It’s a scorcher here in Texas! We’ve consistently had temperatures in excess of 100 degrees for a month and there is no break in sight. Much of the continental U.S. is also feeling the heat. The U.K. declared a national emergency on July 15.

Spain, Portugal, Greece, France, Italy, and Germany are all suffering with excess heat and subsequent fires. As you can imagine, those promoting climate hysteria are blaming the severity of the heat wave on the burning of fossil fuels.

If you’re active on social media and pay attention to energy/climate topics you’ve witnessed a steady stream of self-assured prophets of doom telling you that this heat wave is just the beginning.

One meme shows Bart Simpson of “The Simpsons” complaining that this was the hottest summer of his life. In a second frame, his father, Homer Simpson, says “This is the COLDEST summer of the REST of your life!” The irony of the meme was lost on the self-described “science communicator” who posted it. As everyone knows, Homer is an idiot.

I have little interest in debating the science behind catastrophic human-induced climate change. Indeed, there is no longer anything resembling a debate. The subject is so polarizing that there is little chance of persuading anyone to consider a nuanced point of view. Instead, my interest is in the full-scale illogic of the message itself.

If we are to assume that the planet is undergoing a change (man-caused or natural) that will threaten our very existence, what is our best

defense against this change that is already extreme and underway? There is only one way to go in such a desperate circumstance. We will need to produce a LOT more energy!

Energy is our best and only defense against the natural forces of a planet that wants us dead. Yes, everything natural, including wild animals, viruses, extreme weather events, etc.

is designed to kill the weak and weaken the strong. Over time humans developed many strategies and technologies to help themselves survive this hostile planet. These strategies and technologies have a singular commonality—energy.

In the past 150 years we have created an existence that is founded on carbon-based resources. If it is possible to transition our existence away from oil, natural gas, and coal, it will take a long time. We’re not talking years or even decades, but a century or more. And, of course, we have still not discovered any resource or invented any technology that can replace fossil fuels at any meaningful scale.

This is the illogic of the climate campaigners. (And make no mistake, it is a campaign.) If the threat from climate change is as extreme as they say and is caused by the burning of fossil fuels as they insist, there’s no way to transition away from oil, natural gas, and coal fast enough to save ourselves.

Despite this irrefutable fact, the singular strategy promoted by the climate campaigners is to insist that humans rapidly decrease the energy resources that would sustain us long enough to develop longer term solutions.

They obtusely refuse to recognize that wrecking economies and lives is not going to accelerate any advance toward an entirely new way of living.

It will do just the opposite. As we have seen recently in the collapse of Sri Lanka, national leaders who ignore energy reality quickly starve their people are forced from power.

Western elites are fixated on climate change, but the developing nations of China, India, Indonesia, and the African continent are ramping up their use of fossil fuels as fast as possible.

These are the nations where the vast majority of population growth is taking place. China and India occasionally pay lip service to the concern over climate change, but they have no interest in actually reducing their energy use.

Chinese and Indian leaders didn’t need to see the collapse of Sri Lanka or the farmer revolts in the Netherlands to know that energy is the master resource of prosperity.

During this “record breaking” heat wave I saw something else on social media that made me chuckle and shake my head. It’s a video segment from a show broadcast in 1978, hosted by Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame.

Nimoy says, “What scientists are telling us now is that the threat of an ice age is not as remote as they once thought. During the life of our grandchildren, arctic cold and perpetual snow could turn most of the inhabitable portions of the planet into a polar desert.”

Nimoy’s ice age doom was predicted 34 years ago. Four decades before that the U.S. was enduring the scorching decade of the 1930s—the hottest since temperature recording began. It wasn’t one hot summer, but a decade of wave after wave of drought and extreme summer heat.

This happened well before the widespread use of fossil fuels.

The lesson here is that prophesies of climate doom are as common as extreme weather events. Climate prophets would have a lot more credibility if they were more humble about what they “know” and if their strategy for dealing with impending doom made any sense. It would also be helpful if they had ever been correct.

*Mark Mathis, Author, “Feeding the Media Beast” & Filmmaker, “spOILed” and “Fractured” & Video Producer, Clear Energy Alliance.

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