The Pervasive Lies on Both Sides of the Global Warming Debate

Eric Zuesse
CROSSPOST WITH THE DURAN

The Hyundai Ioniq 5 refueling. Sales of electric vehicles are booming in California in 2023 (Photo: Hyundai)

Whereas conservatives lie to say that global warming is a hoax or else is good instead of bad (as compared with maintaining the current global temperature), liberals lie to say that the measures liberals want put into place are the right ones to address the global-warming problem. Both sides are lying through their teeth, and the individuals who fund that propaganda know it. Contending groups of investors — investors in the fossil-fules industries on the conservative side, and investors in ‘clean fuels’ on the liberal side — differ only in the types of lies that they sponsor. Neither side actually represents the environment; neither side represents the public. Neither side is telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Both sides are instead putting forth propaganda for the benefit of their respective investors.

For example: on the liberal side are proponents of replacing internal-combustion-engine automobiles by increasing usage of electrical cars; but nobody is comparing the carbon-footprints of the two options. Are electrical cars actuallylower-carbon than internal-combustion-engine ones (such as the agents of liberal billionaires claim to be the case)?

Where DOES the energy actually come from for electrical cars? Here are the latest proportions in the United States:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-01/americans-electricity-use-just-keeps-falling
https://web.archive.org/web/20191014031812/https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-03-01/americans-electricity-use-just-keeps-falling

“Americans Keep Using Less Electricity”
Efficiency has driven down per-capita use for years now. Electric vehicles could change that. March 1, 2018
The Top Five Sources of Electric Power
1.3=gas
1.2=coal
.8=nuclear
.3=hydro
.25=wind
3.85=Total
gas&coal=2.5=65% of the total
hydro&wind=14% of the total

In other words: in the U.S., 65% of electrical power is being produced by burning gas and coal; only 14% comes from hydro and wind. (21% comes from nuclear.)

Of course, internal-combustion engines derive 100% of their energy from burning petroleum.

What, then, about the other 35% of electrical power that isn’t coming from fossil fuels? Electricity entails transmission-line losses of around 3%, plus there are the additional costs of the battery, which will wear down and then be recharged and then ultimately trashed, and nobody has calculated a final all-in carbon footprint for electrical vehicles versus internal-combustion ones; so, that’s a secret (or else it’s unknown, if the liberal billionaires are that unconcerned about reality so as not even to know what the all-in carbon-footprint is for electrical versus traditional cars).

There are, in addition, multiple taxpayer-paid subsidies to the fossil-fuels industries, and also there are multiple taxpayer-paid subsidies to the ‘clean-energy’ industries, so that ultimately, the propagandists and the lobbyists that are hired by the billionaires (and their ‘non-profits’ — tax-exempt propaganda-mills) will determine whether or where, and when, electrical vehicles will come to dominate over fossil-fuel ones. No ‘free market’ determines that.

Every aspect of the global-warming debate is like this: propaganda-driven by and for the investors, instead of fact-based for the public.

However, the conservative billionaires’ propagandists lie even more boldly to allege that global warming isn’t happening, and that if it is happening it’s good, and that if it isn’t good then it isn’t being caused by the fuels that their corporations produce and buy.

So, lies predominate on BOTH sides. One can believe either side only on the basis of faith — the necessary scientific answers haven’t yet been sought (much less found). So: the public is at the mercy of — and deceived by — agents who are serving the investors.

On 6 May 2023, I headlined “You want to know how to stop global warming? Here is how” and opened: “Outlaw the purchasing of any stock or bond — any investment securities — in fossil-fuel extraction companies, such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal: any such company at all.” That would make impossible the transfer of ownership of any share of stock, and make impossible any lending to, any fossil-fuels exploration-and-extraction corporation, and therefore the stock-value in all such companies would plunge near to zero, and the only way that those corporations would have any value at all for the stockholders would be by the corporation’s distributing to those stockholders high dividends, which would force all of these companies onto the path of no further R&D (no further exploration) and of their declining toward expiration, so that those corporations will no longer be producing those fuels. This would cause the prices of those fuels to rise sharply, so that ONLY new non-fossil-fuels technologies will be getting the new R&D and will be attracting consumers (because fossil-fuels prices will be soaring); and, since exploring for yet more fossil-fuels will cease while all of those R&D expenditures will then go instead into the much safer thorium-nuclear and other entirely new energy technologies that MIGHT actually succeed at safely lowering energy-costs, there will then be a POSSIBILITY of preventing runaway global warming.

None of the existing ‘clean-energy’ technologies is price-competitive with fossil fuels; and, so, continuing the existing ‘free-market’ policies will inevitably produce global burnout. IF there is any way to prevent that outcome, then it can result ONLY from outlawing the purchase of any stock or bond from any fossil-fuel corporation, as I explained.

Consumers aren’t to blame for global warming; investors are, and always have been. And government will need to place the burden upon THEM, no longer on consumers, because consumers aren’t to blame for it, investors are.

Of course, the liberal billionaires who fund the ‘non-profits’ that urge the public to buy electrical cars, etc., don’t fund any ‘non-profits’ to inform the public that the billionaires have always been the actual source of the global-warming problem. And they don’t care whether buying electrical cars will reduce the problem at all. The only thing that comes from, and has come from, billionaires are cons — deceptions, NOT truthful understandings. And the only difference between the liberal and the conservative billionaires are different lies.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.