An Inconvenient Book

Real Solutions to the World's Biggest Problems

Glenn Beck

• Publisher: Threshold Editions
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781416560449
• eBook ISBN: 9781416580041
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Glenn Beck, the New York Times bestselling author of The Great Reset, tackles some of our country’s biggest problems in this funny, outrageous, and entertaining book.

Glenn Beck believes that the reason why some of our biggest problems never seem to get fixed is simple: the solutions just aren’t very convenient. And as the host of a nationally syndicated radio show and a prime-time television show on CNN Headline News, Glenn Beck doesn’t care much about convenience; he cares about common sense.

Take the issue of poverty, for example. Over the last forty years, America’s poorest cities all had one simple thing in common, but politicians will never reveal what that is (or explain how easy it would be to change). Global warming is another issue that’s rife with lies and distortion. How many times have we heard that carbon dioxide is responsible for huge natural disasters that have killed millions of people? The truth is, it’s actually the other way around: as CO2 has increased, deaths from extreme weather have decreased. But that would never be shown in an Al Gore slide show.

Combining honesty with a biting sense of humor, An Inconvenient Book contains hundreds of these "why have I never heard that before?" types of facts that will leave readers wondering how political correctness, special interests, and outright stupidity have gotten us so far away from the common sense solutions this country was built on.

Chapter 1

Global Warming, Storming, and Conforming

THE SKYLINE OF MIAMI is a spectacular sight, but not because of the lights, the sunsets, or even the flesh-covered plastic that’s wrapped in bikinis lying on the beaches in the distance. It’s the cranes. There are dozens of them.

It looks as if every two buildings in the city are divided by one that’s under construction, topped with a crane like the star on top of a Christmas tree. It truly is southern Florida’s capitalist equivalent of the birth of Christ. In the next few years alone, approximately 100 skyscrapers will be somewhere between the stages of just finished or about to be started—and that’s just in downtown Miami. Drive across to Miami Beach or down to Fort Lauderdale, and you’ll see similar, if not quite as dramatic, development. Even 60 miles north of Miami, the far-from-fabulous, overly underwhelming oceanfront Briny Breezes trailer park has caught the eye of developers. They offered to buy the land from the 411 Briny Breeze residents for $510 million, a deal that would have made all of them instant millionaires.

Of course, South Florida is also a haven for the rich and famous. Lenny Kravitz, Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, Anna Kournikova, Diddy (or “The Didster,” as I call him), Gloria Estefan, Beyoncé, Matt Damon, Calvin Klein, Hulk Hogan, and Rosie O’Donnell are just a few who own houses there.

Yes, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that people want to live in Miami.

The question is…why? Have they not seen An Inconvenient Truth? Don’t they know the risks of global warming? Why are people so passionate about living in a place that will soon be under water?

There seems to be an incredible disconnect between what Al Gore says and what people do. Why is that?

Some, of course, will blame a mass disinformation campaign (funded by Evil Big Oil) that can only be deciphered by the enlightened 21 percent of Americans who think that greenhouse gases are the most important factor causing global warming. But the truth is that most people never even hear honest questioning on this issue because, when it comes to global warming, dissent has its price.

Here are just a few quick highlights of what “the enlightened” say about those who dare to ask logical questions about global warming:

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A.D.D. MOMENT

It may be time to review exactly what the word fascist means, since it’s now being constantly thrown around. First of all, I have not killed anywhere near 7 million Jews. In fact, I can’t personally remember even killing 1 million. I did drink quite a bit back in the day, but I think I’d remember something like that. Second, one of the key elements of fascism was controlling public thought by using fear to silence dissent. Hmm…which side of the argument is doing that? Those who are encouraging questions and debate or those who refer to the Holocaust when they run into disagreement? I’d say RFK Jr. is a fascist, but I doubt he’s killed any Jews either. Let me know if I’m wrong on that one, Bob.

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  Heidi Cullen, climatologist at The Weather Channel, suggested disagreement should mean a loss of meteorological certification: “If a meteorologist can’t speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn’t give them a Seal of Approval.”
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  Ellen Goodman, from the Boston Globe, wrote: “Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.”
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  David Roberts, of climate website Grist, wrote: “When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards—some sort of climate Nuremberg.”
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  In fact, the Nazi references are quite popular with this crowd; I was even called “CNN’s chief corporate fascism advocate” by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. When asked by the Washington Post why I was a fascist (or a fascism advocate), Kennedy said that he recalled that I was “voicing doubts about global warming a few weeks back.” How dare I! But the fact is that RFK Jr. “recalled” (translation: some blog told him) incorrectly. I simply asked questions about whether or not man is primarily responsible, which, as you’ll see, is an entirely reasonable question.

Since I know that I’ll be taken out of context and made to say what I don’t believe, let me try to make my position perfectly clear.

1. Yes, I think the globe has warmed a bit! Approximately 0.74 degree Celsius (+/– 0.18 degree) in the last 100 years. (0.74 +/– 0.18? Isn’t that a 26 percent margin of error?)
2. Yes, I think that man might be responsible for some part of that warming, although I’m not 100 percent convinced of how much (126 percent margin of error).
3. I believe that natural changes are also playing a part in the warming and that the only thing constant about the climate is change.
4. I believe that we don’t fully understand the climate yet, and we must be careful until we do.
5. I don’t believe that so-called solutions, such as the Kyoto Protocol, are the answer for a myriad of reasons (see 4 above).
6. I believe that science, governments, and the media must stop shutting down dissenting views.
7. Because I live in the Northeast, I would like approximately 30 degrees of global warming in the winter, followed by a 10-degree global cooling in the summer. A gentle global breeze would be nice too.

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Environmentalists Say the Darndest Things!

“Climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.”

“No matter if the science is all phony, there are still collateral environmental benefits” to global warming policies.

—Christine Stewart, Canada’s former environment minister

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PLEASE BLIND THEM FROM THE SCIENCE

I am not a scientist. I have never sat in a lab with beakers and test tubes and poured bubbling liquids together to make smoky gases. But I am a thinker. I’ve tried to boil down a ridiculous amount of information into some of the more interesting arguments from actual scientists known as “skeptics.” Warning: There’s a reason scientists don’t have girlfriends; this stuff can get a tad boring at times. I’ll do my best to keep it short and as little like physical torture as possible.

In the Deep End

An Inconvenient Truth pumped more graphs, charts, and animations into the American airwaves in one movie than is normally allowed by the EPA in a century. But one of the more famous visuals was the previously mentioned drowning peninsula of Florida, where the ocean rises up to cover Florida as if it were a raft that a really fat person had just stepped on. The water engulfs everything from the southern tip of Florida to about 100 miles north and connects Lake Okeechobee to the Atlantic Ocean.

But Gore’s apocalyptic yet tropical (apoca-tropical) vision of the future was based on a water level rise that is about 17 times higher than what the United Nations International Panel on Climate Control is expecting. In fact, it’s even fi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Also by the Author:
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• 1: Global Warming, Storming, and Conforming
• 2: Marriage, Porn, Adultery, and Divorce: The Circle of Life
• 3: Radical Islam: Politically Incorrect
• 4: Body Image: The New Hotness
• 5: Blind-Dating: Playing the Powerball of Love
• 6: The Income Gap: The Rich Get Richer, Good for Them
• 7: America’s Oil Dependence: The Peak of Stupidity
• 8: Education through Indoctrination
• 9: Political Games: America’s on a Losing Streak
• 10: Sleepytime! The Weekend Movie Rental
• 11: Media Bias: An All-New Fairness Doctrine
• 12: You Can’t Say That! The Politics of Correctness
• 13: Gratuities: I’ve Reached My Tipping Point
• 14: Child Molesters: A Fiery Solution
• 15: The UN: Truth, Justice, and the Anti-American Way
• 16: How to Remember Names, by Glenn—something or other
• 17: Minimum Wage, Maximum Politics
• 18: Aging: God’s System of Depreciation
• 19: Opinion Polls: Our Country’s Real Leader
• 20: Poverty Prozac
• 21: Parenting: The Case for Abstinence
• 22: Illegal Immigration: Behind the Lies