainstream media” vibe. That looks a lot more like extortion than it does environmental justice.

Environmental hypocrisy from leftists is nothing new. I have written about it often. From Bill Gates getting in a bidding war for the world’s private jet operator just one month after writing a book on climate change to so-called climate warrior Elon Musk’s hundreds of thousands of miles of private jet use, there is certainly no shortage of stories for this booming beat. 

Mainstream media wouldn’t print studies coming from anti-gun groups that take money from the NRA. It wouldn’t print quotes from anti-abortion groups or leaders who partner with Right to Life. Why, then, does Ceres get a free pass?

It is situations like this that explain why America’s confidence in the media is at record lows. According to a Gallup poll released days ago, just 16% and 11% of U.S. adults now have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers and television news respectively, a five-percent decrease from last year. Given the rampant hypocrisy, bias, and whitewashing they see on a regular basis, why should they?

The real crisis isn’t greenhouse gas emissions. After all, the Climate Change Reconsidered series of reports of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change summarize thousands of studies from peer-reviewed scientific journals that show that the climate scare is unscientific nonsense.  The real problem is out-of-control regulations and ideology-based decisions that have gotten the world into the current energy crisis in the first place. The sooner politicians and their mainstream media lapdogs are willing to admit this reality, the better off we all will be.