The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to repeal the Obama-era “scientific” finding that classified carbon dioxide as a threat to public health and welfare, and empowered the federal government to unilaterally, and virtually without limit, regulate the economy.
But when will there be a national reckoning for those who misled us? None of the dire predictions about carbon emissions throwing us into global catastrophe offered by scientists, politicians, or international organizations over the past 50 years have come true. In the end, the endless string of chilling forecasts failed to terrorize people out of modernity.
By the time it was all said and done — and it feels like the public is about done — there wasn’t a malady, tragedy, or human foible that wasn’t attributed to a slight variation in world climate, including mental illness, diabetes, migraines, prostitution, asthma, dementia, and sexual dysfunction. Climate change has turned us into addicts, thieves, human traffickers, refugees, and warmongers, and accentuated our political divisions.
It’s been 20 years since the release of the Academy Award-winning An Inconvenient Truth. In it, Malthusian nutjob and former Vice President Al Gore confidently popularized a slew of unhinged pseudoscientific warnings. Yet the snows of Kilimanjaro are still with us. Glacier National Park is not “formerly known as Glacier National Park.” We have not seen a dramatic increase in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes — we have seen fewer. There has not been a catastrophic sea-level rise flooding major areas. Despite the hopes of some, Manhattan and Miami remain above water. As do low-lying Pacific islands.
No other group of people would be treated with deference after engaging in such a massive and costly deception.
Gore and others made a personal killing on propagating the global warming mythology. What about the rest of society?
Where do people get back the $10 bazillion their governments diverted from potentially beneficial scientific research and technology to stop the temperature from rising a fraction of a degree? What do we do with all the bright minds that were captured by the weather cult rather than by technologies that matter? Some of us remember high school science fairs circa 2008, teeming with children trying to make model cars run on sunshine.
Where do children go to get back their mental health? Even as the world improved by virtually every tangible measure, a generation was stricken by “ecoanxiety.” A 2021 study in the medical journal the Lancet polled 10,000 people aged 16 through 25 from around the world, including 1,000 from the United States. Sixty percent of them were “extremely worried” about climate change. Over half said they were “sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty” because of climate change.
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What about the deranged climate activists who began convincing people that having children was an attack on the planet?
Where do we go to get back our institutions? Sure, experts misled us about COVID-19, but the real cratering of trust in scientific expertise began when the Left started cynically conflating their climate change theories and modeling with irrefutable hard science.
Those even mildly skeptical of this apocalypticism were treated as knuckle-dragging science-averse nuts. Where do they go to get back their reputations? Modern-day McCarthyites chased skeptics from media and academia, chilling any honest inquiry or debate.
In this technocratic crusade to treat energy policy as the Earth’s thermostat, the media began calling skeptics of climate alarmism “deniers” — a purposeful allusion to Holocaust denialism. “Global warming theory” morphed into the definitive “climate change” and then the “climate crisis,” which was meant to quash any debate over policy.
There would be no talk of trade-offs. Not only was it frowned upon to debate whether humanity was to blame for climate fluctuations, or whether it even mattered very much, but also on what should be done about it. Even if anthropogenic climate change were happening — and even if it was happening at the dangerous levels experts contended — the most realistic and affordable means of dealing with it would have been adaptation. We’ve spent most of human existence trying to deal with the destructive power of the climate.
Instead, our institutions dropped billions of dollars trying to shame the proles into surrendering the comforts of capitalism — a hopeless cause.
Once the government began subsidizing and mandating “clean energy” projects to stave off the apocalypse, the entire system was incentivized to reward climate change hysterics and insulate the “green” industry from market forces and competition. Environmentalists will claim that solar and wind are now cheaper than fossil fuels. And yet, most Green Era subsidies and mandates are still in place, funneled to inefficient state-chosen technologies. If the public were given a genuine choice, the green energy sector would crash.
As it is, these projects aren’t going to disappear. Lots of rich and powerful people are invested in state-backed energy scams. The governor of California still wants to spend billions of taxpayer dollars more on choo-choo trains. But it’s not just leftists. One of the biggest boondoggles in America is ethanol subsidies.
Democrats are, of course, going to freak out about the Trump administration’s reversal of former President Barack Obama’s endangerment finding. They’ll continue blaming Republicans for every hurricane, flood, and natural disaster. Every few years, the media will drag out the next Paul Ehrlich, perhaps the wrongest person who’s ever trodden the planet, to offer some new doomsday declaration. But we’ve heard it all before.
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Sooner or later, fearmongering becomes noise. We use around 20 million barrels of petroleum products every day, now more abundant and easier to extract than ever before. We use it more resourcefully than ever before. So, unless some completely new technology emerges, and it almost surely will one day, it will take an autocratic technocracy to eliminate the world’s reliance on fossil fuels.
Then again, the notion that man-made greenhouse gases pose an existential threat to humankind has been little more than a backdoor way to institute unpopular environmentalist policies and temper economic growth. It’s about time we end the scam.
