Liars (26 page)

But saving the planet is not the main goal of the progressive environmentalists. Their true aims are much more in character for people who practice an ideology that only the enlightened should lead.

At the end of
An Inconvenient Truth
, Gore admonishes his viewers: “Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, ‘What were our parents thinking?
Why didn't they wake up when they had a chance?' ”

A better question might be what are the progressive environmentalists really thinking? That is what we need to answer so that one day, freedom-loving people crushed under a progressive agenda will not be forced to ask,
Why didn't we wake up when we had the chance?

Progressives believe that the ends always justify the means. We explored plenty of examples of that in this book. At first glance, it would appear that the end in this case is saving the planet from supposed man-made destruction, and the environmental movement is the means for doing so. But what if that wasn't the case? What if the global warming “crisis” itself was, in fact, the means to a completely different end?

In 2014, Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein published a book,
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate
. Klein is an outspoken critic of capitalism; her previous book dealt with “disaster capitalism,” and when it came out, the
New Yorker
called her
“the most visible and influential figure on the American Left—
what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago.” Klein has contributed to progressive organs such as the
Nation
, and her anticapitalist views are well known.

In
This Changes Everything
, Klein is refreshingly honest, saying what few progressives are willing to admit. She argues, for example, for the use of a new weapon against the global capitalist system: the climate “crisis” itself. Klein writes that climate activism could actually bring down the capitalist system entirely.

“The really inconvenient truth is that it's not about carbon—it's about capitalism,” the book explains. But there was good news, too: “The convenient truth is that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system
and build something radically better.”

Building a better world has been the progressives' goal from the very beginning. And Klein says that climate alarmism is the “existential crisis” that gets us there. A documentary based on
This Changes Everything
came out a year after the book, and in the accompanying trailer, Klein asks what she calls “the big question”: “What if global warming isn't only a crisis? What if it's
the best chance we're ever gonna get to build a better world?” Then she delivers an ultimatum: “Change, or be changed.” In other words,
help us build our better world willingly, or we will force you into it.

But what can Klein force us to do after all? She's a prominent progressive theorist, yes, but she doesn't make policy. And the people who do make international climate policy really must care about the environment. Surely they can't share such a radical aim as the destruction of the world's economic system . . . can they?

As it turns out, yes, they can. Here is what Otto Edenhofer, a former official on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told a Swiss newspaper while he was serving as a co-chair of one of the IPCC's working groups in 2010:

[
O
]
ne must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with
problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.

Edenhofer also said that an upcoming international conference, ostensibly about climate, was “actually an economy summit during which the
distribution of the world's resources will be negotiated.”

This was not just an isolated remark by one radical former official. The current top climate official at the UN has confirmed that the goal of bringing about economic change through climate policy remains in place. In February 2015, Christiana Figueres, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, told a press conference in Brussels that the goal was to “intentionally transform the economic development model.” She went on: “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for
at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution.”

The economic model that has been dominant since the industrial revolution is, of course, capitalism. And the UN has vowed to “intentionally transform” that model through climate policy—to dismantle capitalism.

Besides ignorance of basic economics and blinding ideology, what drives this cadre of scientists, CEOs, politicians, and bureaucrats to dismantle capitalism under the guise of saving the environment? It's fear. But not the kind you might think. They aren't afraid of actual harm to the planet. Yes, some passionate but ill-informed environmentalists might really believe that we will all die in a hail of fire and brimstone brought down by a vengeful Mother Earth, but those
at the top who are pulling the strings of the movement are afraid of something much greater: the balance of power tilting back toward individual liberty and away from state control.

The free market has remained the dominant economic model for the last century and a half for a good reason: it works. Progressives have tried to fight it tooth and nail in any number of countries under any number of banners—from socialism to communism to progressivism—but they have never succeeded. Temporarily, perhaps, in some places, but never completely.

They fear the choice that the free market offers. There are too many possible paths for humanity to take, too many “wrong” roads to go down. Progressives don't like giving the masses too many options, because normal people cannot be trusted to make their own decisions.

That is the fundamental, though never stated, reason behind the embrace of the UN and its climate policies. It's the ultimate weapon in a last-ditch battle against the free-market system. Progressives have realized that they probably can't win the ideological battle—people will keep choosing freedom over authoritarianism any day—so instead they must use economics as a force. Millions of hardworking Indians and Chinese wouldn't choose to stay in poverty; they want electricity, cars, and all the perks of modern life that we are blessed to have. So, true to their nature, progressives opted for carrying out their revolution behind the scenes rather than in the open.

Climate policy has simply provided a convenient cover for an otherwise fairly standard progressive agenda item. The climate affects the entire world, so naturally, the UN should wield worldwide authority, they reasoned. And with that authority, progressives can build their “better world” by slowly regulating the free market out of existence, thereby eliminating the choice they fear—until their new world is the only choice left.

It's Cloward-Piven on a global scale.

LIE 3

We believe in the
wisdom of our founders and the Constitution.

—HILLARY CLINTON, NATIONAL CONSTITUTION CENTER, 2013

America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because we, the people, have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears
and true to our founding documents.

—BARACK OBAMA, FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS, 2009

Progressives have been able to remain a force in American politics because they present themselves as “typical politicians.” As we've seen, they can't show the true nature of their ideology because if they did, the vast majority of the American people would rise up and outright reject it. Unlike, say, self-declared socialists or communists, progressives don't call for open revolution to achieve their goals; they prefer “progression,” gradual change over time. The progressive revolution will not be televised. In fact, if they do it the way they want to, most people won't even know it's going on. One day, we'll all wake up, and the “fundamental transformation” will be complete

Progressives need to blend in. They need to “talk the talk” and “walk the walk” so that they don't stand out from their more moderate colleagues. A big part of talking that talk is proclaiming their
passion for the Constitution and the traditions on which America was founded.

But while progressives may pay lip service to the Constitution, their ideology actually calls for its subversion. In the progressive mind-set, the Constitution is—at best—flawed, outdated, and not up to the task of solving the problems of modern times, not helpful to the “progression” they are attempting to hasten along.

Woodrow Wilson talked a lot about a “living” constitution being “Darwinian in structure and in practice.” Wilson believed that “Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop. All the progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when ‘development,' ‘evolution,' is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution
according to the Darwinian principle.”

Franklin Roosevelt called the Constitution “the
most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written.” And now Barack Obama carries on the tradition.

When Obama stepped forward to give his inaugural address on January 20, 2009, throngs of admirers standing on the bitterly cold National Mall, along with millions more across the country and around the world, waited with bated breath to hear what he had to say. He was already a historic figure, the nation's first African-American president, but he was also the figurehead of a movement, someone who had vowed in his campaign to “fundamentally transform” the country.

With some of the first words he spoke as president of the United States—the sixth sentence of his inaugural address, to be precise—Obama paid tribute to the Constitution and our founding principles. In times of trouble, he said, “America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because we, the people, have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears and true to our founding documents.”

It was all there. The purposeful appropriation of the phrase “we, the people” from the Constitution's preamble, the lofty language about “ideals of our forebears” and “our founding documents.” It was exactly what the public would expect from someone who had just taken an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution. And in this case, the constitutional connection was even more appropriate: the incoming president was supposedly an expert who had even taught classes in constitutional law! Surely someone with that background would respect the primacy of the document on which all of our laws were based . . . right?

Obama's second inaugural address saw him reach another historic milestone: he was the first president in modern times to be
reelected with fewer votes than in his first election. Considering the rancor of his first term and the controversies over Obamacare and other items of his policy agenda, that was hardly surprising. It's important to note that in 2013, Obama went right back to waxing poetic about the nation's founding principles, but he later pivoted to a more nuanced and perhaps more revealing view.

The president began with a reference to the “enduring strength of our Constitution.” He spoke of the duty of every generation since 1776 “to keep safe our founding creed.” Fair enough. But shortly thereafter, he presented a slightly different view, suggesting that our “founding principles” might be flexible after all: “[W]e have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. When times change, so must we.”