Dr. Jay Lehre, Princeton-educated engineer and author of A Hitchhiker’s Journey Through Climate Change, argues climate policies like California’s 100% wind/solar mandate—linked to 4,000+ blackouts since 2008—are socialist tools to stifle capitalism under UN-led "one-world government" control. He dismisses CO₂ as harmful, citing post-WWII greening and Alberta’s oil sands cleanup, while criticizing leftist hypocrisy in restricting affordable energy and food. With Sheila Gunn-Reed framing socialism as "immoral" redistribution, Lehre warns policies like the Green New Deal could worsen crises, urging federal land drilling to cut COVID debt—blocked by environmental lawsuits. Their debate suggests climate alarmism masks deeper ideological battles over individual freedom and economic systems ahead of November’s elections. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello Rebels, you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my weekly Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
Tonight, my guest is Dr. Jay Lehre from CFACT and the International Climate Science Coalition.
He's new to the show.
I think you're really going to like him.
Now, we're talking about a few things.
We're talking about, I guess, the intersection, to use a left-wing word, of socialism and the climate crisis.
And I guess every other crisis the government wants you to believe that is a crisis.
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Every single catastrophe, real or imagined, has become a reason for more government control in your life.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Isn't that what the advocates of big government keep saying to us?
Whatever the problem is, the solution is less freedom and more money from your pocket into the government's hands so that they can pass it along to other people who didn't bother to earn it.
And some big government goon is standing over your shoulder telling you how to live your life, drive less, eat less beef.
It doesn't matter what the question is, the answer is always socialism.
Global warming, no problem.
Socialism in the form of massive green taxes and corporate welfare to green energy companies.
It's fixed.
COVID plague from China creating massive layoffs because the government overreacted and closed all these private businesses.
Easy peasy.
$2,000 per month to everyone for an indeterminate amount of time.
Coronavirus fixed.
Joining me today in an interview we recorded yesterday afternoon is a new face, I think, to Rebel viewers, Dr. Jay Lehre of CFACT and the International Climate Science Coalition.
He sat down with me yesterday afternoon to discuss how all these catastrophes are being manipulated and often created to push a socialist future.
Joining me now from his home is Jay Lair.
Jay is a co-author of many articles with Rebel News fan favorite and good friend of the show, Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition.
And I wanted to have Jay on the show today to talk about, I guess, the intersection of socialism and climate change and how climate change is the vehicle for socialism.
But first, Jay, I know you're new to our Rebel viewers.
Why don't you give us a brief rundown of who you are and some of your educational history, just so people understand that you're just not some guy.
You do know a lot about these things.
I do, Sheila.
I have a PhD, well, a degree in engineering from Princeton University, spent a few years on active duty in the Navy, then a PhD in a combined field at the University of Arizona of environmental science, agricultural economics, and water supply.
And over a very long career, spanning over 60 years, I have authored, co-authored, or edited now 32 books.
The most recent book came out just this spring titled A Hitchhiker's Journey Through Climate Change.
We started out writing with Terry Ciccone, a 150-page book.
We ended up with 350 pages before we were finished.
But the theme really is just what you said.
It's all about climate change and socialism.
Climate change has always been a vehicle to create socialism throughout the world, a one-world government, because the evil people that want to control all of our lives recognize that if you can control carbon dioxide output, the very breath that we exhale, you could control all society.
And if you get people scared that man has something to do with controlling the thermostat of the earth, then only government can control it.
If we're talking about carbon dioxide, it has to be all governments and then really a one-world government, the United Nations, that would take over the world because energy is what creates a positive standard of living.
You can measure the standard of living of any family or human being on earth by how much energy they use.
That's a determination of whether they have good heating and cooling and automobiles and other advantages in life.
And so the evil leftists figured out that climate change was a way to achieve their goal of destroying capitalism and creating a socialist world.
And for the last, again, a 60-year career, I have been writing and lecturing around the world, actually, on this issue and all energy issues.
And for the last three years, I've been working with Tom Harris at the International Climate Science Coalition and also with a group called CFACT.org in Washington and America Out Loud.
I write an article each week for three different websites, America Out Loud, Tom's website, and Committee for Advanced Tomorrow, CFACT.org.
And most of my articles deal with climate change or energy, now batteries, electric cars, and related things.
My most recent article was called The Blackouts Are Coming, The Blackouts Are Coming.
To coin a phrase from Paul Revere, this is a warning, not a scare tactic.
And if you look at what California is today, it's what America will be in the next four years if Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris are elected to take over our presidency.
You know, that's a great place to start.
Let's talk about the blackouts in California, because California, when you look at the global scale of things, really, it's one of the most prosperous places on the face of the earth.
And yet they are living in a form of energy poverty right now because of their pursuit of green energy.
And really, that's what the United States would be like if the Democrats and the more radical Democrats, which you and I were talking off air, I think the party has been completely overtaken by the more radicals.
And Joe Biden's vice presidential pick, Kamala Harris, is a testament to that.
She's a proponent of the Green New Deal.
But what's happening in California?
That's what the Green New Deal would look like for the entire country.
Yeah, Sheila, it's really very lucky for the rest of the country to have a model to look at.
And we can decide on Election Day on November 3rd whether we want to look like California or whether we do not.
California has created energy poverty.
They have, in the last seven or eight years, they have closed all but one coal-fired plant in the state.
Three of them they turned into using wood pellets to burn.
They've turned off all their nuclear energy save one.
They have one plant left, and that is scheduled to be shut down in 2025.
They are no longer going to buy coal power from their neighboring states.
And within the next 10 to 15 years, they want to be 100% wind and solar, which basically is going to mean they're going to have a blackout after blackout.
They already have four times more blackouts than any other state in the union.
From 2008 to 2017, they had over 4,000 blackouts, and now they're having them virtually every week.
It's sheer insanity.
And Ms. Harris is going along with it.
I'm not sure when she was a prosecutor for the state that she was quite as radical as she is now.
But she's bought into the Green New Deal of these crazy people in our Congress.
And they really want to bring the country to its knees, whether they know it or not.
But again, the primary purpose is the defeat of capitalism and the institution of socialism in the United States.
Well, and they also have another arrow in their quiver now to bring about this cultural change in the United States.
It used to be the impending doom of climate change that never actually came.
And so the benchmarks kept being changed and the goalposts had to be shoved back.
But now it's the coronavirus and they're using the pandemic now to push for this green recovery.
The economy has all but stopped in Canada.
And so now in Canada, they're saying there's only one way to jumpstart the economy.
It has to be green.
And I see a lot of the same musings happening in the United States.
However, thank God for President Trump.
But when you have places like Time magazine publishing as the rest of the world plans for a green recovery, America is once again falling behind.
I don't know.
I think the unemployment numbers that came out the other day speak for themselves compared to Canada.
I think avoiding a green recovery is going to be the thing that saves America from this pandemic lockdown.
There's no question about it.
The whole Green New Deal and the leftists are evil, but they're not stupid.
Their goal, again, is to have a socialist country.
They want control, full control over every human being living in the country.
And they were quick enough to see the coronavirus as another mechanism along with climate change to take control.
I worked with 100 doctors on the issue.
The masks are of very little value.
The social distancing is arbitrary.
The idea is to get people used to taking orders, 100% of the population taking orders.
It doesn't matter that it has any impact at all medically.
So they've seized on the coronavirus as another mechanism to gain control of the population and make them just take orders when they say jump, the people are to say how high.
And right now, it's working.
And if we don't see a backlash of people not liking being ordered around under a socialist government the past eight months, then on November 3rd, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris will take over.
I am hopeful that the average person on the street is now getting fed up with it and they're going to go to the polls in the privacy of the polling booth and say they don't want it anymore.
And it's interesting you point out, I think it was a million point 1.3 million new jobs.
That does not count California, New York, or Illinois that are still shut down.
Now, three very populous states, if they were not shut down, those new employment numbers would skyrocket even more.
Now, I wanted, you rightly point out that this is about, I guess, retraining people, but there's a serious application of force in any sort of push towards socialism and government control.
And you do have an article that was out about two weeks ago that you co-authored with my friend Tom Harris about the lack of morality and the application of force.
And it's so funny that socialism is often taught to us as this, or it's pushed towards us as this benevolent thing, this caring thing.
If you care about people, you'll want to give your goods to the government so that the government can redistribute them.
But it's anything but kind, is it?
Yes, it's exactly the opposite.
Socialism means the collective rules everyone's life.
You cannot do anything independently.
We pointed out in a series of three articles on socialism how totally evil it is.
And all you have to really understand, whether or not you are a religious person or not, you cannot have any religion in socialism because that separates groups from the government.
They have their own dogmas, their own rules.
So all religion must be completely wiped out.
And no individual can actually make a decision on their own about anything.
Man's Impact on the Planet00:13:48
The collective runs everything.
Yes, the correct, it's supposed that the collective will distribute wealth evenly.
What they actually distribute evenly is misery.
And all one has to do is to study every socialist country, true socialist country that has existed.
And, you know, we're talking about Cuba and Venezuela and China and Russia.
These are the models, and they are all abject failure.
Socialism can only and has only succeeded in a limited way with a gun to the head of the population.
It's the opposite of being a nice, warm, and fuzzy program.
It is tyrannical in all its forms.
And when you talk about socialism, people point to Norway and Sweden and Denmark that have partial socialist economies.
But when you study them, they're more capitalist than they are socialist.
Their form of socialism really only covers their medical care and their control of an industry or two.
They are not models of socialism.
Venezuela is a model of socialism.
Cuba, Russia are models of socialism, and we all know how they turned out.
Now, getting back to one of the topics that you like to talk about, and I definitely like to talk about, I run into Tom Harris all the time at the UN climate change conferences.
Sadly, there won't be one this year because a real threat came along and so they had to cancel it.
Nothing was ever important enough for them to cancel their private jets to the climate change conference until a disease came along.
But it's funny the places that you listed: Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, Russia.
I was writing them down as you said that.
These are socialist places, communist places.
I suppose a communist is just a socialist who really means it.
But these are filthy places right there.
Filthy places.
Beautiful.
I'm going to remember that.
A communist is a socialist who really means it.
You really nailed it.
Well, I poached it from someone else I heard one time, but these are filthy places.
And it's so often that the proponents of socialism say, okay, well, if we just had more control over the economy and people's lives, that it would be a much greener, cleaner place.
But in the places where the most control exists over people's lives, they're disgusting, horrible, dirty places.
That's absolutely correct.
And one of the Michael Moore, who's one of America's most famous leftists, for reasons I do not understand, decided to pull the curtain away from wind and solar energy.
And he made a movie called Planet for the Humans.
It's brilliant.
And all of the big Google and Amazon tried to stop the film being shown because he shows what a sham they are and they are environmentally destructive.
It was amazing.
He put together a two-minute film inside the movie that showed everything involved in creating a solar farm or a wind turbine farm and how environmentally destructive they are from beginning to end.
There is nothing green about what the leftists call green energy.
The Green New Deal is entirely destructive of the planet.
And this is normally the way the left works.
They take all of their evilness and try to project it on the opposition.
In other words, all their flaws they try to claim are part of Donald Trump as an example.
It's their trick and they do it over and over and over again.
And unfortunately, the young people buy into it because they've been brought up in government schools that essentially don't teach our history, our great history.
They teach just only the evils of society and the children get out of high school today with no idea of how horrible socialism has been through the ages and how phenomenal the American and Canadian governments were at one time.
You know, it's funny because these environmental groups will use whatever lie and half-truth they can to push their agenda.
Just last week here in Alberta, Canada's Texas, we have a massive deposit of oil that is just below the surface, the oil sands.
And it has been leeching out of the ground there for millennia.
The Indigenous people there used to use the oil sands that were coming out of the riverbanks to seal their canoes, to waterproof their canoes.
So it's a feature of the landscape and not a bug.
And yet, environmental groups, just four days ago, they came out with a big report that said there's groundwater contamination and it is because of the oil sands mining.
When we know there's groundwater contamination because of the oil sands and what we are participating is probably the world's largest cleanup project that Mother Nature left us a big fat mess up there.
But it's funny the lies.
And as you point out, it is the young people who will see that and not know the history of anything and say, yep, they're ruining the land up there by mining these oil sands as opposed to cleaning up the mess that was left behind by Mother Nature.
And as you point out, again, the government schools are not going to teach them any different.
No, they've actually taught them that pretty much everything we do in advancing industry is negative toward our environment.
And it's absolutely not true.
We can burn coal with virtually no emissions that are harmful to the atmosphere.
We can drill for oil.
We can hydraulically fracture shale sands to get our oil with no damage whatsoever.
And we can certainly mine the oil sands in Canada without any harm.
And I love what you just said.
It's one of the biggest cleanup projects in history that the more we take out of the oil sands, the less potential pollution that is created.
But they essentially teach young children that up is down and down is up.
And this is interesting.
In the famous novel Everyone Knows of 1984 by George Orwell, that's what an advanced government did.
They literally turned truth into fiction.
And if you say it over and over again, especially when you start with small children, they come out with ideas that are entirely false.
You know, if we needed any proof, any more proof that the green movement is just a vehicle towards socialism and control, all we have to do is look at the solution the environmentalists are proposing for us.
And it is taxes.
It's carbon taxes.
It's which is a wealth transfer in and of itself.
So if we take out all the overlays of environmentalism, CO2 emissions, the cost per ton that they want to charge us on CO2 emissions, if we just look at what the solution is, and the solution is I have to give my money to the government so that they can give it to somebody else, the solution is socialism.
It doesn't matter what the problem was.
This is true.
And what's even more amazing in all the talks I give and all the writing I do now, I make sure people know it's not that carbon dioxide is bad.
Carbon dioxide is good.
Since what we call the second industrial revolution following World War II, about 24% of the earth is greener than it was because carbon dioxide is plant food.
We only live here because we have carbon dioxide and photosynthesis to allow plants to grow, to allow animals to eat, to allow us to eat.
We're only here because of carbon dioxide, and it'll be a better earth when we go from the 410 parts per million carbon dioxide someday to 800.
It'll be an even better earth.
So there, they turn good into evil, and carbon dioxide is a good.
And you describe it correctly.
All of their attempts to solve a non-problem move us towards socialism.
The one, I don't know who's going to win the election on November 3rd.
I am cautiously optimistic that the public is going to recognize they don't like what's been going on for eight months.
They don't like the government to tell them everything to do.
And Mr. Trump will get another four years.
But if by chance he does not get enough four years, it's going to be interesting to watch everything that Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris do fail.
Every idea they have can only result in failure.
And so it might take a couple more years of destruction of our nation before people realize that they have been duped in school from K through 12, in many of the colleges, and certainly by all the major TV news stations.
And the media is controlled.
You know, the old saying that when you buy ink by the barrel, you have a lot of power.
Jay, I am in northern Canada.
I'm a farmer.
I welcome the global warming.
I welcome the opportunity for more arable land to feed people.
And I'm a proponent of GMO crops because that helps crops grow in forbidding climates like where I live.
At the same time, though, the environmentalist movement opposes GMO crops and they want smaller crops, which drives up the cost of food, and yet they claim to be advocating for poor people across the world.
It's very strange.
When you look at the results of their ideas, it's actually very anti-human, isn't it?
Totally.
Sheila, I've spent a major part of my career working in agriculture, helping farmers to understand the wonders of genetically modifying our grain so that they grow in drier and in hotter climates and produce greater yields.
I knew Norman Borlaug, who won a Nobel Prize in 1971, figuring out how to get more yield out of wheat.
The next time I hear an environmentalist say anything about agriculture that is accurate will be the first time I have ever heard an environmental zealot say anything accurate.
You can almost just go by anything they say and reverse it, and you'll be, then you will be accurate.
They don't want people to eat food that is inexpensive and healthy.
They don't want people to heat and cool their homes with energy that is inexpensive.
They only want the worst for society.
I was at a dinner party recently.
There were eight people around a table and I was chatting across the way with a fellow who was a conservative like I.
And we were, I had mentioned that I'd never met an environmental zealot that was a happy-go-lucky upbeat person.
Thank you.
A woman next to me stood up and started screaming at me that she was a happy-go-lucky leftist.
And everybody at the table broke out laughing.
You know, it's so funny.
It's the same people who say, oh, you can't eat meat.
Don't eat beef.
Don't farm beef because it's bad for the environment while they're eating a piece of avocado on their toast that was trucked in from somewhere else, very far away.
We don't grow avocados up here.
And, you know, it's got to be refrigerated every step of the way to sit in the grow trucked into the grocery store from halfway around the world for this leftist to buy it because it's organic.
So they can stare down their nose and say, oh, you shouldn't eat that steak.
That's bad for the environment.
They just don't have the foresight to understand the supply chain at all.
Yeah, not at all.
And that's kind of what's included in the two minutes of the Michael Moore movie I described.
They show absolutely every element of mining something in Africa and what goes into the mine and transporting it across the country and so on and so forth.
And they prove beyond a shadow of doubt there's nothing about wind and solar that is green, let alone the fact that you cannot continue an industrial society that way.
California will be moving backwards a century if they continue on the path that they're on.
And people do not understand the supply chain at all.
And everything going on with global warming is good for agriculture.
Actually, the earth has been warming a little bit since the Revolutionary War was the end of a little ice age, and we've been warming up.
Man has, that's one thing I want to make a statement of because there are not a lot of people that have the nerve to say it.
Man's impact, Sheila, on the temperature of this planet is zero.
Man's Impact on Temperature Is Zero00:03:16
Zero.
It's not a little bit, but you have their two sides.
You've got the modelers that get billions of dollars to support models that have never been accurate, that they don't even understand the variables to put in them.
But then you also have an element of scientists that are constantly trying to figure out man's impact on the planet.
Now, they know it's three or four decimal points away from a whole number, but they're still working on it.
But the only default number to describe man's impact on the temperature of this planet is zero.
Oh, but think of all the grants they're getting to keep working to find something that doesn't exist.
It's like one of those perpetual motion machines.
Just get a grant, keep looking for nothing, get a grant, find nothing.
I love that analogy, and you're right, but it's all about, you know, follow the money on either side of the issue, follow the money.
Nobody pays me one way or another.
So I'm really out there all alone on my island saying it's zero.
Now, Jay, you mentioned some of the places where people can find you.
Do you want to go through some of those again just so that people who are first meeting you for the first time today can find where they can find your work and maybe even support your work?
The first and easiest place is at a website, cfact.org.
We love CFACT.
We love MARC.
We love CFACs.
And if you go to that website and you scroll down and you'll find one of my articles, and if you then just tap on my name, every article I've written there will come up.
And in one tap, you can get probably 100 articles I've written there over the last couple of years.
And most of them are easy to read.
My strength as a science writer is making things simple.
I always say I've never been the sharpest knife in the drawer, and that's been good because I have to work hard to learn things and then I become a very good teacher of them.
And then, of course, at Tom Harris's website and at America Out Loud, AmericaOut Loud.com, I think.
And Tom and I write there every week.
And then Tom's website has all of our stuff and cfact.org.
But I used to do 30 or 40 lectures a year with the COVID.
The travel cut way down.
I did get a lecture three weeks ago out in Las Vegas, and it was fun to lecture for 100 people.
50 were MDs, 50 were very high-level physicists, and not one of them wore a mask.
And the hotel allowed us to have a meeting without a mask.
That was very, very exciting.
But now, mostly I'm spending my time writing and loving every bit of it.
I've just written an article that the U.S. could pay off most of their COVID debt if we just allowed to drill for oil on federal land.
You can't drill for oil on federal land.
No.
That blows my mind.
That blows my mind.
I hope Trump changes that and opens up federal land to drilling.
He's already signed an executive order talking about it, but the environmental groups are suing at every turn.
Thanking Sheila00:00:50
Of course, they are.
Well, Jay, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show.
Hopefully, you can come back on again real soon.
I had a lot of fun.
I as well, Sheila.
You do a great job.
It's been a pleasure.
Anytime, this is what I do, and educating people is my joy.
Great.
Thank you very much.
The immorality of socialism is that it denies the very nature of humanity, that there's dignity in earning that what you own and owning what you earn.
That a kept man is a man denied motivation and thus a man denied his full potential.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much, as always, for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.