You’ve no doubt heard of the Green New Deal, the far left’s favorite piece of legislation. But do you know where it originated? How it became the centerpiece of the left’s agenda? Or that many of its provisions have nothing to do with climate change?
Marc Morano, publisher of ClimateDepot.com, has a new book out Tuesday that answers these questions and more.
“Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal Is Even Worse Than You Think” provides Americans with the information they need to refute climate alarmism, think critically about climate change, and counter the indoctrination of young people.
Morano joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to issue a warning about the Green New Deal’s far-reaching implications and what freedom-loving Americans can do about it.
Also on today’s show, we read your letters to the editor and share a “good news story” about the history of Passover and how we all can celebrate.
Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript.
Rob Bluey: We are joined on “The Daily Signal Podcast” today by Marc Morano, author of the new book “Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal Is Even Worse Than You Think.” Marc, thank you for writing this book and it’s great to have you back on the show.
Marc Morano: Thank you, Rob. Good to talk to you again. I’m looking forward to this. We, of course, used to work together back at the old Media Research Center’s Cybercast News Service. It’s good to see you again.
Bluey: We certainly did, Marc, and it’s great to have you back on the show. One of the things that I wanted to begin with, because I think it’s so important is to explain to our listeners, why we should be worried about this Green New Deal.
Morano: Well, in a very short answer, this is not about climate energy or the environment. The Green New Deal is about a takeover of our economy using a climate scare to achieve their ends and the architects of this Green New Deal are very open about that.
This is a, basically, a backdoor way of central planning, socialism, progressivism in America using a climate emergency, climate crisis as their way.
So the reason you should be scared is they’re not being honest or straight with you about the science and about the so-called solution, even if we did face a climate crisis.
>>> Assessing the Costs and Benefits of the Green New Deal’s Energy Policies
Bluey: One of President [Joe] Biden’s first actions in the White House was to rejoin the Paris climate agreement, so we obviously know he’s focused on some of these issues. Where does he stand on the Green New Deal?
Morano: That’s a great question. The book, my deadline for writing this was right before, a couple of weeks before Biden was sworn in, so I was able to see how he’s doing his Cabinet.
But if you watch him over throughout the last campaign for president, that’s a great question because Joe Biden was sort of all over the place, but he generally tried to portray himself as more of a centrist. He had one of the more, less ambitious Green New Deal plans out there.
But, at some point, he had to make peace with his Democratic Party base. And I show in there that he brings up [Sen.] Bernie Sanders and [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and Sunrise (a youth movement), climate activists, and they all basically come in and they take over and they, essentially, wrote his climate agenda.
So the question is, Joe Biden himself may not be as radical as people associate with a lot of the proponents of the Green New Deal, but Joe Biden is now going to be, essentially, the front man for all this stuff happening behind the scenes.
I don’t think Joe Biden’s going to be that actively involved in shaping this at this point. I think it’s a done deal. They’re waiting.
And right now it’s interesting as we talk here, it’s the late March 2021, still no Green New Deal, still nothing introduced in Congress, still no House or Senate bill, no press conferences on it, nothing. They’ve just been … very, very quiet.
I think what they’re doing is they’re giving the Biden administration a chance to implement the other parts of his climate agenda, which is obviously the executive orders going after pipelines and drillings on federal lands.
But also he’s going to have every department, every department agency have climate as one of their foremost issues. And we’re talking whether it’s Treasury, or [Environmental Protection Agency], or State Department, climate is going to be first and foremost. “Every agency is a climate agency” is their motto.
So in the words of Noam Chomsky, to answer your question, Rob, Biden is probably the furthest left of any president we’ve ever had, or any Democratic nominee, on climate, even though he himself has never really made it a big priority.
But the point is he has now surrounded himself with people who would make President [Barack] Obama’s climate agenda seem rather timid at this point.
Bluey: Well, and a couple of those people would certainly be his vice president, Kamala Harris, who I believe was very vocal in support of the Green New Deal prior to joining his administration, and of course, John Kerry, who is serving as his climate czar.
So certainly there are two people who have significant influence, I would suspect, over the president and some of his actions, so they’re people to watch.
But it is interesting, as you point out, Marc, that they’ve been disciplined, perhaps, in a way not to get out ahead of the administration on this as they focus on other troubling priorities, whether it be HR 1 or the Equality Act, or some of the other things that have come down the pike early in his administration.
Morano: And that’s what they’re doing. I think a lot of this is COVID, the lockdowns, the vaccine distribution. So I think they’re just waiting. And at this point, if I were to project, I’d be surprised if May, middle of May, comes around and they haven’t introduced it, but it’s possible.
They may wait until June, but they’re going to wait until some other stuff is settled, because they know pretty much all hell’s going to break loose when the Green New Deal comes back up. Because once they introduce this and once it’s there, they’re going to have to do it.
I can’t imagine they’re going to have to do it within a few months or less, but once they do it, we are talking congressional hearings, we’re talking, … essentially, the national attention is going to shift now to the Green New Deal.
And I think one of their focus[es] is going to be is they don’t pay attention to what happened the last time we introduced the Green New Deal in 2019.
They’re going to pretend none of that happened and they’re going to try again, and they’re going to be much savvier this time and make it just look just kind of like as reasonable as possible as an incremental bill as they can come up with because, … and I go through this in the book, they ended up having to pull stuff down off websites.
They were truly embarrassed by the original Green New Deal release, the one mentioning farting cows and other phrases and “People don’t need to work if they don’t have to work,” and all sorts of things that they put in there that was just bonkers.
I think, in the words of one analyst, “It was like a gift to any critic of the Green New Deal.”
So I think they’re going to be much savvier this time around and I think Joe Biden, in a way, is the perfect face because he is just, whether you want to argue he’s out of it or not, … this is not his issue and I think he’s going to just make some broad statements and let all this happen behind the scenes.
So I think they’re well-poised to make something happen. Of course, it’s going to come down to people like Sen. Joe Manchin, who may ultimately hold the veto power of this.
Bluey: It certainly seems that way. We are talking to Marc Morano, author of “Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal Is Even Worse Than You Think.” Marc is also the publisher of Climate Depot.
Marc, the Earth’s climate has been changing for 650,000 years. That’s not in dispute, it’s the past 100 to 200 years that we’re really talking about. And while clearly humans are playing some role, you argue that we’re not facing a man-made climate disaster in the book. Can you tell us why?
Morano: Yeah. We’re not the control knob of the climate. Yes, carbon dioxide can warm the climate, but you can’t distinguish its effect from other factors. There’s hundreds of factors that influence climate.
So the key is you mentioned 650,000 years. I actually quote geologists who’ve talked about the geologic history of the earth, billions of years. We are in the 10% coldest period of Earth’s history and we’re in the 10% lowest CO2 in Earth’s history. We’ve had ice ages with many higher times CO2 levels.
… I spent a whole chapter detailing everything from floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, sea level, none of it’s unprecedented. Many of it is actually either a no trend or declining trend, all these extreme storms you hear about.
The only way they can scare people about climate is to say, “It’s worse than we thought.”
You say, “How? Sea level’s not accelerating. There’s more polar bears than we’ve ever had. Tornadoes are at or near record lows. Hurricanes were much worse 50, 60 years ago, and they’re cyclical.”
They say, “Well, our predictions of the future are much worse.”
And I get into that a little bit because what they do is, it’s a misdirection: When current reality fails to alarm, make scarier and scarier predictions.
I also show how polar bears actually are disappearing, Rob. They’re disappearing from Al Gore’s books and movies, because now we’re counting more polar bears than we’ve ever counted, just in the last 15 years, oddly, since Al Gore’s film originally came out.
That’s why Al Gore in his sequel, both movie and book, just conveniently omitted mention of the polar bear because all of his predictions of the polar bear went the opposite direction.
>>> Learn More: It’s Not Just About Cost. The Green New Deal Is Bad Environmental Policy, Too
Bluey: Wow. What an inconvenient truth. Marc, you just mentioned something that I was hoping to raise anyway, and that’s that there seems to be no weather event—be it a hurricane or a blizzard—that isn’t blamed in some way on climate change.
So what advice do you have for people as they may be just engaging in conversation with family or friends to push back on this assertion? I mean, just every day, you really can’t go beyond the media to see where they attribute it in some way to climate change.
Morano: In fact, it’s an opposite prediction. And one of the things I point out is they predict more floods, less floods; more snow, less snow; more malaria, less malaria; more fog, less fog; shorter days, longer days. They’re on the opposite side of almost every climate prediction.
Therefore, no matter if you’re at the Super Bowl and you bet on it, you bet on both teams to win, guess what? Next week at the office, you can tell everyone, “Hey, I was right. I picked a winner.” And that’s what they do.
Many of these climate models and the people who claim that they’d been correct on climate, they come up with dozens, hundreds of different scenarios. One of them is going to be correct. It’s sometimes their exact opposite and then they pat themselves on the back. But people are inundated with this, but what it is is it’s short-term statistical trickery.
So yes, California, if you pick certain years of an eight-year trend, even sometimes a 20, droughts are much worse in California, if this continues. The problem is, if you go back either 50 years, 100 years, you find wildfires and droughts, there’s no trend or they’re actually radically higher in the past.
The problem is … you have an environmental group that’s working with the TV weatherman who’s picked 1970 as their baseline.
In every major city, 1970 is one of the coldest times in U.S. history because we had the coming ice age, global cooling scare. So what they do is they pick a warm period baseline, and of course we’ve warmed since then, they’ve got the maximum warming.
“If this continues … ” and “Climate scientists think this will … ,” this is how they scare you.
So every event becomes “weaponized,” in the words of meteorologist Joe Bastardi, of “weaponizing” the weather. “Climate ambulance chasing” is another phrase. And this is how they do it and it’s very deadly effective.
That’s why I devote a whole chapter—and I actually wrote the chapter in a talking points format that it would have citing experts and studies and it’s very easy to read, so that one chapter can just serve as your talking point. Not just to the science, but also to some of the claims.
Recently, John Kerry came out and said, “We need an insurance policy in case the climate skeptics are wrong.”
And I go through and I explain U.N. Paris Agreement, any EPA regulations, the Green New Deal would have no impact on U.S. emissions, measurable, let alone global emissions, let alone climate in any way, shape, or form.
There is no insurance policy. This is paying a huge upfront premium for no payout on your home if your home were to burn down. That’s what they’re selling us here.
The reason it’s called “Green Fraud” is because A, they’re hyping a nonexistent climate emergency, which is their new phrase. And B, they’re telling us the facts are, even if we faced a climate crisis emergency, nothing they proposed would have any impact on the climate and be able to save us.
Bluey: Marc, thank you for, again, writing the book and providing that information. It’s incredibly valuable, as is your website, climatedepot.com.
Following up on that, I’m glad to hear that you pointed out the skepticism, why we should be skeptical of the climate modeling that we see. But what about the alarmism that we hear about, for example, that we may only have 12 years to save the planet? What do you have to say about things like that?
Morano: That I treat as comic relief. Actually, I show in the book that you go back to 1864, [that] was the first climate tipping point. We were warned by a naturalist, I believe, was who said that we had a “war of climatic excess” in quotes. Since that time, we go through, and I show from the 1970s, the global cooling scare, all the way through the ’80s.
My favorite is Prince Charles, who had the 100-month tipping point and actually went and gave speeches counting down those 100 months. And then when the 100 months expired, he ended up extending it into the 2040s when he would be in his late 90s, which he still might make it to that age.
So AOC, of course, famous 12-year tipping point. John Kerry came out again with another tipping point recently. … I think it was 10 years. They’re trying to count down from that original 12 years, two years ago.
This is just … so comical on its face that it’s ridiculous and it’s also a misreading of what even the United Nations claimed.
They came up with a couple of different emission scenarios and said, “If we’re within 12 years, if we don’t start working on this … ” they never said the world was going to end. So they can’t even quote their own allies correctly on this.
But it’s just base, low-brow propaganda and it works for a general media and public and for schoolchildren trying to skip school to get them motivated. … I have a whole chapter on this, they actually have kids believing that they have no future now unless the government acts to safeguard their climate.
Bluey: Well, I’m glad you brought us back to the future generations because that’s where I want to go next.
There seems to be no issue of more importance to many on the left than climate change. It’s become a religion for many of them. In fact, they’re talking about ending the filibuster to pass things like the Green New Deal.
How do you explain this obsession and what are some of the ways that we can counter it, particularly among young people and future generations?
Morano: Great question. I think the simplest way of explaining their focus and obsession with schoolchildren, they’ve literally failed to convince adults of a climate emergency, and so what’s happened is they’re trying to shame adults by using children who are, frankly, more gullible on this.
What’s happened here, if you go back and look at Gallup polling, even in the 1980s, people can say, “I believe in global warming or as a climate change,” all nonsense. The Gallup polling and Pew, and even, I think it was Harris polling CEO came out.
The level of concern and the key is, are people afraid? Are they concerned about climate? That’s what doesn’t really change. People can believe in climate or think that man’s changing it or the climate is changing, these generic meaningless phrases.
So what happened is they went after kids. Kids, as a age group, are the highest believing, most committed, and most afraid. They’re the most concerned about climate. …
I have a whole chapter devoted to this. I go through the whole school-skipping syndrome with Greta Thunberg, where she came from, how her parents were heavily involved in the environmental movement, heavily involved with even the Swedish government, and that whole movement of hers was, essentially, not some organically sprung movement that just happened.
In fact, she wasn’t even regularly going to school. She was at almost like a homeschool scenario in which she did that, but she became the face of the youth movement.
Then, of course, you have groups like Sunrise Movement. I go in great detail of how these kids testified on Capitol Hill and it’s become intergenerational. It’s kind of like, “Mom and dad trashed the planet. Thanks, mom and dad. It’s up to us to save it.”
They have all these lawsuits with former NASA scientist James Hansen and others basically suing the U.S. government in order to impose a Green New Deal on us to save their future from bad climate.
The way to do this is to go, “We need to educate parents first and then get kids to be more critical thinkers on this.”
Also, these are fads. I think it’s eventually going to pass. I think these kids will be much like the flower children of the ’60s. I think within 10 years or so, they’ll look back and probably be embarrassed that they held these views and went to these rallies and said such inane things about the climate.
Bluey: Oh, critical thinking is an important aspect and I would certainly encourage all the parents and grandparents who are listening today to use the information that you provide in “Green Fraud” to share with their kids and make sure that they’re aware of all that is going on.
Marc, in the book, you also read about fossil fuels. They obviously get a bad rap from many in the media and on the left, yet we seem to take for granted just how much they’ve helped people and companies thrive, including some of those who regularly use oil and gas. And one recent in which I know you played a role was the hypocrisy involving the clothing company North Face.
I was wondering if you could speak to that and why you think that some of these big players are able to get away with the hypocrisy. And you’ve done some tremendous reporting on this yourself.
Morano: It’s amazing. In the case of North Face, this was a company that all of their products essentially are made, derived from fossil fuels. All their fleece jackets made of polyester or anything else. I mean, it’s just an amazing thing.
So what they did is they did not want to be involved with any oil company, so they wouldn’t put the company’s logo on their jackets because they thought, “Oh, my gosh, we’re climate friendly. We’re not going to put this oil company on our jackets.”
So what happened was, the oil company fought back and it was an amazing thing. The Colorado Oil and Gas Association had some fun with this recently, and they literally pointed out that North Face is made up of fossil fuels and they pointed out the absurdity.
This is one of the things, at what point are you going to carry this virtue signaling? Does anyone who drove to the store in a fossil-fueled car, are they going to be able to buy a North Face product? If anyone benefits, are you going to allow an oil worker to come in and buy your products? Where does this kind of virtue signaling end on this?
But you mentioned the larger picture on this. People like Bill Gates, who was pro-climate, pro-lockdown—very pro-lockdown, telling people that they should stay at home—but meanwhile, … he’s bidding on the world’s largest private jet transport company. And I think at last count his electric bills are something in the neighborhood of like $30,000 a month on his home, which is so massive.
This is the guy who flies private jets exclusively, and he doesn’t want anyone else, he wants everyone else staying at home right now.
Yet people like John Kerry, very similar situation. John Kerry actually said he’s so important that he has to fly private jets. But they don’t see any irony in the fact that they themselves don’t follow the rules that they’re claiming everyone needs to follow.
Of course, President Obama has a house at sea level in Martha’s Vineyard after spending years warning of the climate change disaster.
This is just one of the things that I think the general public resonates with them. They realize that they find out that the leaders of this movement, when they act this way, they don’t actually believe we face a climate emergency because they themselves don’t act like it and don’t live that way.
At some point, you would not be living at a home at sea level if you actually thought it was going to be swallowed up by sea levels in short order.
Bluey: Marc, you’ve been working on these issues … dating back to the time that you and I were together at CNS News, which is almost a couple decades ago. You’ve done phenomenal work in terms of writing books on the topic, running Climate Depot. What is your passion? What motivates you to stay involved and engaged and make sure that Americans get the truth?
Morano: It’s weird because I’ve always considered myself as a Republican, except when it came to environmental issues. And that’s the way I, even under Ronald Reagan, I remember thinking James Watt, when he was putting in roads in forest areas, I always was like, it was always a thought Republicans were wrong on that.
My eyes were opened because, … originally, I got in the Amazon rainforest scare, but then after I ended up doing a documentary on it, made several trips down there, talked to environmentalists on the ground there who would throw the guidebooks down and call them crap. It’s because I’d been had on that.
Scientifically, it turned out rainforests are the least, the Amazon was the least endangered forest, and for every acre cut, 50 were regenerating. So it was an amazing story and it was all about public fear. So I felt I’d been duped. So by the time climate came around, I was skeptical.
So I’ve always had a passion because there’s very few reporters and media focusing on non-hysterical environment and energy and climate information. So I feel like that’s my calling right now because there’s very few people out there willing to do it other than delving into it on short stints.
But this is a full-time job. I mean, it’s just an endless machine of hype, fear, all designed for political reasons behind the scene.
Everything that comes out of the United Nations is all designed to lobby and support their next treaty, policy, committee, or whatever goal that they have in mind. It’s all science in service of public policy.
And sadly, we’re seeing a little bit of this now with COVID. In fact, I have a whole chapter on the COVID climate connection in the book where people are so excited, the activists, environmental activists—from John Kerry to Greta Thunberg, Al Gore—they’re all quoting the lockdowns and saying, “This is exactly what we’ve needed for climate.” “This is fantastic for the Earth,” was one of the quotes from climate activists.
Bluey: Well, it’s certainly something to watch. I think that there is an agenda at play there and people will try to use the current situation that we find ourselves in to advance other priorities. I mean, that’s so true with just the $1.9 trillion bill that made its way through Congress and to the president’s desk.
So, Marc, one final question for you: What’s your advice to conservatives or others who get labeled as climate change deniers, find themselves censored on social media, or shut out of debates, or even shunned by maybe their own family when it comes to this issue? You’ve been in situations like that yourself, I’m sure. What advice do you have for people?
Morano: It’s a great question. I think people just need to get my book “Green Fraud” and read particularly Chapter 3, where I go through the basics of the talking point.
If you start, like at Thanksgiving dinner, if you have people—not that you’d ever want to spend Thanksgiving dinner doing this—but if you actually ask them, “Why are we facing emergency?” and what the solution is and get them to admit and get them to realize that they’re talking utter nonsense.
I mean, from both a geologic perspective of the earth, which is very simple to understand. And also, from even, if we face the crisis, the solutions would not only have no impact, it’s the exact opposite way to go.
So, the last chapter of my book I actually go through and explain that if we did face the climate crisis, what we would want is more free markets, more innovation, more technological advancements—not some top-down, central planning, bureaucratic, crushing of American entrepreneurship. You would want the exact opposite, and that’s what’s so weird about this.
Luckily, we don’t face the climate emergency, but if we did and we relied on the U.N. or the Green New Deal, we would all be doomed.
I think once people understand that this is just, essentially, a Trojan horse, the Green New Deal is a Trojan horse for another agenda, which is attack on capitalism, is really at the heart of it.
I have a whole chapter just on the history of that in the last 40, 50 years. How back in the 1960s, just the entire movement has been planning and plotting and using the environmental scares.
It’s always been a different scare before climate. Originally it was overpopulation, resource scarcity, running out of oil, … I have a whole chapter up on global cooling.
Who would have thought the man-made ice age scare in 1970s—they thought our fossil fuels were causing the Earth to emit aerosols, which are blocking the sun, causing global dimming, creating a new ice age—who would have thought the solution to that was exactly read like the Green New Deal? So I literally go through point-by-point.
They wanted central planning, wealth redistribution, more controls, less capitalism, all to solve the man-made global cooling problem in the ’70s. It’s always the same solutions, changing the environmental scare as needed, and right now we’re stuck with the climate scare as the latest one since the 1960s.
Bluey: It’s amazing, Marc. Wow. Well, the book is called “Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal Is Even Worse Than You Think.” Pick up a copy. Marc Morano, thank you so much for joining us on “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
Morano: Thank you, Rob. Appreciate it.