Climate cum energy policies have penetrated deeply into the fabric of our society, with disastrous consequences for our prosperity, due to an unprecedented rise in energy prices which triggered inflation and energy poverty for significant parts of the population. How did all that happen?
This book tries to answer that question.
It is a compilation of a number of articles that we have published in recent decades on climate and related topics, such as energy, both in The Netherlands and abroad. This volume addresses not only the climatic aspects of atmospheric warming, but also its political, economic and social implications. In other words, we have tried to shed light on the issue from different perspectives because we believe it can only be properly understood through a multidisciplinary approach.
While it is true that some authors have suggested some kind of conspiracy to promote the fear of global warming, most look for the cause in a confluence of overlapping interests, developments in society and ideas that are mutually reinforcing and have finally led to a firm belief in the claim that man-made CO2 emissions, through the use of fossil fuels, are a dominant source of atmospheric warming.
According to the proponents of the hypothesis of man-made global warming this would have catastrophic consequences such as a rise in sea level with increased flooding, weather extremes, higher land temperatures accompanied by greater droughts or extreme rainfall, resulting in negative impacts on agriculture, migration of harmful tropical insects to northern latitudes with negative impacts on human health, increased frequency and intensity of storms, massive waves of climate refugees etc.
In this book we have tried to prove that none of these fears is based on science.
