If you’ve been noticing an eerie similarity between the elite rhetoric surrounding the pandemic and that of climate change, you are on to something. Both issues, technically complex, have seen science and fact superseded by the politics and religion of the Left.
The parallels are evident. Both issues are utilized by the Left as convenient opportunity for excessive government action and intrusive intervention. The consequences, intended or not, often worsen both situations.
With the virus, you have government dictating what you wear on your face, whether you can worship at your church, whether your kids can attend school, and whether you can walk in your local park. Consider it a heavy-handed, one-size-fits-all response in the name of looking after the public health.
With climate change and affiliated schemes like the “Green New Deal,” the Left hopes to ban personal travel, replace private banking with state banks, raise the cost of goods and services, and ration energy use. All in the name of protecting the environment. Look for such calls to intensify as Joe Biden moves into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
The Left’s approach to both COVID-19 and climate change hurts the most vulnerable demographics: children and the poor.
Using the virus as a convenient crisis, it wants to lock our children out of school for two consecutive school years. As elites who impose the shutdowns decamp to their vacation homes, the working poor in urban areas don’t enjoy such options. With ill-advised climate change policies, energy access is denied to billions of global poor, resulting in lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality, all so that elites can feel better about their green cred.
Another similarity between COVID-19 and carbon dioxide is the overwhelming stench of elite hypocrisy. Leftist politicians don’t focus on protecting our most vulnerable citizens, such as the elderly and those with existing medical conditions. Instead, they blast religious gatherings as “superspreader” events while applauding protester gatherings — so long as the protesters are of the correct political leaning, of course.
Likewise, at Davos, celebrities and CEOs typically lecture how consumers and common folk must refrain from carbon-enabled activity, yet the blowhards failed to mention they arrived and departed the resort on carbon-powered private jets.
Even the vocabularies of viruses and carbon are similar. Traditional pandemic naming convention initially labeled the current bug as the Wuhan virus, following the lineage of prior diseases being tied to their points of origin: Ebola, Zika, Legionnaires’, West Nile, MERS, and Marburg. But when the Left felt Wuhan harmed the image of the Chinese Communist Party, the vernacular quickly shifted to COVID-19. Anyone applying the original nomenclature was labeled racist.
Likewise, with carbon, what was once tagged as “global warming” morphed into the much more accommodating “climate change” because warming did not appear as predicted.
Meanwhile, the Left’s cures in both cases are worse than their respective diseases.
With COVID-19, self-induced economic comas have wreaked permanent harm upon businesses, livelihoods, children’s educational development, and individuals’ wellness that greatly exceeds the harm the pandemic would have sown if society remained open with tailored, reasonable precautions to protect the most vulnerable. Government-imposed lockdowns did more harm than the virus.
Meanwhile, the Church of Climate’s imposition of government mandates and social engineering to favor so-called renewables and harm domestic natural gas manufacturing strangles the middle class, further restrains the poor from advancement, harms the environment, and acts as a regressive tax on the doers of our nation. Government-imposed energy policy destroys quality of life more than increasing carbon dioxide levels. And note that U.S. carbon emission levels are down 12% since 2005, thanks to the increased use of natural gas.
COVID-19 kills, and hurricanes destroy. Yet reason tells us our healthy teenagers face a bigger risk driving the family car than from the virus and that our fathers face a greater risk of death from a heart attack while cutting the grass than from drowning in rising sea levels. But the Left, allied with its trusty cohorts in government, media, environmental organizations, and public unions, buries reason to its benefit and our peril.
Nick Deiuliis is president and chief executive officer of CNX Resources Corporation. Follow him on Twitter at @nickdeiuliis.
