American business leaders are being bamboozled by climate cultists, whose hysteria over a harmless gas and natural warming deserve ridicule more than respect. Corporate homage to the net-zero mob can levy a tragic cost on the stockholders, employees, customers and communities of companies kneeling to the false god of “decarbonization.”

A recent example is U.S. Steel Corporation’s cancellation of a $1.5 billion project at its Mon Valley Works in western Pennsylvania, representing a reported loss of 1,000 construction jobs and a potential threat to thousands of steelworkers.

“U. S. Steel is setting aside this project as we step forward to meet the needs of a rapidly changing world,” wrote company CEO David B. Burritt in a letter to the public. “In this world – a world that still needs steel – we need to find aggressive decarbonization solutions. The project we had planned in 2019 would have decreased our carbon footprint, but we must now move farther and faster.””Fair Questions” With Matt Bailey – 05/11/21PauseNext video21:03 / 34:17SettingsVoltaxFull-screen

Really? Where steel executives used to worry about making steel faster, now they’re apparently all about decarbonization. Why not just earn a decarbonization badge from the Boy Scouts and let the business alone?

Earth to Mr. Burritt: THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS. Go back to manufacturing steel. You of all people should know that modern industrial processes are compatible with responsible stewardship of the environment.

However, the CEO is not alone in his delusion. The websites of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute (API) have sections devoted to climate change. API’s “Climate Action Framework” blathers on about “meeting the world’s growing need for energy while simultaneously ushering in a lower-carbon future.”

What is it with these people and carbon? Somebody tell API that their members produce hydrocarbons — and that’s a good thing. The entrepreneurial extraction of energy from hydrocarbons is largely responsible for the unprecedented prosperity resulting from the Industrial Revolution. Most sensible people would like more of that.

Who are these people talking to anyhow? The Swedish teenager who scolds United Nations bureaucrats? University agenda-driven scientists who manipulate data to get government grants? Bill Gates who promotes putting pollutants in the sky to reflect heat back into space? AOC? Wile E. Coyote?

Well, they aren’t talking to me or the 70 other distinguished scientists, engineers and energy experts that make up the CO2 Coalition. We could tell Mr. Burritt that there is nothing in the IPCC climate models that justifies killing thousands of jobs, much less, as some would risk, tanking the entire U.S. economy.

There is Dr. William Happer, professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University, who told an audience in February, “There is no climate emergency. There will not be a climate emergency.”

Or possibly Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, whose latest book is “Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom.” Dr. Moore says he wrote the book “to expose the misinformation and outright lies used to scare us and our children about the future of the Earth.”

Another CO2 Coalition expert is Dr. Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who famously stated:

What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that carbon dioxide from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin.

It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world—that carbon dioxide, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.

Any of these experts — and many others — would say that recent increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and moderate natural warming have benefited ecosystems and people with longer growing seasons, increased crop production and an overall greening of Earth. Proposals to spend large sums on “green” technologies and other measures promise only economic pain and social upheaval.

A business leader — particularly one engaged in an energy-intensive enterprise — who embraces the vacuous low-carbon vision is giving their would-be executioner rope for the hanging. Stick to the knitting — or steelmaking — and leave the climate to the Sun, which most school children at one time intuitively knew to be the main agent of warming and cooling.

Gregory Wrightstone is a geologist and the author of the bestselling book, Inconvenient Facts: The science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know. Greg’s expertise on climate change was recently confirmed by his acceptance as an “Expert Reviewer” for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (AR-6). He serves as Executive Director of the CO2 Coalition of Arlington, VA.

This article appeared on the BizPac Review website at https://www.bizpacreview.com/2021/05/12/businesses-are-ignoring-stockholders-and-their-bottom-line-to-embrace-a-woke-climate-agenda-1073115/