Gulf oil spill an excuse to socialize economy?

WASHINGTON – Now that the scientific evidence for global warming has been hopelessly discredited, author Brian Sussman predicts that President Obama will rely on the oil-well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico to promote a radical plan to socialize the economy through controversial new energy policies.

"This isn't about pollution, it's about redistribution of wealth," said Sussman, the Bay Area talk-show host and former award-winning meteorologist and science reporter.

"This is the perfect crisis to sock it to [the oil industry]," he said.

Sussman, author of "Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam," told a Capitol Hill audience today that Obama plans to "tak[e] advantage of a crisis to put forward the Senate energy bill."

That promotion is expected as early as tonight, when Obama has an Oval Office speech scheduled.

If the Senate bill is passed and reconciled with the House version already adopted, "We'll have cap-and-trade," he said.

According to Sussman, the goal of cap-and-trade legislation is not to provide the energy demanded by citizens, but to reduce, involuntarily, private use of energy. He warned that major elements of cap-and-trade legislation, including "smart grids" (broadband Internet connections), "home area networks" and "energy-star appliances," are intended to give the government the ability to control energy use within private homes in real time.

For example, said Sussman, a homeowner might set the air conditioning at 75 on a hot day, while simultaneously watching a ball game on a big screen TV and doing a load of laundry. A bureaucrat at a power station could respond by remotely turning up the thermostat to 85 degrees and shutting off the TV and washer.

"'Efficiency' is the only plan, to reduce what we use," said Sussman. During his speech today at the Heritage Foundation, Sussman also warned that cap-and-trade legislation would destroy entire industries and cost multiple thousands of jobs.

The legislation requires the nation to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 83 percent by 2050, by which time the population is predicted to grow by 100 million.

To accomplish this dramatic reduction, said Sussman, "all manufacturing would be offshored," "the coal industry shut down," and "livestock would be gone" because cows produce greenhouse gases.

Cap-and-trade also would serve as a vehicle for redistributing wealth, said Sussman.

The Senate bill anticipates that it would force prices for all goods and services to skyrocket, so it includes provisions to send money to the poor to pay the freight – "that's redistribution."

Also, the bill provides for three years of unemployment benefits at 70 percent of an employee's highest wage, plus government-paid job training and relocation.

In "Climategate," published by WND Books, Sussman reveals that global temperatures reached a peak during the 1930s and have been trending down ever since, in spite of the increasing amount of human-generated "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere.

"This flies in the face of global-warming orthodoxy," said Sussman.

"Climategate" focuses on the University of East Anglia scandal, in which e-mail exchanges between many of the world's most prominent climate scientists reveal coordinated efforts to discredit scientific critics and to hide empirical data that undermined the global-warming theory.

The theory posits that so-called "greenhouse gases," particularly carbon dioxide, are building up in the atmosphere as a result of human activities such as burning gasoline and coal. According to the theory, the greenhouse-gas buildup is causing global temperatures to rise, which eventually will lead to a series of environmental calamities.

The e-mails reportedly were hacked from the Norwich, England, school's Climatic Research Unit, which had previously served as a main source of information on global warming for the United Nations.

Sussman argues that climate science has been taken over by radical activists who are distorting the data in order to implement a leftist political agenda. On May 29, Sussman told interviewer Phyllis Schlafly that the "goal" of global-warming activists, including many scientists and U.N. officials, is "to use greenhouse gases as a scare tactic to try to transform this economy … and bring forward a socialist system."

During his Heritage speech, Sussman described NASA climatologist Dr. James E. Hansen, a leading global-warming promoter, as "a political activist with an agenda." He continued, "Phil Jones (head of the Climatic Research Unit) is cut from the same cloth."

During a May interview, Sussman told Eagle Forum radio host Phyllis Schlafly that he wrote "Climategate" as an "antidote" to former Vice President Al Gore's chilling environmentalist story called "An Inconvenient Truth."

Published by WND Books, "Climategate" is the No. 1 or No. 2 ranked title on numerous Amazon categories, including Meteorology, Weather, Climatology and Conspiracy Theories.

Sussman cites more than 300 footnotes in breaking down the data, methods and findings global-warming proponents use.

He warned that the move is steamrolling forward, citing a recent rejection by the Senate of a resolution to restrict the EPA from some regulatory actions.

"The EPA regulations are based on pure junk science and will destroy our economy," he said. "Jobs will be sent packing offshore, farmers and ranchers will go bust, the price of virtually everything in America will skyrocket, and our energy supply will be severely rationed. The notion that human activity can alter the earth's climate is pure folly, and the players fronting this failed theory know it.

"These are ideas that flow from minds enlightened by Marx - not Madison," he said.

Last year the EPA declared it would institute a so-called "Endangerment Finding" to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, originally passed by Congress in 1970. The 1970 law limited the federal government to regulating air particulates, ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides and lead — not greenhouse gases.

"We've done an excellent job of cleaning up the six pollutants targeted by the Clean Air Act," said Sussman. "So the environmentalists had to invent phantom pollutants in that of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to continue their attack on America. Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than water, and without greenhouse gases Earth would be a giant ball of ice."

Since 1970, as Sussman notes in "Climategate," of the six pollutants addressed in the Clean Air Act, particulates have decreased 40 percent; days exceeding the ozone standard have declined 79 percent; carbon-monoxide levels have been reduced 74 percent; sulfur oxides 63 percent; nitrogen oxides 37 percent; and lead levels 96 percent.

"All of these pollution reductions occurred while automobiles and trucks have doubled their mileage on our roads and the coal industry has increased its output by 60 percent," Sussman said. "We've done a remarkable job cleaning up our pollution. The environmentalists are not just sore losers, they sorely dislike the American way of life."