The Greatest Scam on Earth

In 2000 Al Gore was a failed Presidential candidate with a paltry 2 million dollars to his name. Not a lot of money for a guy whose lavish mansion gobbles up almost a 150,000 dollars in electric utilities annually alone, and that of course is before property taxes and all the other costs of owning a home in Belle Meade, which has one of the region's highest costs of living. But besides growing a beard and lecturing college students on journalism, a hobby he had last practiced in the 70's, Al Gore didn't have much of a career plan.

But Gore didn't starve on the streets either, and eight years later, despite not having much in the way of a job, the former Vice President is worth over a hundred million dollars. Expanding your net worth by %2500 percent sounds like the Madoff investment plan, but the scam that Al Gore invested in is one that makes Madoff look like a piker... because Gore invested in The Greatest Scam on Earth.

The Greatest Scam on Earth naturally revolves around the earth itself, combining millennial apocalyptic visions with junk science to create global warming. In 1920 the American poet Robert Frost wrote, "Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice, From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire." Taking an incomplete cue from poem, the school of environmental apocalypse first tried to sell the idea of an ice age, before switching over to global warming.

In the 70's the talk was of a coming ice age.

As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.

Naturally of course mankind was to blame for the problem

Man, too, may be somewhat responsible for the cooling trend. The University of Wisconsin's Reid A. Bryson and other climatologists suggest that dust and other particles released into the atmosphere as a result of farming and fuel burning may be blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the surface of the earth.

And of course the world was doomed.

University of Toronto Climatologist Kenneth Hare, a former president of the Royal Meteorological Society, believes that the continuing drought and the recent failure of the Russian harvest gave the world a grim premonition of what might happen. Warns Hare: "I don't believe that the world's present population is sustainable if there are more than three years like 1972 in a row."

Doomed I tell you. How will we ever survive 1972? And yet here we are in the year 2009, and while it is chilly outside, New York City is not enclosed by giant icebergs. Neither is any other part of the world that isn't normally enclosed by icebergs.

Today Time Magazine runs virtually the same stories, except all that stuff about the world freezing to death, has been replaced by stories about the world melting to death. A coming Ice Age was a plausible place to start the environmental apocalyptic panic. After all scientists claimed that humanity had already endured an ice age, and there was something plausible about claiming that another one was on the way. Nuclear winter had become a potent boogeyman of the Cold War, convincing most Americans that a nuclear exchange would doom the planet.

But as Frost had pointed out all the way back in 1920, the idea of the world perishing in flames had a more poetic appeal. From medieval paintings of hell as a place scorched by flame, to the modern atomic terror... fire was a more compelling villain. And by redirecting the locus of environmental impact away from inhabited  areas to the North Pole and other arctic regions that most people did not have any experience with, it became possible to claim just about anything at all was going on there. Anything at all.

Today, as the case of Al Gore demonstrates, there is a great deal of money to be made from preaching from environmental apocalypse. Green Business is big business and today you can find green labels on everything from cars to paper towels. Celebrities have embraced green, the way they once embraced African babies, and have introduced timely proposals for the general public, including drinking rat's milk and breathing less.

The difference between the madman who stands on a street corner with a placard reading, "ThE WORLD IS GONG TO END!" and Al Gore is the difference between madness and big business. If Al Gore really believed in his own dogma, he wouldn't be spending more on electricity a year than the average family's income. If celebrities really believed their own sound bites, they wouldn't be flying private jets around the world. But the Greatest Scam on Earth is not about living an environmentally virtuous life, but about selling environmental virtue to others. At a price.

Cap and Trade is the final solution for American manufacturing and industry, destroying what's left and leaving the rest as government subsidized shells. Wall Street will profit, investors will flock to buy absolutely worthless bonds whose only purpose is to add overhead to American businesses, and everything else will head on a ship to China, which has been smart enough to cash in on global warming alarmism, without actually giving up any of its heavy industry.

But that really doesn't matter, because millennial panics never take into account the long term consequences. They are about the irrational panic of a minority and those orchestrating the panic who expect to profit from it. The same Al Gore who owned a zinc mine and spoke lovingly of Tobacco farming turned himself into an environmentalist prophet thanks to some ghost written books and a documentary created by PowerPoint. In the process he earned himself a Nobel Peace Prize, and more importantly a hundred million dollars, which is only the beginning if the Obama Administration pushes through the rest of the rent seeking proposals that will transform the American economy into a sharecropping venture overseen by a handful of American politicians and foreign investors.

The Greatest Scam on Earth is set to destroy America's economy. Its propaganda mills are restlessly chattering away in magazines and movies, schools and commercials offering up the same old vision of the crying Indian, the visage of the world we sinfully polluted. The hypocrisy of such lectures being delivered by magazines printed on dead trees, by celebrities who live opulently thanks to goods being transported for them around the world, by politicians who stand to benefit personally from the crisis they are manufacturing of course falls on deaf ears. The scam grinds on, and the one thing all that green is sure to accomplish, is to put us all in the red.