by Rick Braun

Chicago – There had been three previous such events, but none of those could claim a similar momentum.

When the 4th International Conference on Climate Change commenced at the Marriott Hotel Sunday evening, it carried the feeling that eventually the truth will win out.

Drafting off the heat of “Climategate,” the event, put on by The Heartland Institute, brought together many of the world’s leading minds on global warming – or, more accurately, the lack of it – including Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen, Ph.D.

The event ran Sunday through Tuesday, with Sunday including a welcome dinner, Monday being a full day that included breakfast and lunch speakers and 12 separate breakout sessions.

The conference closed Tuesday with breakfast speakers, eight more breakout sessions and then lunch and a wrap-up.

And with Climategate – the revelation through e-mails that showed the leading advocates of the global warming crowd had massaged data to try to prove their conclusions that global warming was real and caused by man – as a backdrop, the conference started with a momentum that only seemed to pick up through each session.

Monday highlights included the breakfast with former Virginia governor George Allen and climatologist Patrick J. Michaels, Ph.D., a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute.

Allen hammered at the potential costs of the Democrats’ proposed Cap and Trade legislation and proposed regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency and what they would do to prosperity.

“These draconian EPA regulations, these cap-and-trade schemes are regressive taxes,” Allen said. “And the result of these clearly are higher electricity costs, higher food costs, higher fuel costs; higher costs for everything that we buy from the store. And it makes out country less competitive and we lose jobs.

“The ones who are hurt the worst by this are generally middleand lower-income people – the ones who are struggling to make ends meet.”

Allen decried the power that now rests with the EPA and the judiciary in matters that should be handled by the legislative branch.

Allen referenced 2007 case Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency in which the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, forced the EPA to determine if carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses are pollutants.

“Our country is a representative democracy,” Allen said. “Our country and our economy and our future and our sovereignty and opportunities for Americans should not be determined by unelected judges who are appointed for life making an errant decision as in the Massachusetts case, and then give authority to unelected bureaucrats. The peoples’ representatives need to be making these decisions.”

After the breakfast, breakout sessions included matters of science, economics and public policy.

Two of the more compelling speakers in the breakout sessions on Public Policy were Pamela Gorman, an Arizona state senator who is running for the House of Representatives in the state’s third district, and Christopher Horner from the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of the new book “It Was Never About Climate: Obama’s Power Grab.”

Gorman said she believes the current administration is trying to create crises that will allow it to centralize power “more so than our founding fathers intended and certainly farther than anyone in current America would accept or appreciate.”

“They do it under the cover of a crisis – an energy crisis. They might be able to get away with it, and we can’t allow it to happen.”

Gorman cited administration strategies – the first of which it already accomplished in getting a number of Americans to believe there is a global climate crisis.

“To get this Cap and Tax through, they’ve got to prevent us from tapping into our natural resources,” Gorman said. “Remember, if we could tap into our natural resources we wouldn’t be nearly as dependent on foreign oil.”

Another part of the strategy, “which they’ve already done, is to dramatically and inappropriately expand the powers of the EPA,” Gorman said.

Although it wasn’t a campaign event, Gorman laid out a fourpoint plan for energy in America that includes nuclear power, drilling in the Alaskan range known as ANWAR, tapping into America’s oil shale reserves and continuing to drill off-shore.

Oil shale reserves in America, Gorman said, could yield seven times the crude oil that Saudi Arabia produces.

“Our country needs energy,” Gorman said. “We’ve got to tap into our oil shale reserves.”

Horner’s presentation followed the theme of his book, noting that the current administration’s plans have nothing to do with actually stopping any global warming if it did exist.

“It’s not about the climate, and I think that’s inescapable,” said Horner, who also held a separate book-signing session during the conference.

The temperature after Cap and Trade is going to be whatever it was going to be (without Cap and Trade). It’s not about the climate and it’s unreasonable to conclude that it was about the climate.

“So what is it really about? The answer is we come to our friends who don’t think you can be trusted with so many, many freedoms. The issue isn’t the issue. The issue is … well, if you follow the speech our president gave, he said you can’t eat what you want, drive what you want or keep your thermostat where you want. Other than that, each of you can have a really free existence.”