The Great Climate Change Scam, By James Reed

 Climate change may not rank as the single greatest financial scam in human history — but it undeniably sits near the top of modern contenders when viewed through a critical, sceptical lens. The sheer scale of money redirected, policies imposed, and economic distortions created under the banner of combating "man-made climate catastrophe" has few parallels in recent decades. Trillions have flowed into green subsidies, renewable mandates, carbon trading schemes, and international transfers, often with questionable returns on investment and mounting evidence of inefficiency, cronyism, and overhyping of risks.

Environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg, cited in recent commentary, has tallied the global tab: governments and institutions have poured hundreds of billions — potentially trillions cumulatively — into climate mitigation efforts since the early 2000s. This includes direct subsidies for wind, solar, and electric vehicles; carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems; international climate funds like the Green Climate Fund (pledged $100 billion annually from developed nations); and regulatory costs embedded in energy prices and industrial rules. In the U.S. alone, the Inflation Reduction Act and prior green spending packages funnelled hundreds of billions into "clean energy" initiatives, much of it benefiting well-connected corporations in renewables, battery tech, and consulting.

Critics argue this represents one of the largest wealth transfers in peacetime history — from taxpayers and energy consumers to a select group of industries, NGOs, academics, and international bureaucracies. The promised benefits — averting catastrophic warming — remain speculative and increasingly contested. Models that once projected dire scenarios have repeatedly overstated warming trends or extreme weather impacts, while observational data shows milder outcomes: global temperatures have risen, but not at the runaway pace forecasted in earlier IPCC scenarios; sea-level rise continues at historical rates (about 3 mm/year); and extreme weather events, when adjusted for population growth and better reporting, show no clear upward trend in many categories.

The financial architecture amplifies the scam-like qualities. Carbon credits and offsets markets, worth tens of billions annually, often involve dubious projects — planting trees that may never mature, or hydroelectric dams displacing communities with minimal net emissions cuts. Renewable energy mandates drive up electricity costs (as seen in California, Germany, and parts of Australia), disproportionately hurting lower-income households while enriching developers through tax credits and guaranteed rates. Electric vehicle subsidies, meanwhile, have funnelled billions to manufacturers like Tesla, even as battery production relies heavily on mining in environmentally damaging ways and supply chains dependent on authoritarian regimes.

A climate-critical perspective highlights how fear-based narratives sustain the flow. Alarmist headlines about "tipping points" and "existential threats" keep public and political support high, despite evidence that adaptation (better infrastructure, disaster response) often delivers far more bang-for-buck than mitigation. Lomborg and others calculate that spending on resilience—flood defenses, drought-resistant crops, heat-wave planning — yields benefits orders of magnitude higher per dollar than chasing net-zero targets. Yet policy prioritizes the latter, locking in high costs for uncertain, distant gains.

This critique centres on exaggeration of dangers, suppression of dissenting science, and the enormous misallocation of resources. When trillions are redirected based on models with wide error bars, when predictions fail repeatedly without consequence for proponents, and when the primary beneficiaries are those selling the "solutions," the enterprise begins to resemble a self-perpetuating financial mechanism more than dispassionate science-driven policy.

Climate change alarmism may not eclipse history's most notorious cons in sheer audacity or personal enrichment, but its global reach, institutional capture, and sustained extraction of wealth from productive economies place it firmly among the era's most consequential — and costly — deceptions. Until transparency improves, costs are rigorously audited against benefits, and debate is freed from accusation of "denialism," scepticism remains not just warranted, but essential. The real scam isn't necessarily the science; it's the unchecked, trillion-dollar apparatus built around it.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2026/02/18/was_climate_change_the_greatest_financial_scam_in_history_153854.html