Left Evades on Climate, Right on Their Success

The New York Post, which mentions the work of Bjorn Lomborg, walks its readers through a half-century of apocalyptic climate warnings, many from from the U.N..

This is valuable -- up to a point -- and amusing -- also, up to a point: My favorite was the prediction that Britain would have a "Siberian" climate by 2020.

That one was made in 2004.

This author is reasonably sure, based on multiple data points (that happen to coincide with televised Arsenal matches) that that prediction was wrong.

That said, the value of spreading raw data around and justifiably laughing at ridiculous predictions is quite limited.

Consider the following paragraph, near the end of the piece:

Image by Felix Mittermeier, via Unsplash, license.

That gives us until 2030 -- or 58 years after the warnings of 1972. Advocates for change believe if they just scream louder, or write more like the Book of Revelations, they'll get the world to agree to a complete upheaval of modern life and trillions in spending. But after decades of alarmism, they sound like the boy who cried warming. People have tuned them out.

People have tuned them out. What people? The climate protesters? The legions of voters who showed up last year to vote in the Democrats, who claim that fighting "climate change" is a major priority? Every Tom, Dick, and Harry whose bill at the pump has more than doubled over the past year?

Some haven't and some have, and the problem is that the people whose faith in climate change is impervious to evidence are still fighting for their cause while the people who have tuned out fail to show up to stop them, and protect our way of life. And then there are the people whose lives are affected by the anti-energy agenda who basically mumble a complaint about prices, and then zone out again.

If leftists don't know or care about the accuracy of their past predictions, too many of the rest show just as much indifference to the progress they keep making towards their goals, either by laughing it off or by going to sleep again whenever the momentary irritation caused by that agenda temporarily passes or becomes part of "normal" to them.

Neither the dumb predictions, nor the scare tactics that go with them, nor the incremental progress towards the destruction of industrial civilization will end until outlets like the Post take a serious and penetrating look into the fact that such a movement can exist in the first place -- and begin to help offering a positive alternative to it that can inspire and motivate the young and the idealistic.

The sins of the left in evading reality are all too clear in this piece, but the right is also guilty of ignoring reality -- that of the repeated partial successes by the doomsayers that are undermining our country, like restrictions on offshore drilling, fracking bans, and work stoppages on needed pipelines. If the left repeatedly tries to scare everyone into an orgy of self-sacrifice, the right is guilty of repeatedly failing to notice that the idea that self-sacrifice is moral is one that most people take seriously. It is what animates the alarmists, and it and must be opposed before it once again succeeds in precipitating a major regression in our civilization.

-- CAV