We’ve written a great deal about the Great Climate Fraud in recent months, as the cultish Church of Global Warming (CGW) has entered its inevitable decline in credibility with the scientific community, policymakers and the public at large. The revelation last fall of hundreds of emails detailing an organized commission of outright fraud by some of the leading fake “scientists” who have promoted the Warmist religion has had the same effect on the CGW as the revelation of emails detailing an organized effort to manipulate U.S. natural gas markets had on Enron a decade ago.
Citizens in the United States, Great Britain and across the free world have begun recoiling at the idea that they’ve been had by a bunch of two-bit charlatans. Ok, make that a bunch of trillion dollar charlatans, but charlatans they are. In the most recent Pew survey on public attitudes towards major issues, the percentage of Americans who believe human activity is the cause of climate change fell to an all-time low 34 percent. Climate change ranked 21st out of 21 issues surveyed in terms of public concern, with just 28 percent still laboring under the belief the matter is cause for major congressional action.
Politicians with those kinds of numbers keep themselves busy looking for other lines of work. Public policy issues with that low level of public concern seldom become the subject of successful legislation to address them. Thus we have simultaneously seen over the last few months the collapse of leftist efforts to enact cap and trade legislation targeting carbon dioxide, as well as growing bipartisan congressional opposition to efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency to severely hamstring the economy by implementing command and control regulation over carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases”.
What is happening here is that the public is beginning the process of rejecting the politics of frivolity. And frivolity is exactly what the CGW and really environmentalism in general have become.
Over the past 30 to 40 years in America, many good and positive things have been accomplished in the name of environmentalism, since the implementation of major pieces of legislation like the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. Automobiles no longer belch out plumes of black smoke as they run down the road; the emissions from coal-fired power plants have been dramatically reduced, although they are still the dirtiest things around; emissions from oil refineries have been cut by a factor of 9 and more; cities no longer are allowed to flow their sewage into the nation’s waterways; important and significant animal species like the Whooping Crane and the Bald Eagle have been brought back from the brink of extinction. All of these and more were good and worthy goals that were worth taking on, and the nation is a much cleaner and safer place as a result.
But, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the resulting de-legitimizing of world socialism, the worthiness of the environmental movement in general began to change, as leftist activists of all stripes came to the conclusion that the best way to advance their radical agenda was under the guise of “environmentalism”. Suddenly, beginning in the early 1990s, proposals for listing species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) moved away from species, like the Whooping Crane, whose very existence was truly threatened, to animals like the Sage Grouse native to Wyoming and Colorado, which literally exist in the millions (and even have an open hunting season dedicated to them), but whose listing under the ESA on the grounds of decreasing habitat would result in massive economic and societal disruption.
Environmentalist activities under the Clean Air Act (CAA), the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) began to take on a similar profile of proposing “solutions” designed to cause maximum cost and economic disruption possible. Under NEPA, the EPA can require the conduct of hugely costly environmental impact studies whenever a citizen raises concerns about almost any potential environmental impact that could allegedly result from some economic activity. Such studies typically cost millions of dollars and can take years to complete. These NEPA provisions have been systematically used by radicals around the country to delay and increase the cost of all manner of infrastructure projects. In Texas these tactics have been used to dramatically increase the time and cost of major highway project on I-35 north of Waco and I-45 north of Houston. One seven mile stretch of road on I-35 has now taken more than 14 years to reconstruct, and is still unfinished.
Examples of this sort of abuse of the provisions of these major federal acts are legion, and the public invariably becomes incensed once the abuses are revealed, despite the best efforts of the leftist news media to cover them up. This has never been more true than the last two years, as a nation mired in a major recession begins to realize that it can no longer afford to tolerate such mindless frivolity in the name of “environmentalism”.
Of course, there has never been a more frivolous environmental policy proposal than the current efforts by congress and the EPA to either legislate or regulate control of carbon dioxide emissions. To understand exactly how frivolous such proposals are, all you really need to know is that carbon dioxide makes up only about 4% of all so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions. Of that 4%, human-based emissions amount to around 3.4%, meaning that, in the now-failed Waxman-Markey legislation, congress proposed to cost the U.S. economy more than $2 trillion over 8 years to attempt to marginally reduce what currently amounts to around 13/100ths of 1% of greenhouse gas emissions. Now that the Waxman-Markey bill has failed, the EPA now proposes to cost the economy even more than that under its heavy-handed, Soviet-style regulatory system.
This is rank frivolity that a nation mired with trillion dollar-plus annual budget deficits as far as the eye can see simply cannot afford or tolerate. The recent polling data indicate that most citizens outside of the hard-core radical left have come to that realization. You can expect that shift in attitudes to show up in a big way in this November’s congressional elections.
The frivolity of the liberal zoo has fallen into a state of unrecoverable ill repute.
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