Imagine my surprise during an otherwise pleasant day when a youth envoy to the United Nations’s “Climate Week” started calling me names on Twitter.

In fairness to this youth envoy, I started it. I reposted her remarks on climate, albeit with no commentary. For all she knows, I agreed. But, alas, I was not given such leniency, as is the case with the left.

Here’s how it started: this U.N. climate envoy, who immigrated to America, now lives in my home city of New York, which hosted the United Nations’s “Climate Week.” This gathering is the latest in a long list of glamorous, multi-thousand attendee conferences held around the globe.

I wrote about this, mockingly of course, at the beginning of the year. Climate activists are extremely well-traveled. Heck, next month the “World Conference on Climate Change and Sustainability” will be held in Barcelona, followed by the “Global Summit on Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability” in Rome just days later. Both cities require a lot of carbon emissions to arrive at.

Regardless of location, it’s always the same tired, pseudo-intellectual screed usque ad nauseam, until the money runs dry. “The climate crisis is man made, and it’s not just man-made; it’s white man made. It is the result of capitalism. Years of colonialism. Years of racial oppression.”

As the expression goes: “when you don’t know what to say, blame racism.”

That’s not an expression. I made it up, as easily as climate activists make up their nonsense.

Discussing “man-made climate change” with a true believer is a waste of time. It’s easier to convince the Pope to eschew parts of the Catholic tradition. It is the Marxist underpinnings of their remarks, said with such conviction and so much ignorance, that I find genuinely sad.

This particular activist attended Hunter College in New York. So did my grandmother, getting a double masters in the 1930s. My grandmother was also an immigrant, which is irrelevant. What is relevant is that Hunter College was founded by an Irish exile who fled his homeland because of his nationalist, anti-monarchist views. Yes, Thomas Hunter was the victim of…colonialism. After coming to America, he started a school for the sole purpose of educating women, a school he could only dream of in colonized Ireland.

It’s the capitalism which brought immigrants, including my aforementioned grandmother, to America in droves, and what still brings them today. Today’s climate activists sit on stages and blast “capitalism” with unacknowledged comforts of freedom and free society. 

Today’s activists have it pretty damn good in America. 

Capitalism, and even more specifically fossil fuels, created the middle class and moved billions of people from sustenance living to a life of dignity and prosperity. Capitalism allows for these tens of thousands of climate activists to jump on planes to New York City so they can clog the streets with their double-parked cars going to dine at midtown restaurants, with not a word of gratitude to the Wright Brothers or to Henry Ford.

Capitalism lowered infant mortality rates in capitalist countries as innumerable fossil fuel products from disinfectants to bandaids raised hygiene and improved health.

Capitalism eradicated diseases like polio and malaria and leprosy, and when COVID came to our shores, we turned to fossil fuels and petrochemical products for plexiglass dividers, hand sanitizer, face masks, and the very internet to keep us somewhat connected to our loved ones.

Not once did I see someone thank John D. Rockefeller, the man who gave us the fossil fuel economy, and perhaps the greatest American entrepreneur to ever live.

Our life today is 100 percent indebted to capitalism and fossil fuels.

Right now, Amnesty International estimates 40,000 children, some as young as four years of age, are enslaved in cobalt mines in the Congo. They are digging the raw materials for the very wind, solar, EVs, and batteries celebrated by the climate activists. And I bet you that no climate activist will even acknowledge this vile, preventable, humanitarian crisis. 

They will demand “environmental justice” and decry “racism” right before they leave the United Nations and head to the Plaza for tea, but they will deliberately ignore the fact slavery today in Africa is worse than at any time in human history, and it is largely driven by their success at making us “go green”.

Nor will the climate cult acknowledge Communist China, the world’s largest polluter of air, land, and water. They may talk about ocean plastic and call for “solutions” like banning plastic bags and straws, but there will be no calls for China to do anything. 

China, once exempt from the heralded Paris Climate accords, has gone a step further now to drop out altogether, and no one will even discuss it.

For the first time in 10,000 years of human history, the abundance of life is not just for the rich and powerful, and that is because of fossil fuels and capitalism. Today’s activists cannot even tweet at me to condemn fossil fuels and capitalism without using fossil fuels and capitalism. I find that wonderfully ironic.

The socialism for which climate activists long has not produced a thing of value. It exists only in their minds. Passionate word salad with Marxist vernacular does not change that. Regardless of what climate activists post about online, we live in the most capitalist, most fossil fuel rich country on earth. I think that is worth defending and celebrating, even if activists at the United Nations’s “Climate Week” do not.

Daniel Turner is the founder and executive director of Power The Future, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs. Contact him at daniel@powerthefuture.com and follow him on Twitter @DanielTurnerPTF