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The Left Doesn’t Care about Climate Change, Part II
As Professor Rahe noted, the enviro mob is at it again. On Sunday, the usual suspects staged a People’s Climate March and today they’re punishing working stiffs with a Flood Wall Street provocation.
To mark their renewed focus on green activism, an older article of mine was getting passed around the interwebs. In it, I made the case that the Left doesn’t really believe in climate change:
The sky is always falling. If the new ice age doesn’t do us in, the ozone hole will. The instant DDT is banned, aerosols must follow. Global warming is replaced by climate change is replaced by “global weirding.”
And what is the solution to these often-contradictory scenarios? We anachronists who retain a bias toward the hard sciences would employ very different measures to prevent a freezing ocean and a boiling one. To an engineer, soldier or plumber, this is obvious…
Every time a real-world solution is provided to a promised calamity, leftist leaders move the goalposts. To be sure, many well-meaning parishioners have bought the con and piously observe the demanding rituals of earth worship. But the high priests still jet around the globe, chasing checks from energy tycoons to build monstrous mansions along “doomed” coastlines.
That’s because the Left doesn’t really believe in climate change. Their true religion is raising taxes, increasing government, impeding capitalism and reducing national sovereignty. Climate change is just a temporary excuse to achieve those ends.
Yes, my argument was brilliant as always. But looking back I don’t think the piece went far enough. The Left prescribes the same anti-capitalist solutions whether the environment is cooling, warming or holding steady. But they propose those same solutions for every other issue they find marketable at a given time.
How is today’s Flood Wall Street stunt any different from Occupy Wall Street, the semi-annual G8 protests, or Seattle’s WTO riots? How does the People’s Climate March differ from the annual amnesty marches, Bush-era antiwar demonstrations, or the “nuclear freeze” rallies of the 1980s?
If you diagrammed the participants in these various protests, the Venn Diagram would consist of a single circle. The same goes for the solutions: no matter the issue, marchers demand we raise taxes, increase government, impede capitalism and reduce national sovereignty.
Let’s face it; many of these marchers don’t even know the cover story of why they’re there. Hence the “smash capitalism,” “vote union” and “end racism” signs at what is supposed to be an environmental march. With a few coats of paint, they can turn last month’s papier-mâché puppet head of a menacing Zionist into a rapacious industrialist.
The Left doesn’t believe in climate change, but they also don’t care about the war on women, food injustice, immigrants dying in the border deserts, or globalists jetting in and out of Davos. All of these issues are just convenient proxies for the progressives’ real passion: destroying capitalism and enervating America.
P.S. Here’s a photo from today’s tantrum:
Are we not supposed to notice that a group of privileged white males is angrily attacking African-Americans? Why do I doubt the press will report it that way?
Published in General
Last time I checked the leaders of the march and the attendant celebrities were Bill McKibben, Al Gore, Bill deBlasio, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, etc, etc, etc.
So much for smashing the straight white patriarchy.
Hypocrites by their own standards. (Which are horrible, identity-politic standards I completely disagree with.)
When an African-American becomes a self-loathing race-traitor, as is true of any who would stoop to join the cops, all bets are off, Gabriel!
And the guy with the camera and papers (script?) looks like he’s afraid of catching cooties. Racism?
<sarcasm>But, SCIENCE!!!</sarcasm>
Like.
Exactly! AWG theories would be worthless to the Left if they failed to provide justification for the Left’s agenda of increasing govt control over its citizens. Furthermore, the Left considers all problems–including imaginary “problems” like AWG–as stalking horses for the Left’s demands for increases in government power over its citizens.
The single goal of the left, wherever it rears its hideous head, it to control people and their wealth… for the benefit of a ruling elite, the Nomenklatura. I pity my leftist colleagues in higher ed who think they will automatically be part of such a Nomenklatura. History shows that they would be among the first purged. They, like the people in this demonstration, are nothing but useful idiots (emphasis on”idiots”).
Cato, it never gets old.
When they pulled this in London’s financial district, the traders attacked them. Does no one remember “Sod off, swampy?”
This article describes my own theory about leftist serial agitators far more eloquently than I ever could. The most pointed example in my view is the hysteria generated by any Israeli action when compared with the ho-hum reaction to the slaughter in Syria- including of its Palestinian residents. In fact the so-called Anti-War (in truth Anti-American) left in Ireland only became exercised about Syria when bombing was mooted after the use of chemical weapons by Assad. To be clear, it was not the chemical weapons which caused the outrage.
Sunday, we passed the communists on the waterfront in Portland trying to eliminate carbon usage. As we passed I gave them a big thumb’s up and yelled “Putin, Putin”. Perhaps they thought I was yelling “Puta, Puta” and for them, what’s the difference?
It’s not that they have no principles, it’s just that they have none they won’t sell.
Progressive/liberals/Democrats have primarily their own self interest at heart and the various “causes” they push are primarily designed to advance these self-interests. DAH! Who on Ricochet hasn’t figured this out?
Republicans never forcefully make this point because it is in their own self-interest not to so. I trust you are adroit enough to have figured this out, but never write about it. Why-perhaps because it is in your own self-interest not to so?
Do you really think the Republicans came up with the ethanol scan because of their concern for the environment? Give me a break!
This is the major kick the lefties are on now. This will be their criteria for their elected officials. And the elected officials will have to respond to make them happy. They will fight for this for the next twenty years and they will eventually get something passed, unless we can slam dunk prove their science is wrong. This is the new gay amrriage issue for the left. And they won’t quit until they win. hold on to your wallets, they are coming after it.
Question for liberal jim – So if Progressives/Liberals/Democrats are pushing causes that advance their self-interests, why is it that they hide those self-interests behind causes like Global Warming? Why not have the guts to come right out and say that they are in favor of destroying capitalism, raising taxes, increasing government control and weakening traditional structures such as organized religion and the family (with a mother and father)? My guess is that Democrats know that the majority of Americans would never support that platform, so they have to use cunning to advance their cause.
I care about climate change.
I’m all for it! I usually live in Iowa but I’m visiting Minnesota.
I say “Hooray for global warming! I want it and I want it now.”
Change the climate? Absolutely.
5 Ways ISIS Can Reduce Its Carbon Footprint
http://www.clickhole.com/article/5-ways-isis-can-reduce-its-carbon-footprint-1053
Great article, Jon. This reminds me of several protests that were covered on C-SPAN during the Bush administration. It wouldn’t matter whether they were protesting the war on terror, global warming, whatever. You’d have speakers talking about abortion, under-funded schools, mistreatment of American Indians, equal pay for women, independence for Puerto Rico, capital gains taxes, nuclear power, the minimum wage, federal funding for the arts, and so forth. If C-SPAN didn’t have a label on the bottom of the screen, you wouldn’t know that this supposed to be be an anti-war demonstration.
I figured this out more than 30 years ago and after about 2 years of GHB (you do remember lying lips) I concluded Republicans were doing more or less the same darn thing. You wouldn’t know it to listen to them today , but most of the Republican establishment opposed RR and his programs and worked to undermine them.
I think most global warming activists, at least at the grassroots level, really believe in global warming. The idea that carbon dioxide affects climate is logically sound, but that doesn’t mean their conclusions are correct. Their main problem is they don’t appreciate all the great, great good that comes from fossil fuels, and they wildly overestimate the feasibility of switching to solar and wind power.
I do think global warming flatters their prejudices against capitalism, so they are more credulous than they otherwise might be. They think capitalism would still be bad even if global warming wasn’t a problem, so they are erring on the side of alarmism.
So, I agree with Jon Gabriel’s main point (the real issues are capitalism and bourgeois values, not climate), although I think if you gave the activists a lie detector test and asked, “Is global warming a big problem?” they would be able to say “yes” and pass the test.