I received an email from the Art of Liberty Foundation suggesting that we watch a free video about the truth behind Climate Change hysteria. Knowing that there are a lot of well-intentioned but boring, confusing, or simply amateurish movies out there regarding the climate, I approached this with trepidation. I need not have worried. The movie is wonderful. Watch it, share it with open-minded friends, and store up its arguments for those times when the climatistas try to shut you down.

Climate The Movie (The Cold Truth) came out in 2023 but is now available for free, in high definition, on YouTube. In a mere 80 minutes (so you don’t have to sign away hours of your life to watch it), you will be inundated with accessible data told through interviews with enormously prestigious scientists and people who worked in the climate change field, actual data often generated by the climatistas themselves, and a clearly presented narrative about the Earth’s climate history and the political and economic uses driving today’s hysteria.

The movie is well-organized and intelligent, as well as being leavened with gentle humor, mostly through archival footage. I can’t figure out who the narrator is, but he has a gorgeous voice, which helps.

But don’t listen to me; watch it yourself:

As an added benefit, if you click over to YouTube, you’ll see that YouTube has appended the usual propaganda to the movie, sending people to the United Nations to learn about the same views that the movie debunks. The irony is killing.

While I’ve got your attention, I want to make one more point about the war on hydrocarbons. It’s a point I’ve made before, but I truly think it cannot be made often enough: Without the industrial age, when humans harnessed hydrocarbons to create power far beyond anything humans or animals could generate, we would almost certainly still have slavery, and women’s lib would never have happened.

One man, relying solely on his own labor, can do limited hunting and gathering. With the help of a tribe, he can somewhat expand his reach. On the home front, the women can gather food, maintain basic crops, and raise some of the children to adulthood. We know this because this is how Stone-Aged people, whether thousands of years ago or in some remote New Guinea or South American jungle, have always lived.

Over time, humans discovered two primary ways to augment the limits of the individual, the family, or the small tribe: One way was animals. Dogs helped hunt and guard farmsteads, while oxen, horses, mules, camels, and donkeys provided added energy for farming and transportation.

The other way was slavery. After a successful war, the victor could slaughter the enemy or enslave it. Provided one had the resources to control slaves, captured humans dramatically augmented the victor’s workforce. You could sit at home while your slaves labored in the fields.

Slavery is as old as humankind. The Bible was the first ideology to recognize the humanity of slaves and yearning for freedom (Exodus) and to mandate that slaves (per the Bible, the Jewish slaves) must be released after seven years. Even this recognition did not end slavery.

Eventually, humans figured out primitive ways to harness wind and water using mills. These worked, though, only when the wind blew, and the water flowed.

In the 18th century, people began to figure out that they could harness energy by burning coal (a seemingly limitless resource. And, of course, the 19th century brought oil into the equation, along with the wonders of the internal combustion engine and the ability to generate electrical power using oil. (And yes, dams such as Hoover Dam also generate electricity, but they are geographically limited.)

It’s true that the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening made people aware of the moral evil of slavery, but it was never going to go away in the West unless there was an alternative. I can also hear people pointing out that there was no slavery in England or Europe, even as it continued to exist in America, but that’s because Europe and England were no longer primarily agrarian societies by the 19th century.

Moreover, in the early factory era, Europeans, especially in England, created factory slavery. This ended only when fossil fuels increased factory efficiency, while the Industrial Revolution raised Western wealth to the point at which the power of the purse enabled people to demand better working conditions.

The reason for today’s cultural Marxism is that these rising standards in the West (which derived from the fossil-fuel-driven Industrial Revolution) meant that the workers of the world refused to unite and overthrow capitalism. Instead, the Marxist revolution happened only in those agrarian societies that were still slave-based (e.g., Russian and Chinese feudalism). That meant that the only way to bring about a socialist utopia in the West was to eat away at society through cultural means.

That’s the macro level of fossil fuel’s contribution to slavery’s end. At the micro level, women’s lib happened because fossil fuel relieved women of the unrelenting burden of household chores. My mother, who grew up in 1930s Tel Aviv, still had to go up to the apartment rooftop once a week, fill the huge kettle placed there for the building’s residents, stoke a fire under the kettle, wash the household laundry in the kettle, drain the kettle, and then wring out the laundry and hang it to dry. Had Mom lived in America, the fossil fuel revolution would have spared her that chore.

Historic photographs

Travis Chumley

It was the women who no longer spent all their waking hours doing laundry, beating carpets, building fires by which to cook, spinning their own thread and yarn, and weaving or knitting their own clothes who had the luxury of demanding equal rights.

Image: Climate The Movie release poster.