this is a good place and you should use it. [applause]

argues that the modern environmental movement is made up of socialists and communists whose goal is to rule the world. it's about 50 minutes. >> good afternoon and welcome to the heritage foundation as the director of lectures and seminars, it is my privilege to welcome everyone to our louis lawyer and auditorium and of course welcome those who joined on the heritage of our website as well as those who will be joining us on c-span on future occasions. we ask everyone to make a courtesy check that cell phones have been turned off as we proceed. always good that the speaker does that especially.

its and we will post within 24 hours on the website for everyone's future reference. hosting the discussion this morning introducing our special guest is mclaurin, a policy analyst in our thomas rowe institute for economic policy studies. he focuses on energy, environmental and regulatory issues and also examines energy prices and other economic effects of the environment policy and regulations particularly looking at climate change or cap-and-trade legislation and he articulates the benefits of the market environmentalism. he has appeared on many radio programs locally as well as serving as an associate for the charitable foundation prior to joining this year heritage. please strine me in welcoming my colleague, nick? [applause] 64, john and all of you for coming here today. but surely promises to be an educational and exciting event

with our speaker. learned about these issues and studying them as the global recession hit seen a shift in the movement away from the learning about the catastrophic consequences of the climate change and shifting towards agreement job's movement and towards a clean energy economy, and these policies have such far reaching implications of american households and businesses and to rest on our shaking from the assumptions about. this is julieanna the policies here in the united states to list them endlessly really do have policies that artificially drive the price of energy up so people will use less biofuels mandates, energy efficiency regulations that restrict consumer choice and ignore the

trade offs they make when purchasing appliances or white balls or vehicles. all these policies alter the system of free enterprise and they all have an underlying goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions of greenhouse gas emissions, and that's just scratching the surface. when you dig a little deeper and learn about the climate science and the special-interest politics that go on beyond these political shifts and policies that's when you're on is begin to pull - and your blood begins to boil and i don't think that there's many people that have done as much digging as our guest james delingpole a rider and logger who helped expose the gate scandal in the speech from author and shivers books including welcome to obama lane five senior future and it doesn't work and 365 ways to

drive the liberals crazy so if you are looking for a way to drive a little crazy, james is your guy in his book is the one to read. in 2005 he received the charles douglas reward and in 2010 he won the prize for on-line journalism and on his website jamesdelingpole dhaka, he is a fan of great white sharks and films about the full vampire's so we can have those discussions may be another day and have him back again but today use joining to discuss his new book watermelons the green movements true color. with that the string me in welcoming james delingpole to the podium. [applause] thank you. if you want me to talk about great white sharks i would be happy. thank you for welcoming me to d.c., the home of small government in liberty.

before we talk a bit more about my book, "watermelons," i would like to show you a little film. >> the idea is everyone starts cutting their cost emissions by 10% so even a plan it safe for everyone eventually. that's how they got to be huge things but i would love it if you and your family would think about doing something like taking your next holiday by train instead of running or biking energy-saving light bulbs it would be great to get a sense of how many of you.

fantastic. that's absolutely fine. you're own choice. thank you so much for today and i will see you tomorrow. oh, just before you go i just need to press a little button here. now everybody please remember to read chapter five and six on volcanoes. >> i just want to check on that, had brilliant ideas for lots of you to cut down emissions by ten per cent. just a quick show of hands everyone who wants to get involved. a great that's nearly everybody. just for the record, no pressure, those who are not quite convinced on it yet?

the problem, your choice. those of you planning something of a year or at home should get working on it. and those of you who aren't. >> hello everyone. agreed to be back here. tell me something. [inaudible] it means we are trying to cut carbon emissions by 10% this year. >> they are coming from buses, trains, cars. >> i wouldn't do it. it seems like a stretch to me. >> just ignore it, no pressure.

>> pune hundreds of thousands of people, scott tribes, president and government all taxing climate change in more than 40 countries. care to join us? no pressure. >> was that okay? heppe to help. it's been a quitter you thinking of doing for yourself? >> are you kidding me? >> i thought i doing this voice-over that was my contribution. >> absolutely. no pressure. thank you.

>> so today's talk is dedicated to the memory of siloed and tracie coo stood up because the ego fascist schoolteacher who died for that cause. how many of you have seen that video before? okay. about a third of you. when people see the video for the first time often their reaction is that it must have been made by people like me to sadr guice the ego fascist leanings of the green movement. you may be surprised to learn that that film was made to recruit people to the cause of environmentalism. it was made entirely without irony and you can see that the values of that were pretty high and would give an expensive to make. the people taking part in its

that you don't recognize david of france and peter for england, u.s. radio had providing the soundtrack of the nd and gillian anderson from the x files as the schoolteacher and the film was directed and written by richard curtis, britain's b5 most bankable, the third actor who directed films like nottinghill with julia roberts, four weddings and a funeral and the blackout series this guy is big. the campaign was sponsored by organizations like sony and a mobile phone company. it was endorsed by all three main political parties and had the enthusiastic endorsement of our prime minister david cameron and at no stage during the

making of that film did anyone stopped to think hang on the second. what are we saying here? are we really saying people who don't believe in 53 about global warming deserve to die? that is kind of what they were saying. and i think to appreciate the sinister absurdity of this u.s. yourself imagine any of their minority group. imagine if they decided the best idea for gays would be to execute them are muslims or disabled people, yet it seems that according to the bulk of the people that made the video people who do not believe and man-made global warming are so beyond the pale of reasonable

human discourse devotee only just and fair penalty for them in a comedy fashion is dead. how did we reach this pass? how did we get into this mess? ra content in my book, "watermelons" that the man-made global warming industry, and it is an industry, a cost the industry represents the biggest outbreak of mass hysteria in history. it is also probably the most expensive, i correct that, certainly the most expensive of mass hysteria in history, and one of the questions i set out to answer in this book is if it

is not true, if it is miffed, climate change, manmade climate change, catastrophic manly climate change, why is it so many people think otherwise? and how can it be that we are in a situation where leaders like david cameron and barack obama find themselves in bed with activists like george monreal, ed begley jr., in bed also with rent seeking carvin traders like al gore, in bed also with all companies like exxon and bp but there is no mistake that the big oil puts far more money into the

global warming industry than it does funding skeptics contrary to what you might read in the blogosphere. an australian lager so of you may be familiar with her, she researched how much had been spent on the man-made global warming industry. since 1989, the u.s. government, the european union and so on have spent approximately five times the manhattan project funding research into man-made global warming. it is a lot of money. sometimes people ask me why would the scientists cheat the danger? why would the eisel reply to us?

i can answer that follow the money. the manhattan project is repeated to have been the most expensive scientific project in history. we have spent five times that. if you are a scientist and you want to research the habits of squirrels you're not going to get your funding. you want to research how the habit grew and has been affected by climate change you will get the funding. i would like to dispute for a moment this word constantly used against people like me. i'm not dealing the climate changes nobody no use denying what climate change it has done over the millennia it does it of the time. we have the medieval war period

more than it is now. we of the roman before that. we had the ice age currently emerging climate changes all the time. so the idea that anyone is denying climate change as the reality is nonsense we all believe in climate change but what we don't believe, and this is where the ideas get completed the idea of climate change when they use that phrase with a wanted to think is subliminal man-made climate change but this is where we do dispute those on the my side of the argument. catastrophic minute climate change. if you look at the

intergovernmental panel on climate change report over the last 20 years, it has been increasingly shrill in its prognostications about man-made climate do. but in the period, no convincing evidence has been produced to show that human influence on climate is so significant or dangerous that we are all going to fly. on the contrary, global warming actually stopped or flatten out over ten years ago now. we are entering a period of cooling, and i think we need to remember if you look at human

history and what man has done in times of the ruling as opposed to warming the civilization flourishes in times of warming. we are designed for warm weather. it's not that we can't cope in the climate we are very adaptable. we've got a blues and stuff like that, but i was telling you earlier i would like to live in california. there's a reason i would like to live in california. it's not the political climate is the weather climate to it is nice and warm we are drawn to warmer weather. warmer weather souls to of our main problems of how to feed ourselves. in periods of world he can grow things like wheat at higher latitudes. my book "watermelons" covers the science of climate change but i'm not a scientist and this

isn't the part that really interests me about this whole debate it's where these ideas come from and the politics of social change if you like. if the science is flawed how come so many people believe in it? i think one reason is that i think there is built into our dna this in in eight catastrophism. every generation believes that somehow it will be the last, that it will be the one that shape the world that it would destroy it through its own evil and if you look at religion through the ages, but it is about, what they are all about in one way or another is a

atoning decisions to try and appease the guts. the aztecs dealt with this by sacrificing people and sucking blood out of their hearts, they're still beating hearts and in medieval times they questioned by wearing shirts and flecha leading themselves. today in the green movement they do it by imposing taxes on flights and forcing everyone to use yellow light bulbs that give you a headache. there is this idea that we punish ourselves in order to make the world a better place, and it is my contention in the book which may initially seem a controversial contention that the facts bear this out that

actually you don't have to make a choice between either the environment or economic growth. on the contrary, real environmentalism and economic growth go hand-in-hand. i will give you one example of this. in the victorian times at the height of the british empire when i might tell you the tax rate is about 10% when the british economy was thriving pretend the river that runs through london was stagnant like washington and the summer it would grow so putrescent in the summer months that it was known as the great stink of disgusting

what flowed past. as people got off the train on the railway stations near the river they would sometimes a bomb attack at the nauseating stench. why did this no longer have been? what is because the victorians under that regime of 10% or so had enough money to invest on building an effective sewage system they built the in bank but in the they could do this because they didn't have the big government, they didn't have the epa or equivalent in posing the regulation to make the river cleaner. on their own accord they thought hang on a second we would like to be cleaned.

what we do about this? i know, let's build a sewage system and this is what they did and nowadays when you get off the train you don't throw up. it's cleaner than it was in the victorian times. again it is cleaner than it was probably 300 years ago. why? because as economies grow more mature, so people can spend the money making the world leader, better, more frequent, you look at the great environmental disasters in the last century where did the really bad stuff happen? it happened in the soviet union it's happening now in north korea and china. this is what happens when people

of their economic freedoms constrained by the big government. so what my book really is about in the end is a pleasing for the more rational discourse about the environment. i'd like to stress here in case there are anybody that thing that one of those nasty people that doesn't care about like to point out that actually i really like country walks and a beautiful countryside of use. i like going surfing, i like looking at animals and one of the great propaganda victories that has been stalled by the

green movement is to portray this world in which there are two kinds of people. on the one hand there are the caring and sharing who are members of greenpeace and care about nature and on the other hand evil big fat cigars in their mouth and dollar signs like the katulis do and they laugh and say i want to destroy the world. nobody, believe me, nobody looks at a beach and thinks you know what would really improve the beach if it were covered with an oil slick and maybe a few dalia and pelicans nobody thinks that. we all like the sea otters and

the beaches. it is in our nature to desire a clean, fresher, happier and more frequent world. we like that kind of stuff. but we can achieve that without bombing of the economy back to the dark ages in the name of saving it and the mentality to the green movement in order to save the city we must destroy yet, and i think that ury is wrong and self-destructive. i think it is not borne out by the facts and if you want to discover more about this you can ask interesting and lots of questions and read my book because it is good and funny, too. thank you. [applause]

>> thank you, james. three simple rules. one, wheat for the microphone because we are taking this so everyone can hear you. state your name and affiliation and leave it to a question and not a diatribe as right or wrong. i will let you dictate. no violence. i don't want a tax or trolley tour of my clothes off to have sex with me or anything. now your questions, please. >> yes, you, sir. >> you sound very similar but he considers himself beneficial and mild do you think that he is wrong on that?

>> i think it is easy to get bogged down and stuff one can't really answer because no one knows. people consider themselves it's not their position to argue about. i think it is easy in this debate to get bogged down in the kind of an esoteric stuff about trying to predict the future based on your particular theory. i don't know. even richard doesn't really know what's going to happen to the climate so i prefer to concentrate on the things i know about. i read books. i can see stuff in the world but i wouldn't want to prod bostick eight prognosticate too much. they seem to be very much under

the view that we are entering a period of oscillation. it tends to move in the three-year cycles. i think what is clear from the evidence so far is that we are warming gently but i hope we carry on warming and gently, because actually as i said earlier, warming is better than cooling. cooling is what we must year. but only to a couple of degrees of a drop in the global temperature for the reproduction to be jeopardized. why is the air of a spring happening at the moment? is it because the watch south park? is it because the service outpouring sudden liberalism in the middle east?

no. it's because of the same thing it always causes the revolutions like the french revolution for example. why are there with shortages of the moment? can anyone tell me? it's one word and it begins with a b. sleeves of the world's most productive agricultural land are being taken out to use on by you fuel. why is this business going? all because the interest sarkozy not to the big government and environmentalists have told them it's the way of saving the world they are actually destroying the world. it's the kind of roundabout way. yes, you, sir.

>> i just want to ask about pollutants i think there is documentation and that is all tied into this. the fact that there is air pollution particles in the air and the effect on children's health, asthma, things of that nature is so if you comment on that aspect of this. >> there is a cafe that i go to when i stay with my brother and it's run by 18 environmentalist and on the wall of the cafe is a picture of these towers with white stuff coming out, you can bet your bottom dollar that 95%, if not more, of the people who come into the cafe and look at that picture and think

pollution, the stuff coming out of those towers is water vapor. i think people have a completely floored idea about what constitutes pollution and what doesn't. the epa believes that co2 is a pollutant. co2 is planned food. it is not a pollutant. not for a second part of a dispute that we need to limit pollution wherever we can. as i said earlier we want a cleaner environment, but i would contend the way to achieve this through our natural human instinct and occasionally you need laws to help people stop

businesses from dumping -- when businesses use africa as a dumping ground i consider africa part of my world and i want to go their own holiday. i don't want it to be toxic. obviously you need to regulate against that kind of thing that we over regulate. there is a very interesting story that i told my book about julian simon the dooms lawyer he was known as. julian simon was the great partner of paul alec. julian simon was on the panel in london talking about the environment and went on before

and showed him with a dramatic improvement to the air quality the introduction of the clean air act in london had and julian simon, what a strike this was produced a draft of his own going back much, much earlier, showing the air quality had been improving any way. the pollution was going down quite naturally through the natural economic process. this year and i mentioned before to make things cleaver. there is a fantasy that environmentalists nurture that without them, without the intervention the world would go to hell in a handcart. i would contend that this is very much not the case.

i hope that kind of answers your question. yes? >> could you tell us something about ships and public opinion if any of the brereton in the week of the climate scandal that showed pollution and corruption across-the-board among the scientists who the recipients have to carry out a climate research is the environmental movement in britain as a result of that? thank you. >> i'm glad you asked that question, yes. the thing about climate changes that afterwards al gore said he was sorry for being wrong about lifting and then he resigned as the head of the ipcc. greenpeace disbanded. the epa stopped regulating.

no, none of these things happened. they ought to have happened because as you say quite correctly with the claimant e-mail shows is at the heart of the ipcc which president obama has described as the gold standard of the scientific understanding of the global warming would be hitting not like scientists are not like dispassionate seekers of the truth, what more like activists. now i know of many people who were previously had gnostic or even on the other side of the argument for me shifted as a result. for them it was the game changer in the way so many americans

9/11 is what turned them to the more conservative views and the opinion polls suggest the public is growing more skeptical it has been since climate change. they are sick of being said this propaganda and increasingly sick of the tax rises and regulations being imposed on them in the name of this seemingly nonexistent problem with the problem is not where the public is going, it is where the political class is going, where the environmental movement is going. that video i showed you at the beginning at indigenous of that. rather than admit they got things wrong, environmentalists or growing - real and dangerous

that preparing their line you know, this talk of ocean and sophistication for example is like a comedian co2 doesn't make the world get hot but it does make the notion more acidic and that's bad, too. looking for new ways of justifying their position and i fear this is great to be a long hard battle to counter. they are not going to surrender very easily. >> i would ask you to take a step back and look not just as global warming but the human interest in alarmism and what

exactly is the response to the next alarm, how do we inject skepticism early enough? i feel like we are behind the curve on this and they got the jump on us and after the scandals have we seen the pullen opinion term back. >> you're absolutely right. i will give you a classic example of what was just said. shale gas is the revolution that is going to transform all of our lives. it's cheap, it's usually abundant across the world. it is relatively if you believe in such things it is relatively low carbon, it is relatively environmentally friendly and that is available in places

which aren't evil like poland for a sample and one of the big problems in the world now is that our energy supplies are in places like the least, places like russia which have massive supply of gas and places like france which got a monopoly on nuclear that's really scary isn't at as an english nanny where i think zte push man anywhere i think. so shale gas is like a dream come true because what we want is cheap and abundant energy in the stark economic times what we need this cheap energy not expensive energy i feel we can all agree on that. and yet before most of us knew of the existence of shale gas last year for goodness sake this guy josh fox makes this film

called gas land showing when somebody turns on the tappan colorado or the faucet or whatever anyone calls these things methane comes out. how did this guy get in there so soon? the are very, very quick to get their propaganda in the environmentalists. i think there is a -- in the conservative disposition i consider myself conservative libertarian, classical liberal, whatever. i think the reason i took this position, this slight tendency towards complacency is because we believe that the world should functional level of logic and

the empiricism. we look at what works and what is true in the therefore things will take care of themselves because that is right. their philosophy is the green movement and the progressives and liberals generally is i think about denying reality about winning the argument not through the facts and logic and open debate but through closing down the argument and propaganda so i don't think there is ever going to be a solution to the problem because the other side fights dirtier than we do so we have just got to be -- we have just got to hope that in the end a kind of justice will prevail

as natural justice and i am seeing that for a sample in the collapse of the carbon trading market. you know, al gore, goldman sachs said of the chicago trade exchange i think a couple of years ago carbon or co2 as you and i might call it was trading at $7 a ton just before the carbon trading exchange closed he was trading at 7 cents per ton. the carbon trading market is tanking in europe now and we would suggest that you would call it back to the market's that there is a kind of natural justice system which cancels out all this rent seeking