The Propaganda Push: Central Bank Releases Unfounded 'Climate Cost Reports'

P. Gardner Goldsmith | April 14, 2023
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Last fall, MRCTV reported on the little-known Federal Reserve call for the nation’s six biggest banks to compose out-of-thin-air lists and “prices” of “anthropogenic climate change costs.” And now, the call is getting more attention, because economist David Barker has studied two of the responses, and he has written a detailed piece for the Wall Street Journal, expressing his shock over their poor methodology, analyses, and errant assumptions.

“…I took a close look at two Fed studies on the subject and found shockingly poor analysis. These studies on the effect of temperature on U.S. and world economic growth are cited without a hint of skepticism and widely lavished with media attention. I’ve managed to debunk both.”

Both studies assume that mankind is “warming” the planet, a politically-driven claim that has is debatable, and, as I and many others have noted, a claim that has been pushed by numerous special interests that have been exposed for either discussing how to manipulate their data to fit their preferred outcomes, for not revealing their sources and methodologies in court, or for using faulty ground-based data inputs.

And, even IF one accepts the unproven notion that man’s use of the internal combustion engine is causing a catastrophic change in planetary climate activity, these politically-tied culprits also overlook the fact that any costs associated with such a possible “cause-effect” relationship only can be quantified through initial tort (person-against-person) claims for damages that are proven in a court, in front of a jury. 

Related: Court Rejects Multi-State Attempt To Stop Biden’s Arbitrary 'Cost Of Carbon' Impositions | MRCTV

As I noted in October, this Federal Reserve push is a scheme to create and dictate “costs,” as part of a much larger “Environmental-Social-Governance” (ESG) based attempt to control human behavior through central bank digital currency (CBDC):

“The modus operandi runs along typical lines, wherein national politicians, bureaucrats, Fed-connected U.S. banks, and corporate cronies will ‘partner’ with each other and ‘partner’ with INTERnational politicians, bureaucrats, crony banks, and corporations to toss around terms such as ‘stakeholder’ as they decide who will get to contribute to their centrally-planned fascist political economy. Following the ‘rent-seeking’ pattern that economists James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock pointedly dissected in their prolific careers, and as we recently saw with the International Organization for Standardization establishing a ‘sales code’ for major credit card corporations to apply to purchases at gun shops, these politically favored ‘stakeholders’ define terms, create exclusive barriers to entry, and engage in a feedback loop that favors the politicians, bureaucrats, ideologues, and banking interests that, in return, help them by forming official ‘policy.’”

We also must note that the word “policy” is a euphemism for government commands that you defy at the risk of government, and government-corporate, retribution.

Much of what Barker saw in the two released “reports” appears to focus on the “costs” of a climate which the bankers already assume is warming.

But, writes Barker:

“In the September issue of Econ Journal Watch, I discredited a paper from the Richmond Fed claiming that warming reduces economic growth in the U.S. I showed that the paper had serious problems with its statistical reasoning and robustness. My analysis concluded that the data used in the paper showed no meaningful relationship between temperatures and growth.”

He also told readers about the second “study.”

“More recently I published a critique of a study from the Federal Reserve Board claiming that a year of above-normal temperatures in countries around the world makes economic contraction more likely. The original study used sophisticated statistical techniques but failed to report that its primary finding was statistically insignificant. My request to the study’s author for computer code to reproduce the paper’s results went unanswered.”

So, given the intransigence of the respondents, Barker took on more, and replicated the study.

“I managed to write the code from scratch and exactly replicate the results, allowing me to run additional tests that the author didn’t report. The author’s primary result—that temperature has a bigger effect in bad than in good economic times—turned out to be statistically insignificant. Additional analysis showed that there is no reliable effect of temperature on growth at all.”

Which isn’t surprising. But the Daliesque way the Fed banks bend the picture to A. assume increasing temps, and, B. assume that increasing temps will HARM economic growth indicate that they have a planned narrative, a rhetorical destination of claiming more economic control – for “our good.”

Barker adds key points:

“There are two main reasons why the Fed study appeared at first to show a statistically significant effect of temperatures on economic growth. First, each country in the sample had equal weight in the analysis. China had the same weight as St. Vincent though China’s population is 13,000 times as large. Equal weighting means that some small countries with unusual histories of economic growth greatly influenced the results.

The paper’s results disappeared when countries like Rwanda and Equatorial Guinea—which had economic catastrophes and bonanzas unrelated to climate change—were omitted. Omitting similar countries representing less than 1% of world gross domestic product was enough to eliminate the paper’s result. The complicated statistical techniques used in the Fed study magnified the influence of these unusual countries.”

And he notes the most glaring reality:

“There’s a second reason why the Fed study appears to find that temperature affects growth: Many poor countries have warm climates. A warm climate doesn’t preclude economic growth, as is demonstrated by Florida, Arizona, Taiwan, Singapore and several Persian Gulf states. But the average poor country is warmer than the average rich country. Debate continues as to whether this correlation is random or causal, but the hypothesis of the Fed paper is that year-to-year increases in temperature reduce annual economic growth. The paper claims that its method controls for long-term differences in climate, but using simulated data I found that the Fed paper’s method can be fooled into finding an effect that doesn’t exist.”

Precisely, and a logical response to this obvious empirical and deductive problem is to hypothesize that the folks doing their “studies” knew full-well what they were doing. The fact that Barker cannot get them to engage with him in any productive capacity also is an indication that they are fearful of debate.

But this is the pattern of the Climate Cult. It’s how they have operated from the start, by tossing out unfounded claims, nonsensical “studies,” manipulated stats, and media-packaged fearmongering as the assiduously resist offers to debate.

Related: Feds Ready a Ban On Incandescent Light Bulbs | MRCTV

Barker’s last comment says it well:

“The only thing to learn from the Fed’s research is that climate propaganda is spreading fast, and when it comes to climate, academic economists are no more deserving of trust than are other supposed scientists and experts. The Fed’s time would be better spent on more urgent matters, like improving its botched regulation of the banking system.”

As the Fed preps for its push to impose a central bank digital currency, and as the Biden Administration pushes for its own “Cost of Carbon” to be imposed as a form of “carbon tax” – as the central-planners push for electric vehicles and impose “emission controls” over automobiles that will make typical cars and trucks more and more unattainable, price-wise, and as they impose their ban on the incandescent bulb – we know that this is just one of the many vectors the arm-benders are taking to manipulate our lives.

The fact that politicians and bureaucrats can claim the “power” to influence our lives on so many levels ought to be sufficiently disturbing for Americans to call for a reduction in their metastatic control system.

 

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