Meaning no disrespect to climate alarmists of the past half-century,
who have been quite formidable in their doomsday warnings, the modern
era has ushered in a new wave of scaremongers who threaten to eclipse
their predecessors.
This shouldn't discourage the original
enviro-wackos of the 1970s, who hadn't accumulated sufficient empirical
data to support their burgeoning secular religion. Give those people a
break; how were they to know they'd have egg on their faces for
predicting apocalyptic global cooling? We're much more advanced now, so
it's not fair to judge them.
Admit it. A full week doesn't pass
without some cataclysmic news about climate change. The meteorological
activists are brilliantly adept at shoehorning any weather event or
natural disaster into their ominous narrative. If world temperatures are
cooling — or warming — they attribute it to overall warming. If there's
a severe hurricane, it's because of evil capitalist carbon emissions.
If California forest fires are caused or exacerbated by their asinine
environmental policies, they blame them, too, on the "deniers," because
one thing is certain about global warming blowhards: Their supposedly
having good intentions means never having to apologize for their
consistently failed prophecies. Al Gore, after all, is still an icon of
this movement despite his embarrassing record and his unconscionably
stratospheric personal carbon footprint.
Have you ever noticed
that all proposed solutions for climate change require massive
expansions of government control, reduced reliance on free market
entrepreneurship, and the surrendering of our national sovereignty to
global entities that are hostile to the United States and its founding
principles? Is it simply a coincidence that the undying adherents of
this pantheistic religion are political leftists who want to control
every aspect of our lives? If these collectivists believed that the
optimal solutions for our alleged environmental problems were
market-based, do you think they would obsess over climate change?
Ironically, the best remedies have arisen from the free market, but
that's a topic for another column.
Just know this: There is a
reigning pessimism in the humanist worldview that undergirds climate
hysteria, and it has been around for a half-century. When I was in
college in the '70s, a labor economist bemoaned the scarcity of the
world's resources and said we'd have to tighten our belts because
substantial economic growth was no longer possible. In his defense, we
were then living under Jimmy Carter's malaise.
It is always a
zero-sum game for statists, who seem incapable of imagining the
wondrously creative solutions human beings are capable of if
unencumbered by the vise of government control and the mandates of
elites. Happily for America, Ronald Reagan believed human ingenuity
could develop innovative processes to compensate for finite natural
resources. Thankfully, he rejected the dismal notion that there's a
finite economic pie. (Fast-forwarding to today, thank goodness President
Trump rejected President Obama's similarly fatalistic pronouncement
that only a magic wand could restore manufacturing jobs and robust
economic growth to the United States. Do we see a pattern here?)
As
the left ceaselessly bombards us with climate fearmongering, it's no
wonder many have bought into hopelessness and despair. It was hardly
surprising to see MSNBC anchor Katy Tur telling her audience this week
that her life will be meaningless unless we start addressing the climate
change problem. "I read that New Yorker article today, and I thought,
'Gosh, how pointless is my life?'" said Tur. "And how pointless are the
decisions that I make on a day-to-day basis when we are not focused on
climate change every day, when it's not leading every one of our
newscasts?"
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