Craig Rucker: What You Need to Know About the Global Politics of Climate Change

They called out us and they committed $100 million to try to stop us from being able to communicate. They're trying to pressure big tech companies to censor our social media posts. This is public information. It's not conspiracy theory. You can actually get the documents and go check for yourself. They want us to shut up. The public doesn't know what the facts are. They can embellish it and get away with it. Today, on Bay Area Innovators, we are joined by Craig Rucker, co-founder of CFACT, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. For decades, CFACT has challenged prevailing views on climate policy, energy, and environmental regulation. In this conversation, Rucker explains why he founded the organization, what he believes are major flaws in climate change arguments, and how China's energy practices raise national security concerns. This is Bay Area Innovators, and I'm your host, Steve Esposito. Craig, welcome to Bay Area Innovators. Well, thanks for having me on, Steve. It's a pleasure to be on the program. Well, great to have you here. So you are currently the president and you're also the co-founder of CFACT, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. And your organization and yourself are in many ways challenging the current views on climate change. And you're not alone. There's others who have done this, but you're pretty prominent in this. So I would like to start to tell us a bit how you got around starting CFACT and your background. You know, CFACT has been around for quite a while, I understand, and I want to get a sense of how you got it started. You know, we started back in 1985. I was just out of doing a stint in college, a little bit of time in the Army. And I came initially from a kind of rural conservative area near Buffalo, New York. And in my community where I grew up with, it wasn't much, it was a, you know, an area where you chopped wood to heat your home. We went deer hunting. My grandfather was a farmer, an ag person. And when I went to college, I went near New York City, a place called the State University of New York at Albany. A lot of my friends were from the Big Apple and they were mostly liberal. Whereas where I came from, we were mostly conservative. And I found something peculiar back then. I noticed that all of them who came from New York City declared they were environmentalists and I was not. And I thought that was a little odd. These were people who live in the city saying that somebody like me who grew up in the country doesn't know about the environment. I decided to start CFACT with another gentleman named David Rothbard. And we gathered a bunch of scientists together and we thought there should be a voice that goes out there and discusses these environmental issues, which you mentioned climate change and others, but from a free market or conservative viewpoint, not from a viewpoint that's more to the political left like Greenpeace, Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Defenders of Earth and these other types of groups, which in our opinion were fairly radical organizations that didn't reflect the viewpoints of many Americans. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in 1985, definitely the term climate change did not exist. I don't even think global warming existed at that time, right? No. As a matter of fact, having grown up in Buffalo, New York, I remember well that in the 1970s, major blizzards and snowstorms hitting the East Coast. We had a very famous blizzard in Buffalo in 77. I think Parker Brothers made a game out of it called the Blizzard of 77. You saw people like Leonard Nimoy, Spock from Star Trek, actually going out and talking about the impending ice age. And many of the environmentalists were saying that the Earth was going to be buried in tons of ice. And they actually adopted ideas of putting soot and black things on the polar caps to try to melt them so that we could stop the ice age from coming. Well, within 10 years, starting around 1988, that had only changed. And the planet moved up from a very cold 1970s to a warmer 1980s. And voila! It went from global ice age and cooling to global warming. So you're right. When we started in 1985, that was not the major issue. But it quickly became, within three years of our inception, to become probably the biggest issue we addressed. So originally, the reason you started CFAC was for the environment, for basically creating a better environment? Is that correct? That's correct. As I said, I thought the environment was one of these issues that conservatives needed to address. We were kind of caught up in the Reagan revolution. I myself had a chance to actually shake Ronald Reagan's hand before he was president. And no, I haven't washed this hand since. I say that in jest. But we were both kind of borne out, David Rothbard and myself, in working for that. He actually worked in Reagan's student effort. And we wanted to, you know, impact this particular issue. Because just as the left has moved against other issues, they'll talk that they're for women's rights. Well, feminists are not all women. A lot of women don't agree with the feminist agenda. They would make this thing with the civil rights movement and other things that, you know, were not necessarily representative of everybody in the particular movement. So the environment was another one that the left was clinging to, to try to push what we considered to be a fairly radical political agenda, using the cover of the environment as the reason for doing that. Now, climate change, there's probably trillions of dollars being spent to avoid or to reduce CO2, things like that. Can you please tell us from your experience, from your work, from your research, what are some of the biggest flaws that climate change seems to have? Well, we knew early on. Again, I had mentioned that we had listened to the political left saying there was going to be an ice age, and they immediately pivoted to climate change. My first reaction, and this came in 1988, when a guy named Dr. Hansen said he was 95 percent sure in a congressional testimony that the world was going to burn up by the year 2000 from global warming. My first question was, you know, where are they getting this global warming from? They said this is unprecedented, the temperatures that we had in 1988. Well, I had grandparents that remembered the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. And if you looked at the temperature records, most of America's major records for heat waves was back during that Dust Bowl 1930 era. And if you're a student of history like I was, you realize that the Vikings, for example, settled Greenland. And they farmed on Greenland. You still cannot farm on Greenland to this day because it's cooler. And we started looking into the issue and realized that a lot of the assertions they were making, that we're seeing an increase in hurricane activity, tornadoes, wildfires, and on issue after issue, if you plow down through the data, you'll realize that there's very selective picking and data points that they are using that embellish what the actual facts are. The truth is, when you get all through it, and we publish this every month at cfac.org on issue after issue, you'll see that we are not in any sort of impending climate catastrophe. And it's also obvious now, given the fact that many of the prognostications and predictions that they made from the early years never came to pass. We were told that New York City would be underwater by the year 2000, by this very famous, parts of New York City would be under. That never happened. We were also told that the Arctic would be ice-free by the year 2013-2014. Never happened. We had Prince Philip make prediction that back in 2008, that there would actually be no more, that the world would end in 18 months or so. And that never happened. So, you know, Greta Thunberg makes a prediction in 2018 that by 2023 that's it. We have AOC saying by 2030 we're all going to die. Time and time again, it's self-evident that what they're saying is an embellishment and simply not the truth. We're living longer and healthier than at any point in human history, and far from any sort of apocalypse. Grain yields are increasing. Lifespans are increasing. We're doing better than ever. And, you know, so, I think that it's obvious. A lot of these conclusions are based on models, these models that the climate people are using. Can you give us a sense how these models are derived? Who's creating these models and how accurate they are? And how can you verify whether they're accurate or not? Yeah, I mean, that's an excellent point, is that what you find is a real divide in the scientific community between those who look at the actual data, the real weather data, and those who believe in climate models. And these were developed in their rudimentary form in the 80s and 90s, but now today are supposedly more sophisticated, that actually make projections of future weather trends and global climate trends. We know that this is kind of a garbage in, garbage out assessment. We've seen some of the predictions made during the early years of the United Nations when they started looking into this in 1992. They had projections where the temperature should be today based on these climate models, and they are catastrophically off on almost every measure. I mean, a model is only good insofar as it accurately predicts reality. But if it deviates from reality, then the model should be trashed. You can run these models in reverse in many cases, and you can check and see if they can explain what happened in the past. They don't. So, item after item, we have a history of computer projections that say the Earth should have warmed by this point from the 1990s to today by 5 degrees, 3 degrees, 7 degrees, and in each and every case they way embellish how much warming should be taking place as opposed to what actually took place, which is very modest. Now, recently, a little over a week ago, the United States withdrew from several climate change organizations, including IPCC and UNFCCC, which have been very prominent and continue to do the work they do. Can you tell us what that means and what the future is going to look like as far as the whole climate change agenda and work that's being done? You know, this is wonderful news for those of us who have been battling the UN for decades. One of the early things we did in CFAC was actually make ourselves an accredited NGO. We applied, and as a result of that, we've been actually able to attend the biodiversity conferences, the population summits, and the climate change conferences that have taken place since the world got involved in climate change, which was specifically back in 1992 with the UN Convention on Climate Change. That was signed by George H. Bush in the United States and actually ratified by Congress. When people out there are wondering, why are they going after our hair dryers? Why are they trying to force us into electric vehicles? Why are they pushing renewable energy like solar and wind? It all stems from the UN's involvement in the US signing this agreement back in 1992, that UN Convention on Climate Change. That later grew into the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Accords, whatnot. What's happened is, in recent years, we've not really hit the source, which is to go back to that original convention and try and stop it. Trump, when he announced this, he said, we're withdrawing from that convention. That will remove any incentive for our federal bureaucracies to keep regulating us and everything, because that's the source and the legal justification that's being used to pass all these laws. What Trump did by targeting this particular one is get us out of not just the Paris Accords, but out of anything that has to do with climate change. We'll see if it withstands legal scrutiny. It should. But if it does, this is a good day for America. He took the time also to withdraw us from other things that we've been involved in. This Population Conference, International Population, ICPD, the UN Habitat, which is a UN effort to try to regulate our cities and things of that sort. The UN has been very involved and also getting involved in our land use issues across America. They have this World Biosphere and World Heritage Site thing that UNESCO has been working on. On issue after issue, the UN has been trying to create itself almost like a global government of sort, where it's regulating the nation states kind of deceptively using these treaties and these organizations have been the means to try to put in these agenda items that are really not to the best interest of humanity. You told me earlier that you're a prankster. Even in high school or in college, you would have these practical jokes. You've done some things within the UN. Can you share some of the fun things or some of the interesting things that you have done to raise the awareness of what you think is the climate change hoax, I guess? Yeah, I mean, ever since I was young, I guess everybody has their gifts. With some it might be singing, others guitar playing. I do do a little guitar playing. But for me, it was pranks. I used to like to just spoof people and do things of that sort. So when we joined the United Nations, we continued that. We realized that the left was very good with groups like Greenpeace and that. They'll do very high-profile things like climb buildings and drop banners off them and that sort of thing. We said, well, why are they the only ones that get to have fun? Our side should do the same thing. So we set about to somewhat mimic that in our own style. We have parachuted into UN conferences or right next to them with banners behind calling attention to things. We did that dramatically in South Africa and got on the front pages of their papers. We boarded Greenpeace ships that had been out in the ocean and dropped banners off them that had made the New York Times. We've also put up a life-size image of Donald Trump right in a convention right after he was first elected in 2016 that grabbed media headlines on CNN all weekend long. That did wind up getting us kicked out of the conference for a few days. And these are the types of things that we like to orchestrate. We brought students. We have student chapters of CFACT all over the country. And we sometimes will assemble a couple dozen, sometimes as many as 70, and we'll bring them to these conferences to do protest marches or to get into the meetings to hand out our material and that sort of thing. Now, the UN has gotten wise to this and prevented us from doing that in recent years. But nevertheless, these are the types of things that we do, and a lot of people know us because of these stunts. Now, you were able to participate in pretty much most, if not all, of the climate change conferences. And how did you manage that? How were you not banned from going there since you were not in line with their views, right? Excellent question. And in fact, you know, sometimes when we go to these things, they'll often say, how the heck did you get in here? Well, I think back in the early 90s, nobody expected a free market conservative think tank to actually go to these meetings. So we joined and weren't really questioned. They just assumed anybody who's signing up for this must be in agreement with climate change and what the UN is saying. So we kind of entered in under the radar. And once we were in, we were grandfathered in. And unless we do something that breaks the code of conduct, they can't kick us out very easily. Although there are some trying to do just that. And as a result of that, we've been able to stay in pretty much. Now, recently at the most recent UN conference in Belém, Brazil, there was an initiative by the President Lula who actually put forward something saying that we're the cause of trouble for them not succeeding in getting their agenda around the world. They called out us. They certainly would include the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Competitive Enterprise Institute, a number of these other organizations that we partner with as being troublemakers. And they committed $100 million to try to stop us from being able to communicate. They're trying to pressure big tech companies to censor our social media posts so that we aren't able to... And this is public information. It's not conspiracy theory. You can actually get the documents and go check for yourself. But this is something that was signed by Canada, Western Europe, and others, designed to try to silence those of us who are calling attention to every time they make some proclamation about a hurricane hitting Florida and we challenge that that hurricane is not the strongest ever, they want us to shut up. So the public doesn't know what the facts are about that hurricane or they can embellish it and get away with it. Now, let's talk about wind farms for a bit. You've been outspoken and did research and discussions on the wind farms and the security issues related to them. Can you tell us a bit more about why is there a security concern as far as the wind farms? Well, wind farms are being put out there to address global warming. That's the connection. Biden is the one who wanted to put 30,000 megawatts stretching wind farms all the way from the Carolinas up to Massachusetts with, I think, 1,500 massive towers. These are bigger than the Statue of Liberty that would stretch all that way. And he put them about 15, 20 miles off the coast right in the lanes of a bunch of endangered marine life like the right whale which there's only 350 left. He also fast-tracked these things and didn't listen to his own Navy which had real concerns about these windmills and what they mean for national security. For example, the wind turbines would interfere with military exercises. They're placing some of these right near the Norfolk Naval Base which is like America's largest naval base in the country. Home to, I think, a couple carrier groups and 70 warships. And they objected to that. But more significantly, these wind turbines also interfere with radar and communications devices which could actually be a danger not just to the Navy but to flight traffic that goes over top of them. And why that impacts national security is a third reason because nations like China and others are exploring these things called unmanned underwater vehicles or UUVs. And these are kind of like drone submarines. They're large in many cases like several semis long. But they can go rather silently through the water and if they're masked and they come in an area where there is a lot of wind activity and stuff and clanging from these wind farms they can hide themselves because of the radar being messed up by it. So the Navy had real concerns about that as well. So Biden of course said whatever, we don't care because climate change is our biggest threat not China. And so he fast-tracked these things. The Trump administration comes in. Day one they issue an executive order saying that these wind farms have to cease construction. And there were five more remaining ones and then right before Christmas he issued another stop work order on the remaining five. Now what is your sense of the perception in the general population of the whole climate change issues? Do you feel that it's been changing lately or in the last few years? Or is it pretty much the same in the sense that yes, we need to do all this work to address climate change? You know, it's very much a partisan issue. I think for those on the political left they would feel climate change is a very important issue. And polling data kind of indicates that. If you went back 20 years ago and looked at it today it's still a left-right issue. Most of those who are conservative or Republican or Trump supporters tend to not view this as a serious issue. Those on the left do. I would say the momentum has been taken away in the recent years just because of the fact that I think as evidenced by the fact Lula wants to silence skeptics because he feels they're making so much trouble for them getting their agenda through. I think we've been gaining traction. And I think one of the big reasons for that is the success of the Greens in transforming. People don't want to be forced into electric vehicles. They don't want to have unreliable electricity from solar and wind that costs two and three times more and kills birds and kills whales. They don't want to be told they can't use electric appliances like hair dryers or gas stoves or things of that sort. So they're almost victims of their own success. And in the case of countries like in Europe where they really went bonkers over climate change, you have big blackouts occurring and largely they're rationing electricity. Not long ago Germany was talking about people taking cold showers. They were turning the lights off on their monuments in the Brandenburg Gate. Japan, for its instance, was telling people to go to bed earlier to save electricity. So there's been some crazy things that have come about in the climate change issue that I think have led to people kind of resisting the whole idea. Craig, I think no discussion on energy and on climate change and all these efforts would be valid without talking about China and how they are pushing on basically they are getting a wild card in being able to pollute the world and they want the rest of the world to put the brakes on everything else. So can you tell us why they get away with this? Why China can bring coal mines and all this and the U.S. and the western countries have to stop as much as possible the pollution? You know, that's a great question. I would say, you know, it's not just China but a lot of people see that the U.N. climate issue is one that they can get leverage economically over their opponents. China being the grossest figure in this particular case because their economy they claim makes them a developing country yet their economy is one of the biggest in the world and they're pumping out new coal-fired plants pretty much every week and they spend extravagantly on these U.N. conferences. I mean, when I went to the one in Belem the first thing you saw when you entered this conference was a big pavilion put on by China that was gorgeous and they were giving out free books with Xi's picture on it and they allowed people to kind of wine and dine in their area. They're a very prominent figure here. Now why is China doing this? It's very simple. China views this as an economic thing where if they can get western Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and Japan to buy into this and they have to cut their electricity use, they have to rely on unreliable renewable energy like solar and wind, then heavy industries can't really operate there. Where are they going to go? They'll go to places that have bountiful, cheap electricity which is China which is putting in, as I say, coal plants all the time, nuclear plants all the time. China will talk out of one side of its mouth that it's all about climate change and yet it's the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by far of all the countries. I mean, they're off the charts in terms of how much CO2 emissions they put out which I don't think actually is a pollutant but nevertheless it's hypocrisy on their part to be complaining that CO2 is going to destroy the planet and we all need to sign a treaty except we're exempt. Everybody else has to comply with it when you're the biggest source of it in the world. I think also that they also are very involved in the renewable energy industry. They're a leader in producing this. Not that they themselves use renewable energy. They sell it to countries that mandate it like the U.S., Western Europe, Australia. So they're making good bucks on this whole climate change issue. Strategically, it's weakening their enemies and they're the beneficiaries. So you told us before that you were able to go to lunch with some of the people who are involved and very active with the climate change activists or people. How do you balance that? How are you able to be friends with them and work together I guess or communicate at least? Yeah, it is an odd couple in there. I would say that we've made inroads by becoming their friends on the solutions. While they may buy into climate change, many of the people on the other side don't like what the answer of how to address it is. Case in point, many on the far left care about saving whales or saving eagles or not polluting the ocean shore. Well, just a couple summers ago, one of these wind turbine blades broke and on Nantucket Beach polluted the entire beach. And they go, wow, how did that happen? I said, well, you've got that offshore wind turbine there that just shattered a wind turbine and now you have shards all over your beach and you can't do anything and all your business is shut down, tourism is killed. You know, you voted for that. And they go, wow, maybe we shouldn't have done that. And then they'll see whales beaching on some in New Jersey and off the coast of Virginia and they'll say, how did that happen? Well, there's been an increase in whale deaths because of offshore wind. And I found that in just letting them know what the consequences are of what they voted for. They've, over time, many of them have changed. And now we actually work together. I'm on several of the boards. There's this one group called NOAA, the National Organization Opposing Offshore Wind Association. And I'm like the only one that's kind of a Trump supporting conservative on it. They're all filled a lot of them with people that we used to call granola crunchers, people on the left, but they like me. And we've been able to heal wounds over that. So our opposition to some of these green extremist things has brought us together and really has strengthened things. So I like that. And in the case of the U.N., we were able to meet with indigenous peoples. A lot of times people would say that these people are all on the political left. They are afraid of climate change and everything else. Well, the U.N. kind of abuses them. They bring in the indigenous peoples, put them almost up there to be gawked at by the attendees of these U.N. summits as though they're just window dressing. And as they sip champagne and walk past they go, isn't that nice? Well, these indigenous peoples are upset that their rainforest is not able to be developed. They want to have development. They want electricity. They don't want to live like they did 300 or 400 years ago. They want their kids to go to college. But that's patronizing that the U.N. treats them that way. So when we go to these conferences, we hang out with them. We talk to them and find out that actually we're on the same side. So we're not afraid to do that. We've made friends even with some people that you might think would be opposed to us. And that's how I make change. That's very interesting. What lays in the future for you and your organization? What do you hope to see happen in the next months or years within what you're doing? I'd like to see just a wholesale reputation of what the Green Movement has done, a rejection of it, much like they do most totalitarian things. This is an agenda that's anti-human. They want population control. They want to control our cities. They want to tell us what type of vehicles we can drive, when we can sleep, we can't eat red meat. I want to see a wholesale rejection of that, even in the blue states. I think that we need to go and continue our education efforts. It's helpful that we have a president there that agrees with us. Now a lot of people in the government a few years back would have just shunned us. They would call us climate deniers. You guys are way out there. We don't even want to be associated with you. Well, now they do. So we're in. I would like to see more acceptance of that and our ability to just educate people, let them know the facts and that freedom would advance and that these people would be confined to the ash pit of history, I guess you could say. Now, are you aware of any dialogue between scientists and the activists? And what I mean by that is there's something like the CO2 coalition, which I talk to people there and there's a lot of scientists who are very much into understanding the reasons between the increase in temperature and the cycle and all of that. But they told me that there's no such dialogue that exists between these scientists and the activists or the politicians or whoever is driving this. Do you see any effort in putting that together, a dialogue that can actually look at how CO2 coalition, they're a good ally of ours. We've worked closely with them on a number of different matters. Really, you've got to have an understanding you know, why people believe what they believe. And different people have different reasons for embracing climate change. And I've learned this from going to the 27 out of 30 conferences around the globe. Some people are into this just for the money. You go to these climate conferences, and so many of them, they don't care about the science. They just see a quick buck to be had. You know, we'll sell you some sort of solar panel that lowers your carbon footprint. We'll sell you something else that makes your passenger jets have a lower carbon footprint. The last thing they wanna hear is that, you know, that what we're selling isn't scientifically backed up. You're not gonna convince them. They're just into it for the money. Other people are into it for the power. And I would actually say that that's a good many politicians. This is a winning issue. This is also an opportunity for people like Lula in Brazil and Xi in China to go after their opponents. And they see it a way to weaken the West and to advance, you know, their country's interests and economy and everything else. And then you have others who have an almost a spiritual look at it. At every one of these climate meetings, you'll see people embrace climate change because they talk about Mother Earth. And they'll have little sessions where they're praying to Mother Earth, holding hands and singing songs to her. There was a meeting in Egypt a few years ago where they went up on Mount Sinai, which wasn't far from where they were meeting at Sharm el-Sheik, and they did another Ten Commandments. They went up there and did a reenactment of the Ten Commandments coming down, except instead of things like adultery and murder and stealing, they changed them to lowering your carbon footprint and supporting, you know, they just, the old Ten Commandments by God weren't good enough. We need new green Ten Commandments. And that's what they reenacted. So there's actually a spiritual component. So whether it's money, power, spiritual, people get into it, but there is a component that is actually believed scientifically it's the case, and they're just misinformed. And I think in that particular crowd, having facts put out there, having scientists speak to them will actually make a difference. I'm not sure a scientist speaking to somebody who's into climate change because of religion is gonna necessarily impact them. Wow. Greg, we thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Any final thoughts on your work, on what's important to you? Any final thoughts? Yeah, I think it's important for people to be plugged in and get to know these issues. That's why we always encourage them. As I mentioned, some of these organizations like the Heartland Institute, CO2 Coalition, Heritage Foundation, and of course our organization. If you're interested in finding out more facts, we have a website. It's called cfact.org. That's C-F-A-C-T dot O-R-G. And we give away a free email newsletter that updates people every month. We do a climate fact check every month when we go down and anytime you hear of a hurricane, tornado, flood, and somebody says, you know, climate change, we rebut that and we'll give you the real facts on it. So we encourage people to head on over there. Cfact.org. And Greg, what is the most rewarding thing that happens in your daily work? You know, what are you looking more forward to when you do this work? You know, it's a good question. I mean, it's all fun. I do enjoy going on programs just like yours and being able to talk directly to people. And we so appreciate you doing what you're doing and having other outlets like yours to get to the American people and even international audience with the facts. So I enjoy going on these things. I also enjoy putting out reports and talking to civic groups and helping with drafting bills and testifying before legislatures. And we also are involved in lawsuits and going to these UN summits. So to me, a variety is a spice of life. So I can't honestly pinpoint which one's my favorite, but probably of all these jumping out of airplanes, doing something like that. Greg, thank you so much. I appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you for watching another episode of Bay Area Innovators. If you enjoyed this episode and you know someone who should be on our show, please send us an email at sfbayatepochtimes.com. We would love to hear from you. Thank you and see you next week.