I'm beginning to believe very few of the environmental alarmists actually believe what they say.

I suspect their motivations are not "saving the planet," but something else entirely.

This isn't true only of those in Copenhagen this week, claiming now we only have "weeks" to reverse cataclysmic climate change. It's true of all environmental chicken littles.

Let's examine a much smaller example to put this in perspective.
Way back in the 1970s, when no one had yet dreamed up the possibility of catastrophic, manmade "global warming," the big threat in environmental circles was PCBs or polychlorinated biphenyls.

These chemicals were widely used for three decades in electrical equipment because of their insulating properties until Renate Kimbrough of the Centers for Disease Control decided to feed massive quantities of PCBs to lab rats and found they caused liver cancer.

Not long afterward, in 1976, Congress banned the use of PCBs.
Almost 25 years later, Kimbrough revisited the subject in a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine and found no link between PCBs and human health problems. That study, by the way, focused on more than 7,000 people who worked from 1946 to 1977 in GE power plants on the Hudson River – plants that dumped massive amounts of PCBs into the river.

Even though PCB levels in the Hudson were dropping every year as nature took its course, and despite the new study by Kimbrough, the Clinton administration decided to invest in a major dredging operation of the river. The Bush administration later green-lighted the project at an estimated cost of $460 million.

All along the way, critics explained the worst possible thing you could do if the goal was to reduce PCB levels in the Hudson was to dredge. They said dredging would actually raise the levels of PCBs in the river.
Scheduled to begin in 2003 or 2004, the project finally got under way last spring – with a new price tag of $780 million.

Would you like to guess the results?

Almost immediately, the PCB levels in the river began to rise. They're still rising. But, instead of halting the dredging operation, the Environmental Protection Agency has simply assured the public there are no health dangers.
Of course, that begs the question: If there is no health threat associated with rising PCB levels, why dredge them out in the first place?

Because it was never about PCB dangers in the first place. This was about doing something – about politicians taking action that would make them heroic figures, about make-work projects, about payoffs and so-called "green jobs."

That little story is the climate-change scare in microcosm.
There was no danger in the first place.

The science was faulty and fraudulent.
But politicians needed to create crises that would alarm the public so the politicians could ride to the rescue as heroes – all the while ripping off the public in the process.

Now the stakes have risen.

Today, the environmental alarmists are using all they've learned in 35 years of refining their scams to remake the world in their own shady image.
They are literally trying to take over the planet in Copenhagen this week.
They think they have found the key to making themselves masters of the universe in the name of saving the planet from catastrophic, manmade global warming – even though it is as phony as a three-dollar bill.

So, they fly their private jets off to Copenhagen and ride in their stretch limousines and condemn the rest of us for driving SUVs and keeping the thermostat at 72 degrees.

It's not really about saving the planet. It's about raw, unbridled power.