Diehard environmentalists -- the fervent, radical Green faction -- want global warming to continue. Whether man-caused warming is real or just a fabrication of anti-capitalist leftists is unimportant.

The hardcore environmental lobby wants and needs the issue of warming to justify their existence and fundraising activities the same way and for the same reasons that the Democratic Party creates racial, gender, ethnic and income-based victimhood. Create a victim group, convince them that their plight is completely the fault of the opposing party, then promise them a government program that will alleviate their suffering forever if they vote for the Democrats.

The issue of warming being the fault of Republicans is a tough case to make, however. First, there’s the issue of whether there is really any man-caused warming at all. Without refighting that entire battle here, there is certainly a lot of doubt as to the legitimacy of that claim. The famous statement of “97% of climate scientists agree that warming is caused by man’s activities” is so fatuous and misleading as to be without value. It’s the classic example of a popular, neat-sounding cliché being repeated often enough that it’s accepted as “true,” regardless of the actual facts. When one drills down deep into the study that produced the 97% figure, it turns out that it’s not 97% of 12,000 climate scientists as popularly reported, but instead 77 of 79 self-identified climate scientists who had already taken a position in favor of human-caused warming and had also published more than 50% of their peer-reviewed papers. That’s where the 97% comes from -- 77 out of 79, not 97% of 12,000!

No matter. Let’s take the mountains of legitimate scientific doubt off the table and do the very unscientific thing of ignoring a large body of evidence that contradicts the politically-popular man-caused warming hypothesis. Let’s just accept man-caused warming as real, for the sake of this discussion, and silence any bleating protests from the pro-man-caused warming crowd.

Is man-caused warming the fault of American Republicans, the way Democrats would have you believe? Democrats are all too quick to put forth the idea that heartless Republican businesspeople, in their relentless pursuit of immoral profits, willfully and callously disregard the environment and run their businesses in a deliberately “dirty” manner in order to maximize their earnings and keep their expenses -- like costly pollution-reduction devices -- to a minimum.

That’s the Democrats’ position: It’s the Republicans’ fault. If Republicans had any conscience whatsoever, they’d never do this to our earth. But they don’t have a conscience, they are, in fact, doing this to our earth and the only way to stop them is to vote for us.

The reality is that the United States is the world’s hero when it comes to reducing greenhouse emissions, per the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. That agreement was signed by 192 nations in 1997 (not by the U.S., however) and was supposed to reduce world-wide greenhouse pollution (the kind that causes warming) so that the earth could survive. The biggest problem with Kyoto, of course, was that its signatories didn’t adhere to the requirements for emissions reduction. Even though the U.S. was not a signatory, our greenhouse gas emissions have been reduced down to mid-90s levels, primarily as a result of our increased use of natural gas from fracking, replacing coal, and other efficiencies from new technology. As a country -- including all the Republicans who live here -- we lead the world by far in the tangible results we’ve achieved. Europe, despite all their collective bluster on the environmental issue, is just starting to catch up. The later Paris Accords was a similar all-show/no-substance affair. As John Kerry said at the time in December 2015,

“If all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions -- remember what I just said, all the industrial emissions went down to zero emissions -- it wouldn’t be enough, not when more than 65% of the world’s carbon pollution comes from the developing world.”

China -- one of those “developing world” countries Kerry alluded to -- is actually the biggest problem. If man-caused warming is real -- a big if, to be sure, to any clear-thinking, logical minded person -- it’s more China’s fault than anyone’s, due to their huge economy and unrestricted use of coal-fired power plants without pollution filters or any such modification. They spew an enormous amount of pollution into the atmosphere every day and no one in the Democratic Party, the environmentalist movement, or the liberal mainstream media ever criticizes them. Instead, their criticism is always directed at Republican businessmen. President Obama played right into this -- wittingly or unwittingly -- when he completed an agreement with China that requires even further American emissions reductions while not requiring China to begin making significant cuts until 2030. In so doing, he put American businesses on the hook for scrutiny and criticism -- prime Democratic red meat for upcoming election cycles -- while absolving China of any real responsibility for over a decade. Sharp politicking on his part, to be sure.

Unfortunately for the political side of the environmental movement, however, there are big troubles ahead regarding China. It was just recently revealed that China is now the world’s 3^rd-largest producer of shale-derived natural gas. China is using fracking to unlock their vast stores of natural gas and will be replacing an ever-increasing share of their dirty coal fuel with clean-burning natural gas. Therefore, the world’s biggest violator of clean emissions practices will become greener and greener very quickly, in a few decades -- a veritable blink of an eye in geological terms. China will cease to be a net contributor to the warming problem and will instead become part of the solution.

This is bad news for the Democrats and the Green lobby. Once China is no longer a major warming factor, the earth will recover and reverse its warming tendencies. The man-caused warming problem -- if it was ever real to begin with -- will self-correct. The environmentalists’ claim that the earth will soon reach an irreversible, disastrous tipping point if dramatic action to halt man-caused warming is not taken immediately is utterly ridiculous. To begin with, there is no scientific proof of a “tipping point,” nor is any “proof” possible. The notion of a tipping point is merely a totally unsubstantiated assertion that has entered the climate dialog in remarkable coincidence to the nonfulfilment of past years’ predictions of warming-induced calamity and devastation. Shorelines have not crept miles inland, wiping out cities, ports and civilization along the way. Manhattan is still not underwater despite ABC’s risible 2008 claim. Pestilence and disease are not on the rise. If the undefined notion of a “tipping point” is valid, it would appear that we we’re not even remotely close to reaching it.

Environmentalists, of course, are symptomatic of the fundamental problem with Democratic Party politics as practiced today: In order for their party to be successful, there has to be a victim group in need of their “rescue.” Success -- be it the economic/social success of a demographic group or the beneficial conclusion to an environmental issue -- spells defeat for today’s Democratic Party. They find themselves in the position of hoping for failure. Without victims -- whether real or contrived -- and purported injustices, they have no reason for being. Positive progress renders today’s Democrats irrelevant.