Men often take dumb risks by pounding drinks they should probably skip. It may have seemed like such a dumb stunt when former Democratic Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper threw back a shot of fracking fluid — but in fact it was perfectly safe.
Hickenlooper knows what so many liberal environmentalists deny: The cocktail of water and chemicals that gas companies inject into the ground as part of the fracking process isn’t “poisonous” at all. He also knows what his party’s most popular figures could never admit: Fracking is a safe process that creates jobs, brings down energy costs, and helps the economy. In fact, fracking has done more to reduce U.S. carbon emissions than all environmentalists combined.
This fealty to science and economics, were it to spread to other issues, could become a liability to Hickenlooper now that he’s seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. After all, his is a party that doesn’t tolerate science or economics when they get in the way of ideology.
Exhibit A is the “Green New Deal,” which presidential candidates raced to embrace. It aims to reduce greenhouse gasses by impossible amounts while rejecting the only reasonably available means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions: nuclear and natural gas power. This ideological hatred of fracking and nuclear power leads the Democratic luminaries away from the only realistic path to carbon reduction.
Democrats’ aversion to science isn’t merely on the environment. This is a party that recently rejected a bill to protect newborn babies who had survived abortion attempts. Their talking point was that this bill, which only protected babies already born, infringed upon a woman’s right to control her own body. Blurring the difference between a born baby and a woman’s uterus is quite a heavy lift, but it’s what this party does for its donor base.
Similarly, Democrats now parrot the insane dogma of gender ideology that requires them to pretend that male and female have no physical determinants, but are merely social and personal constructs. No one is either male or female by nature or by birth, but only by self-identification, they hold.
Finally, Democratic antipathy toward economic reasoning is always on display. Hickenlooper’s rival for the Democratic nod, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., this week praised rent-control laws in Portland, although they are obviously going to exacerbate the housing crisis there, just as they have done in San Francisco.
We don’t know whether the Democratic presidential candidates are unaware of the scientific and economic laws at play, or if the party’s base simply forces the politicians to pretend these laws don’t exist. Whatever the case, Hickenlooper, if he shows common sense beyond fracking, will certainly face the wrath of a party that won’t let reality undermine what they believe.
