Global Warming
When I was a kid and didn’t know better, I bought some cool stickers and pasted them all over my bedroom window, much to my parents’ dismay. Green peace signs (like the ones that have been proliferating on every car but mine in the state of MA in the last few years) proclaiming “peace” and “ecology”. See, this was before “the environment” it was “the ecology” back then. It wasn’t “global warming” it was “the coming ice age”. Seriously. Ask anybody who was around in the 60’s and wasn’t too stoned to remember being there. And besides, it’s not “global warming” anymore anyway. I think that was quietly withdrawn and renamed when a few noisy people started noticing that the cycle goes up AND down. Now the mantra is “climate change” – pretty good, since it covers everything. If we have an unusually cool summer – climate change. We need to raise taxes on gasoline, enact more socialist policies, elect more Marxist politicians and save the planet. If it’s an unusually warm winter – climate change. We need to raise taxes on gasoline, enact more socialist policies, elect more Marxist politicians and save the planet. No matter the problem (real or imagined), the solutions are always, ALWAYS the same.
I’m not debating climate change – it seems to me that climate, by definition, changes all the time. That’s nature. Aren’t we supposed to “leave no footprints behind”? So it’s extremely naughty to use an incandescent lightbulb to keep from falling down the basement stairs at night but wonderful to try to change the whole doggone climate? Really? So climate = change, both small cycles and large ones. I’m not arguing that, I’m only doubting that humanity has much if any impact in the matter – either cause or effect. These changes have (according to popular science theory) been going on since before we all crawled out of the primordial ooze and evolved into higher life forms – first protozoans, then apes and eventually Donald Trump. (Note: I wrote this several years ago, well before the Donald had announced his intention to run for president of the US. The line seemed funnier to me then…) As far as anyone knows, we weren’t driving Escalades and farming cattle for food at that point in time (and as we all know, cattle farming is easily as evil as SUVs because it isn’t “sustainable” – another mantra – and because cows belch and fart methane which is very rude, and because it’s believed that they also almost never vote for marxist candidates.) And I’m sorry for the run-on sentence. Not really.
I’m also not for pollution or careless use of resources. This is our home – hopefully most of us don’t dump garbage in our livingrooms or let our toilets overflow into the hallway so why should we run sewage into the ocean or otherwise trash our larger home?
No, I don’t think it’s about AGW, the coming ice age, climate change or anything else. When I see people like Algore flying around the world in private jets to go here and there making impassioned speeches (and pantloads of money) gaining accolades and adulation for lecturing the great unwashed about how we should turn off our lights and ride bicycles to work (much as that might not be a bad idea, but for reasons unrelated to “sustainability”), when I hear about Fearless Leader (ours, not North Korea’s) flying all over creation to get his golf card punched at every course on the face of the earth, no, it seems to me it’s ultimately about what it’s always about: the obtaining and consolidation of power and the transfer of wealth.