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Paris climate summit: If liberal journos get their wish it may be lights out for billions

Tue, 08 Dec 2015 15:00:00 -0500

This month, world leaders and activists are gathering in Paris, the City of Light, to try to reach a deal to turn out lights around the globe.

The UN climate change conference (COP 21) is bringing thousands of environmental activists to still-shaken Paris to discuss what liberals consider a bigger threat than terrorism -- climate change.

Heads of state are attempting, yet again, to reach a legally binding agreement for carbon dioxide emissions, even though satellite temperature records still show a pause in the warming trend. That pause began more than 18 years ago in 1997.

The conference has no bigger supporters than the liberal media. Journalists have worked together with environmentalists to attack nearly every energy source we use. News outlets have targeted energy that provides more than 90 percent of U.S. power -- oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear and even hydroelectric.

Meanwhile, they’ve helped promote renewable energy without concern for higher prices and ignored the fact that relying on them exclusively is more science fiction than science. Media have blasted coal as the “dirtiest fuel on earth,” while groups like the Sierra Club waged campaigns to move “Beyond Coal.” But journalists seldom focus on the flaws of the replacements they hype.

Instead, we are bombarded with visions of apocalypse. Journalists repeatedly warn global warming will be “catastrophic.” They’ve regurgitated false claims about earth’s hottest years and protected climate alarmists from being discredited by scandal and failed climate models.

It’s not a conspiracy but it might as well be one. Back in 2007, "Good Morning America" even asked onscreen, “Will Billions Die from Global Warming?”

So far, no autopsy report reads Cause of Death: Global Warming.

But millions already die from direct consequences of life without electricity -- the world the left and the media advocate.

According to the International Energy Agency and World Health Organization, 4.3 million people die prematurely each year as a result of indoor air pollution from cooking with fuels like charcoal, wood or dung. They have no reliable alternative.

Imagine needing critical medical attention in a country without reliable electricity. It’s a nightmare. Yet, more than 1 billion people around the world don’t have to imagine it. And journalists won’t tell their stories.

Safe and affordable energy lengthens and improves lives. It lifts people out of poverty. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said just one proposed Australian mine project could bring power to 100 million people in his nation.

Too many world leaders, eco-activists and journalists simply don’t care. They want the underdeveloped world to go without, or to leapfrog cheap energy entirely by having the West pay trillions of dollars in climate debt to fund it. At the same time they want the West to abandon everything but renewables too.

Leave everyone powerless, with a renewable energy Utopia just around the corner. Solar. Wind. Geothermal. Those are the answer. Maybe. Some day.

That fantasy ignores the reality of renewable energy. Solar and wind are expensive, highly subsidized energy forms. In 2014, the two provided just 2.19 percent of the U.S. energy mix. They are so pricey that Britain just pulled the plug on most of its renewables. Laughably, The Guardian heralded the viability of wind power based on one “unusually windy” day in Denmark just months ago.

Germany has tried to massively scale up its use of renewables. The result: dramatic price increases. German newspapers say hundreds of thousands of people can no longer afford their electricity bills, in part because of the “green” energy transition.

In the U.S., President Obama is trying to boost renewables by punishing energy that works through the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. That’s going to cost up to $292 billion and could raise electricity prices in 47 states, NERA Economic Consulting concluded.

The inconvenient truth is that the sun stops shining, the wind stops blowing and geothermal energy isn’t readily available.

Don’t expect to hear that from the press. They put all their energy into taking ours from us.

If journalists and the rest of the climate alarmists get their way in Paris, it could be lights out for millions around the world.

Hollywood, hypocrisy and Matt Damon's anti-fracking film

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 15:30:26 -0400

It is true that there is nothing new under the sun, especially when it comes to Hollywood movies and TV shows. Ripoffs, remakes and reboots abound and the villains and heroes chosen by Tinseltown rarely shift.

Successful business people? Villains, of course. Environmentalists? Heroes, naturally. And few industries are maligned by entertainment media more than oil and gas, whistleblower characters, excepted. The left-wing Hollywood message is clear: oil and gas are bad, from children’s movies like “The Muppets” which dished out its trademark farcical, silliness for viewers in late 2011, to the much more serious 2005 film “Syriana” which had George Clooney to sell its message that the oil industry is full of murderous villains.

Now, it’s the business of natural gas. A process called fracking that has come under fire from the left, and naturally it has also become the target of Hollywood writers and celebrities, on and off the screen. The biggest example of that is Matt Damon’s “Promised Land,” which will be spewing that anti-fracking sentiment on screen when it is released in January 2013.

Hollywood hates fracking – so much, that the makers of that particular upcoming flick were willing to be accept financing from an oil-producing foreign government (the UAE) that stands to benefit by less domestic energy supply in the U.S. Imagine the outcry if a conservative film had gotten oil funding, especially from a foreign nation.

Those left-wing views aren’t just peddled on the silver screen. Episodes of “Dallas,” “CSI” and other shows have attacked fracking. One convoluted plot from TNT’s “Rizzoli & Isles” featured a panoply of liberal stereotypes when an ex-Blackwater agent, masquerading as a yoga guru, killed a vegan student and a professor in order to hide his drilling for natural gas. One of the main characters also declared that fracking “pollutes groundwater,” in that episode.

Such Hollywood tales ignore available information, such as University of Texas at Austin researchers who concluded “there is no evidence” of polluted drinking water from fracking.

The fact that Damon and John Krasinski decided to collaborate on an anti-fracking movie called “Promised Land” is as predictable as the end of a saccharine rom-com. But the true plot twist has come from reality, not fiction. As documentary filmmaker Phelim McAleer wrote in the Sept. 25, New York Post, “In courtroom after courtroom, it has been proved that anti-fracking activists have been guilty of fraud or misrepresentation.”

Things aren’t panning out the way the left wanted. In the small Pennsylvania town of Dimock, anti-fracking activists claimed the drilling had harmed the water supply. “[W]hile “Promised Land” was in production, the story of Dimock [Pa.] collapsed. The state investigated and its scientists found nothing wrong. So the 11 families insisted EPA scientists investigate. They did — and much to the dismay of the environmental movement found the water was not contaminated,” McAleer explained.

Not easily dissuaded from their fracking opposition, actor Mark Ruffalo and “Gasland” filmmaker Josh Fox scheduled an event in Dimock shortly thereafter to still protest fracking. Despite the EPA’s ruling that water in there was safe to drink and the Department of Environmental Protection’s decision to allow Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. to resume fracking in seven wells.

Fracking was invented in 1947, and if it’s used to extract natural gas from shale it stands to vastly increase the supply of natural gas and could generate $332 billion toward GDP and create 2.4 million jobs by 2035, according to estimates from IHS Global Insight.

None of that matters to Hollywood, which prides itself on “ripped from the headlines” storylines, but they persist in ignoring facts that support fracking. They care little for stories of townspeople who wanted fracking to revive their troubled local economy. Businessweek wrote in June that natural gas drilling could have done a lot for “struggling farmers” in Wayne County, Pa., who said “the biggest thing that ever happened around here” was stopped by a regional regulatory agency.

And of course, Finding out that one of those scary, flaming tap water videos was a sham wasn’t the plot twist Damon and Krasinski were looking for, either.

All that news did have an impact on “Promised Land,” according to McAleer reports. He said the film went through a series of rewrites. What the actors came up with was a conspiracy worthy of Damon’s “Bourne” franchise. Now Krasinski’s character will play NOT just an environmentalist who reveals the “evil” oil company’s plot. Instead he will actually be a deep undercover agent for the oil industry to make fracktivists look like frauds.

Fox, is one such real-life fracktivist, who helped galvanize fracking opposition with his movie “Gasland.” Many have criticized the movie for having errors, but the most dramatic scene was when Fox lighted a glass of water on fire and attributed it to fracking.McAleer proved Fox knew of instances where tap water could be lit on fire decades ago. When McAleer confronted Fox with a 1976 report that there was a “troublesome amount of methane in the aquifer” Fox said, “Well, I don’t care about reports from 1976. There were reports from 1936 that people say they can light their water on fire in New York State.” He claimed it had “no bearing” on the issue. The viewing public might disagree.

You see Hollywood doesn’t face facts, it ignores them or twists them beyond recognition until they fit the left-wing agenda. And they’ve been doing it for years. Hollywood has hated on all kinds of businesses and businesspeople, from old man Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” to Gordon Gekko on “Wall Street.” Instead of finding a new tale to tell, Damon and Krasinski are being typical lefty environmentalists. They’re recycling.

Julia A. Seymour is an assistant editor for the Media Research Center’s Business and Media Institute.