Human Trafficking Fueled by Evil, Not Climate Change
Climate alarmists constantly revise their language in search of a catchy phrase that captures, and obscures, our reason and will. Hence, "catastrophic, anthropogenic (manmade) global warming" (CAGW—clear and specific) morphs into "global warming" (vague), which morphs into "climate change" (more vague).
Along with their language, they also revise their goals, expanding them to Herculean proportions with utopian promises.
We'll eliminate poverty by eradicating fossil fuels! We can guarantee education and equality for all if we impose renewable energy on the globe!
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And now, the latest canard: Since "carbon" (the word substituted for "carbon dioxide" to confuse the public) causes "climate change," and "climate change" causes modern slavery, if we stop emitting "carbon," we'll end human trafficking!
Never underestimate the radical and drastic lengths undertaken by CAGW fear mongers to impose their will on the world. Words and promises, no matter how illusory, have power to motivate change.
For the last 40 years, the Roman Catholic papacy intensely battled UN abortion proponents, whose underlying agenda was grounded in radical population control, "sustainable development," and then the prevention of CAGW. The Holy See repeatedly exposed the underlying anti-life agenda of all three movements.
That left the climate alarmist movement in desperate search of a moral voice.
Until now.
Enter Pope Francis, peddling panic and warning of a rise in the seas and human trafficking as a result of "climate change." Francis's own Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (PASS) served as the launching pad for this curious and troubling alliance with the United Nations' elite climate-change globalists and the Obama Administration's radical environmentalists.
Incredibly, the Vatican declared that there was an intrinsic connection between "climate change" and human trafficking.
I have spent years fighting human trafficking as the first Director of the International Division of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, then as General Counsel for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, where I created the first missing child and human trafficking unit, and more recently as Special Counsel at Harpo, Inc., where I was Oprah Winfrey's Child Advocate.
I know human trafficking. I know what lies behind it. And it's not climate change.
The claim is, on its face, preposterous, deceptive, and infinitely damaging to the plight of victims of human trafficking around the world. The Vatican's fallacious statement links a real human crisis of modern slavery with a manufactured one of "climate change." The Vatican even promised, in the words of its favorite expert, population control enthusiast Jeffrey Sachs, that sustainable development could eliminate human trafficking in 2020! (Now that would be a miracle!)
Yet, facts get in the way of utopian promises.
Human trafficking thrives in both developed and undeveloped countries. Its victims and perpetrators span the economic spectrum, and the climate spectrum. This crime is growing for a multitude of reasons: war, migration, open borders, easy and rapid transportation, government corruption, and instantaneous Internet connections.
And one more thing: abortion and its heinous and predictable mutation, sex-selection abortion.
The horrible irony is that, surely without intending to, Pope Francis, by jumping on the global warming alarmists' bandwagon, contributes to actions that increase human trafficking.
How?
The cure prescribed for "climate change" is reduced use of fossil fuels. That can be achieved in two ways, and the climate alarmists, in league with population controllers, want both: (1) reducing the amount of fossil fuel-derived energy each human being uses, and (2) reducing the number of human beings using energy.
The second way is an important element of the climate alarmists' strategy: slow, stop, and reverse human population growth through government-run "family planning" programs, which invariably include abortion as an option. And in poor countries, where couples see the birth of a boy but not of a girl as the promise of provision in old age, that option frequently leads to sex-selection abortion.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and the void of millions of missing Asian girls and the glut of 33 million more unmarried men than unmarried women in China alone (with proportionately similar conditions in many developing countries) are causing human trafficking to soar.
Don't get me wrong. Although gendercide makes human trafficking more lucrative, it doesn't cause it.
At the core of modern sex slavery lies a malevolent heart that seeks to exploit and abuse another human being as a disposable commodity. Evil, not climate or weather, is at the heart of human trafficking.
The evil in the human heart wasn't created by our starting to use fossil fuels, and it won't be eradicated by our switching to windmills or solar panels. Evil must be properly named, identified, and battled to be defeated. But there is something very pernicious when the evil reality of human trafficking gets bootstrapped to the unreality of CAGW.
Fear not, the sky is not falling. But the heavens are weeping for the victims of human trafficking. Those victims need to be rescued, not through an international climate agreement engineered by the very people whose population control policies aggravate human trafficking, but by effective police action and the changes in heart that have been the church's main aim through two millennia.
