To put this story into context, let's go back to 1899 and the publication of Johann von Bloch's book Die Zukunft des Krieges (The Future of War).  Bloch was a 19th-century railway magnate who had built the Warsaw to Moscow railway.  In those days, the best and the brightest worked on optimizing the productivity of railroads through operational analysis.  Bloch applied insights from managing railroads to theorizing about the conduct of war.  His big insight, original at the time, was that wars would be won by the country with the biggest industrial output.  This is the same as the Soviet military concept of "the correlation of forces."

When Lenin was exiled in Switzerland from 1914 to 1917, he spent a lot of time in the Zurich and Bern public libraries, reading books on military strategy and electrification.  Library records show that he borrowed The Future of War many times.  But the Soviets didn't start using Bloch's insight in a big way until the 1980s.  The Chernobyl nuclear plant blew up in April 1986.  It was a big disaster for a country with a low standard of living.  The nuclear contamination was equivalent to a nine-megaton ground burst.  Three months later, at a meeting of Warsaw Pact leaders, the Bulgarian prime minister posed the question: how can the Communist Bloc profit from the Chernobyl disaster?  The records of this meeting were accessed in Berlin after the fall of the Wall.

The Soviets had financed the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament for decades, but that Warsaw Pact meeting triggered a new campaign against nuclear power in the West.  Nuclear power was demonized, and the public was primed to accept closures after a nuclear mishap.  Thus, Angela Merkel, herself the fruit of a long-term campaign by East German intelligence, was about to close the German nuclear industry without discussion, with the Fukushima mishap as the excuse.

The biggest and most successful communist disinformation campaign, with the intent of reducing Western industrial capacity, has been global warming.  On June 24, 1988, self-confessed global warming scientist James Hansen addressed a congressional committee and told them that "global warming has begun."  The air-conditioning in the hearing room had been turned off for effect.  Significantly, Hansen's verbiage was transmitted live to a reception at the offices of the European Environment Bureau, funded by the E.U., in Brussels.  Those attending in Brussels were told that this was the start of something big, and so it was.

But why were the Europeans in on Hansen's testimony?  Because they wanted to hobble U.S. industry.  When communism fell apart in 1990, the benchmark for carbon dioxide emissions was set as those of 1990.  Thus, it was easy for the Europeans to comply with the regulations they wanted to impose because power generation in formerly communist Europe had collapsed.

The global warming campaign gained momentum, but last decade, it hit a roadblock in the U.S. Senate, with Republican senators asking why U.S. industry should be hobbled with restrictions when Chinese carbon dioxide emissions were going through the roof.  So President Obama, who had grown up among communists and who was the fruit of another long-term campaign, put a lot of effort into getting China to sign on to a climate agreement.  The Chinese were quite happy to, because U.S. industry was hobbled, and they didn't have to change anything.

Now China has adopted Bloch's insight and is doing what it can to hobble industry in countries gullible enough to believe in global warming.  Thus, there is Greenpeace East Asia, which is headquartered in Beijing.  Any NGO allowed to operate in China does so only at the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party.  So Greenpeace East Asia was active in a campaign in Malaysia in trying to stop the building of a rare earths-processing plant, which would have competed with Chinese production. 

So the U.S. dodged a bullet when President Trump declined to sign on to the Paris climate treaty, despite the urgings of globalists Mattis, Tillerson, and Kelly.  French president Macron's urging the signing of that treaty last week in Washington was just the slimy French version of the same.  But the globalist global warming threat remains, and that is why Scott Pruitt has been attracting so much attention from the left-wing press recently.

It's not because of anything that he has done, but because of what he has so far failed to do, and that is to rescind the 2009 endangerment finding on carbon dioxide. Doing so would produce the first government-sanctioned report from anywhere in the world that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not a problem.  The era of "settled science" would be over.  Conflicting scientific reports would rip the whole effort apart, and it wouldn't be possible to resuscitate it.  A billion people -- the populations of the United States, Europe, Japan, and beyond – would be set free.  And Chinese connivance in the European plan to hobble the U.S. would be thwarted.

The left want Pruitt replaced because he might end the endangerment finding, if he bothers to get around to it.  Conservatives have no idea what is at stake.

So how do the coal people fit in?  Well, the next Pittsburgh Coal Conference is not being held in Pittsburgh.  It is being held in Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, China.  This is just a little fragment of China's attempt to gather unto itself all the world's useful intellectual property.  Instead of having to steal it, license it, or otherwise pay for it, in this case, the foreign experts will pay to travel to China and tell all they know and all that is possible.  Someone tell the coal people that we are in a pre-war state with China, and it is time to stop having anything to do with the country.  Just as the experiment in imposing democracy on the Middle East ended in blood and tears, the 20-year-long experiment in drawing China into the community of civilized nations has ended with the Chinese reverting to type -- attempting to subjugate the rest of the world.

The memo to the coal people could be illustrated with satellite photos of Anderson AFB on Guam, where a lot of hardened shelters are being installed, at last, in preparation for that war with China.  In imagery dated January 3, 2018, there are no fighter aircraft evident but a number of new fighter-sized shelters at the southeast end of the runways.  The B-52s are parked far enough apart, but the B-1s on the apron could be taken out two at a time by an incoming DF-26 ballistic missile.  There are some larger hardened shelters being built that could take the B-1s.  They would have to fold their wings back to fit instead of leaving them open as at the moment.

David Archibald's latest book is American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare.

Note: The original version of this piece misidentifed the scientist who testified to Congress as Michael Mann. AT regrets the error.