Useful Idiocy

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Useful Useful Idiocy Idiocy

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For many years, environmental By ASHLEY VARNER VP for Communications & Federal Affairs extremism just seemed like a harmless joke. But with people in the Ukraine actually dying because of it, no one’s laughing anymore.

t’s getting so you can’t get through a news broadcast without hearing about a new law or regulation to combat climate change. Contrary to the popular narrative, there’s nothing resembling a consensus supporting such legislation within the scientific community, but when it comes to the mainstream media and government bureaucrats, the debate is long-since

settled.

Not coincidentally, these draconian measures to save the planet from impending doom involve millions, or even billions, more in government spending and provide the chattering class with a nightly catastrophe about which to opine.

Many of these inconveniences are minor and incremental,

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like banning plastic straws in favor of paper alternatives that disintegrate if you don’t enjoy your beverage fast enough.

But other governmental burdens in the name of “saving the planet” can deeply and adversely impact millions of people.

At the low end of the scale, this means imposing oil and natural gas policies that cause fuel and home energy costs to skyrocket beyond what a family’s budget can easily absorb.

For others, it’s literally become a matter of life and death.

By now, to cite the most horrendous example, it’s become patently obvious to all but the most deranged environmental extremists (and their befuddled surrogate in the White House) that adopting policies designed to curtail exploration for future oil reserves and the transportation of its current inventory has put the United States at a significant competitive disadvantage with Russia.

This is far more than an economic dilemma. By transforming the nation from a net exporter to a net importer of petroleum, President Biden handed Vladimir Putin, Russia’s bloodthirsty dictator, the political cover and the funding he required — not only with the U.S. but also with its European allies — to invade Ukraine and butcher tens of thousands of innocent noncombatants.

Once upon a time, fanciful dreams of running a modern economy on moonbeams and happy thoughts seemed like a pleasant diversion to many. But those days of blissful ignorance are gone.

Now we’re forced to endure video every day of men, women and children slaughtered in the name of keeping the planet from warming by two-tenths of a degree over the next century.

The green mob’s answer to $4plus per gallon gasoline? Go out and buy a $50,000 electric car (that has to be recharged every few hundred miles using power generated, in the vast majority of cases, at a coal-fired plant producing more carbon emissions than the gas guzzler it was created to replace).

The rhetoric has ratcheted up dramatically in recent years, but the campaign to grow government and intrude more and more into our daily lives has been ongoing for decades.

Before it became “climate change” in the 2000s, there was the “global warming” crisis of the 1990s. In the 1980s, the calamities de jour were “acid rain” and the destruction of the planet’s ozone layer by aerosol deodorant.

These came on the heels of similarly solemn pronouncements during the 1970s of planetary cooling trends that foretold a looming ice age.

It appears for now the climate experts have settled on the term “climate change” because they don’t have to come up with a different tactic for each new decade while they find new ways to scare the bejeezus out of the American people in hopes of separating them from ever-more tax dollars and personal freedom.

Against this backdrop, President Richard Nixon in 1970 was goaded into creating the Environmental Protection Agency by executive order.

According to the EPA’s own archives, during the 1970s alone, the agency enacted: n the Environmental Quality Improvement Act (1970); n the Coastal Zone Management Act (1972); n the Marine Protection Research and Sanctuaries Act (1972); n the Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972); n the Endangered Species Act (1973); n the Deepwater Ports and Waterways Safety Act (1974); n the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act (1974); n the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1976); n the Water Resources Planning Act (1977); n the Water Resources Research Act (1977); and, n in its early years, the EPA placed “about 1,500 rulemaking notices in the Federal Register annually.”

Meanwhile, the media regularly pitched in to help with the fearmongering.

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An April 28, 1975, Newsweek article proposed solutions that even included outlawing the internal combustion engine, and a Time magazine issue on Jan. 31, 1977, featured a cover story with helpful advice on, “How to Survive the Coming Ice Age.”

Much to the annoyance of the doomsayers, it didn’t happen, which necessitated the manufacturing of another oncoming catastrophe that could only be averted with a massive infusion of taxpayer dollars, larger and more intrusive government and the unquestioned sacrifice of our civil rights.

As an Oct. 29, 1989, Los Angeles Times article headlined “Global Warming Expected to Be the Hot Issue of the 1990s,” explained:

“In a simpler time, not so long ago, environmentalists talked about saving forests for hiking, streams for rafting and clean air for the pure enjoyment of breathing it. Now, as the 1990s approach, the talk has turned to the science of survival – saving forests for oxygen, keeping streams from spreading toxic pollutants, cleaning the air to avoid catastrophic global warming. From the hazy vantage point of 1989, the environment looms as the major global issue of the next decade.

The threat of environmental cataclysm is replacing nuclear holocaust as the most frightening menace to civilization.”

The 1990s put the climate propaganda into overdrive with doomsday predictions of melting glaciers pushing the sea levels to dangerous levels, overtaking coastal beaches and submerging entire blocks of New York City under the ocean.

A popular cartoon series, “Captain Planet and the Planeteers,” debuted in 1990 and ran throughout the 1990s, preaching to young millennials about the evil and dangers of man-made global warming.

Clinton administration Vice President Al Gore was tasked with enacting a laundry list of environmental policy goals — and empowered to fire any government official who got in his way by, for example, citing scientific facts.

Interestingly, those old enough to remember “global cooling” in the 1970s were really cooling to climate hysteria by the late-1990s. Sales of SUVs continued to rise despite ongoing attempts to demonize them, and the failed Y2K hysteria during 1999 certainly didn’t help those skeptical of apocalyptic government pronouncements.

For his part, Gore believed he could ride this climate-phobia all the way to the White House and, in 2000, came within a whisker of doing just that.

Embittered by his rejection at the polls, in 2006 he turned to producing a fact-challenged documentary euphemistically titled “An Inconvenient Truth” and issued a prediction that, unless the nation undertook “drastic measures, the world would reach a point of no return within 10 years.”

That was almost 30 years ago, and we still seem to be plugging along.

American politicians and ecoactivists still prattle on about the need for Americans to sacrifice so the rest of the world can breathe quality air and drink clean water, without trying to implement the same policies in developing countries that have been foisted upon America’s economic engine since the 1970s.

Over time, it started to become obvious America’s would-be emperor and his followers weren’t wearing clothes.

As conservative radio icon Rush Limbaugh observed:

“Climate change isn’t about climate. It’s about getting rich off of an ever-expanding, growing, controlling government. It’s all about expanding the government and government control over people. It’s about creating victims. When you successfully turn somebody into a victim, you’ve automatically made them a dependent on you. You’re essentially telling them they’ve lost the power to solve their own problems.”

So government has to do it for them. All you have to do is hand over your money and your freedom, and hucksters like Al Gore will do the rest.

Unfortunately, while those old enough to remember the doomsday predictions decades earlier have long since learned to roll their eyes and go back to living their lives, too many got sucked into the hysteria and are having a hard time finding their way out.

Millions of gullible children taught that melting ice caps would drown polar bears believe to this day the world is on the brink of collapse if we don’t do more, pay more and give up more.

A new crop of climate alarmists actually believed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) when she proclaimed in 2019 that the world would end in 12 years if we didn’t address climate change … in a way that we haven’t for five decades already.

Americans are living in the cleanest, most efficient and environmentally friendly economic climate in our nation’s history, but it’s never enough because those in government and those who seek to profit from our misery will always find a way to inflict a little more.

If this sounds eerily familiar, it’s because we’re living it out in a different doomsday scenario, also engineered to grow government and impose more restrictions on our daily lives.

Trust the science, follow the experts, and do what you’re told because government knows best and government is here to save you.

Only this time, the we can’t just shrug off their failed projections and laugh as the professional Chicken Littles are exposed yet again.

This time, unless adults intervene once and for all, the lies and selfserving agenda of environmental extremists have the potential to blunder us into World War III.

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