Last weekend, an estimated 300,000 “climate change” evangelists flooded the streets of New York City, creating traffic jams and leaving the streets littered withtrash and waste. Their publicly-stated goal? — to raise awareness about “climate change,” as if decades of yelling, bullying, and name-calling has not left the public well-aware of the movement’s agenda. As expected, the march attracted its usual suspects clothed in their standard green hypocrisy. Al Gore left the march in an SUV. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, got testy with a reporterwhen asked if he was going to “lead by example” and give up his cell phone.
Even employing its self-avowed standards of calculating the “environmental impact” of actions, the march itself, with hundreds of thousands of people from across the globe descending upon the city, was an environmental disaster.
Of course, facts, history and logic are not elements readily apparent within this crowd, especially among those who dare not question the fanatical claims about the consequences if immediate action is not taken to put a stop to what used to be known as “global warming,” but now is referred to more vaguely as “climate change.” Furthermore, the “immediate action” for which these environmental zealots clamor is well known as liberal-speak for “government regulation;” their panacea for everything under the sun.
The fact is, “environmental conservation” is not a social good owned exclusively by liberals. Every hunter and sportsman appreciates the importance of protecting Earth’s natural resources. It is also one of the many important lessons taught over the past century by the Boy Scouts. “Appreciation for our natural environment and a knowledge of the interrelationships of nature bolster our respect and reverence toward the environment and nature,” say the Scouts.
The common-sense notion of personal environmental stewardship as practiced for generations by the Scouts reflects a community effort to keep our environment clean, and leaving the world better than when we found it. Unfortunately, true concern for the environment is not the objective of today’s environmental warriors, like those who marched in the Big Apple last weekend.
Radical environmentalism, not unlike many of the Left’s other crusades, is a thinly veiled cover for a brand of forced living standards and mandated anti-capitalism not at all unlike traditional Communism. Today, “environmentalism” is less about taking common sense, personal steps toward environmental stewardship, than it is throwing a monkey wrench into the industrial world and bringing technological progress to a grinding stop, regardless of the impact on humanity.
This anti-corporate, anti-freedom “progressive” movement is made effective not by rational argument, but by acid rhetoric, propaganda, and both academic and monetary fraud. Its proponents use these tools purposefully to create a false dichotomy in which the only “moral” position is to agree with them, lest one be labeled a climate change “denier” or “skeptic” – environmentalist jargon used by the Mainstream Media to insinuate that global warming critics are Neanderthals who reject “proven science.”
It is a modern day version of the old tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
Of course, even when significant, and damning, progress is made by critics atdebunking the junk science used by global warming alarmists to justify all manner of social re-engineering, the goalposts are simply moved, and the script is altered to keep their game alive. It does not matter that the Earth has been cooling over the last decade — they simply change the nomenclature of the debate from “global warming” to “climate change,” according to which you will always be right because the climate always will change, even if not known in what direction. In this environmental Bizarro World manipulation is condoned because the laudable goal of these “scientists” is to save the planet.
Periodically, Hollywood A-Listers will step forward to hold fund-raisers, bloviate about how they love Planet Earth, and spend millions making another sci-fi spectacular about how political and corporate bad guys have destroyed Earth. Man-made global warming may be a myth, but the agenda of these enviro-socialists is very real.
In the short term, the goal of these anti-capitalist crusaders is a global initiative, marked most recently by Obama’s visit on Tuesday with U.N. leaders to address a “global framework” for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. President Obama has shown little restraint in using costly, job-killing environmental regulations (or, in the case of the Keystone Pipeline, taking no action at all) to appease his liberal base. In an election year in which Democrats are struggling to paper over the vast failures of this Administration, it is virtually certain American businesses and taxpayers will be hit with even more of this costly and counter-productive environmental chicanery.