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The End Is Nigh!
Climate change is not my issue. I don’t know enough about the science to form a solid opinion. Had I been permitted to remain within the liberal left, I’d no doubt be mindlessly backing Team Gore. That is, I would have, had Team Gore and the Democratic Party not made the mistake of amply demonstrating its cynical perfidy when it comes to issues I do know and care about.
A story for another day (or, let’s face it, for just about all my other days): at the moment, I’d like to reprise my Stewardess Metaphor for those who might have missed it.
“Stewardess” by the way, is what we called “Flight Attendants” when I was young. I did a lot of flying as a child and didn’t like it. Like Christine Blasey Ford, I don’t like it a whole lot now either. I am prone to motion sickness and, as I’ve gotten older and seen too many statistically-unlikely tragedies come to pass, the possibility that I might fall out of the sky, or die in a fiery mid-air explosion seems less remote.
To soothe my fear of flying, therefore, I’ve learned to watch the stewardess. She, after all, flies all the time. She’s accustomed to the skies, friendly and unfriendly. Okay, she isn’t actually a pilot, but she is the visible on-board expert, the Al Gore of Air Travel.
So if we encounter turbulence — if the ridiculous cigar tube we’ve all allowed ourselves to be stuffed into begins to bounce merrily amongst the clouds — I peel open my squinched-shut eyes and look to her. If the stewardess is still chatting amiably with the Disney-bound family in the third row or preparing the beverage cart even as we bump and slide, I figure all is well.
If, on the other hand, she’s strapped herself tightly into her special stewardess seat, her knuckles white as mine, her lips twitching in silent prayer, I’ll know my fear is justified. If she assumes the crash position, I’ll believe that time is running out.
Here’s my problem with climate change: everyone from “turn back the rising seas” Obama to the pastor of my local liberal church will eagerly assure me that Science has proved that the end is nigh; climate change isn’t just happening but is imminent. We or our children are about to witness the mother of all fiery crash-and-burns unless we repent and turn from our sinful ways. Time is running out. It was running out in 1989, then again in 2000, 2002, 2006, 2007, 2012, 2014, 2015…
It’s as if we’re on the plane — eating our pretzels, pecking at our laptops, trying to keep our toddlers entertained — and periodically the stewardess announces that the plane is about to tumble to the ground in flames and we’re all going to die. Then she brings the drink cart around, starts the in-flight movie, and goes back to her argument with the other stewardess about who forgot to put toilet paper in the first-class loo, or whether a businessman should be able to have three olives in his complementary martini.
This week, even as the long, national nightmare of the Kavanaugh Circus (#BelieveWomen and #Abortion) was staggering toward its conclusion, our self-designated planetary stewardess Al Gore grabbed the loudspeaker long enough to alert us all to the UN’s extra-special super-urgent report on the climate.
“Today the world’s leading scientific experts collectively reinforced what Mother Nature has made clear [presumably by throwing an earthquake in Indonesia?] – that we need to undergo an urgent and rapid transformation to a global clean energy economy,” he said. “However, time is running out, so we must capitalize and build upon the solutions available today. Solving the climate crisis requires vision and leadership,” Gore said before attacking President Donald Trump.
Got that? Time is running out. We’re all going to die! But what have those with Vision and Leadership (e.g., the men and women of Gore’s party) been soberly debating in the hallowed (and harpy-haunted) halls of Congress?
Boofing. The secret meanings of puerile scribblings in high school yearbooks. How much beer and stupidity was normal at college parties circa 1984. Whether someone relentlessly accused of ever more absurd and disgusting crimes in front of his wife, daughters and America should find the experience infuriating.
Given the Visionary Leaders habitual attitude toward inconvenient sex abuse survivors, it’s hard to believe it was about #believing women. Frankly, I doubt they #believed (or gave a damn about) Christine Blasey Ford.
So for what urgent cause was an evidently decent man insulted, his family humiliated and America’s time wasted? Was Kavanaugh the one thing standing between our doomed selves and climactic salvation?
Of course not. Long before the vaguely wounded Dr. Ford made her appearance before the Judiciary Committee to publicly insert “Brett” between the vast lacunae of her memory, frantic protesters were shrieking anathemas from the gallery, inveigling cops into “arresting” them outside, and inundating Senator Collins’s office with threats and coat hangers. Not big-eyed polar bears or simulacra of our ravaged planet. Coat hangers.
Shouldn’t those with Vision and Leadership — Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, the pathetically persistent Hillary — have been using this precious time, their precious (and dwindling) moral capital to persuade us all to support what the IPCC admitted would be the high costs of this necessary global transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar?
Why wasn’t Maxine Waters urging her followers to “create a crowd” and “push back on” oil company executives or, for that matter, Chinese, Indian, and European nationals in restaurants, departments stores, gas stations … “wherever we have to show up” and “tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere?”
Why hasn’t Jimmy Kimmel called for the castration of European coal plant managers; why doesn’t Kathy Griffin symbolically decapitate the leaders of the Energy Union, given that their own website reveals that the EU’s priories of energy security and economic competitiveness trump climate change? Why aren’t the screaming social justice warriors clawing at the locked doors of the Chinese embassy?
Whatever happened to Dr. Ford (Trauma or drama? Pathos or bathos?) and whatever might or might not happen to Roe v. Wade, how can this possibly compare with the fierce urgency of this planetary Now?
The flight crew is standing around in the galley, making nasty remarks about the passengers and taking the best snacks for themselves while the plane is about to crash into the rising, increasingly acidic, all-but-boiling sea.
Or, to put it another way, the Democrats are making it so abundantly clear that just about everything—black lives, abortion, sexual assaults on left-leaning women, transgender bathrooms, gun control, illegal immigrants — matters much, much more than climate change. When the Pew Research Organization surveyed voters before the 2016 elections, it was very clear that Clinton voters could barely bring themselves to mention “environmental issues” when abortion and the Supreme Court — presented separately by Pew though clearly linked — were on the line. NBC News offered viewers a helpful guide to The Ten Big Issues before the presidential debates: Climate change didn’t make the list.
There are subjects I know a lot about. Climate change is not one of them. But if the world is going to end, the people who do know and claim to believe need to walk the walk their talk implies. I need to see some white knuckles and mumbled prayers. I need to see Al Gore arranging teleconferences from his yurt, not luxury Davos getaways from his beachfront mansion; I need to see the Democratic Party setting aside the issues that can only be important when and if the world is not about to end.
The Climate Change deniers can go ahead and make abortion a priority. In the absence of imminent global disaster, why wouldn’t the (im)morality of deliberately killing human fetuses go to the top of the list? They are likewise free to focus on the economy, criminal justice reform, shrinking the size of government, reducing the tax burden … whatever they like, really.
But the self-anointed must make a choice. Either the plane is going down — in which case literally everything else is unimportant — or the plane is fine and flying, and Al Gore, et al., have been using climate change the way apocalyptics always do: as a means of dividing them from us, sinners from saints, those whose lives matter and those who lives don’t.
[GRRRRRR!]
Hey, wait a minute. What about “10 Worst Typos of 2081”?
I am sure Democrats like Menendez see that as a feature not a bug.
@gldiii has a lock on it. Sorry, Mark.
2108? Getting ahead of ourselves aren’t we? The world will have been warmed to death by then.
Dang, didn’t see your comment, haha.
I like the test that, if you run the model backwards, does it “predict” what has already happened? And they don’t.
Quite so. And has been pointed out by Dennis Miller among others, back in the 70s when Global COOLING was the big bugaboo (“The Coming Ice Age” on the cover of Time, etc) the “solution” was exactly the same: more government control, over EVERYTHING.
Here’s a great link for what might be a definitive argument:
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2018/10/Lindzen-2018-GWPF-Lecture.pdf
As it happens, I spent the evening talking to a couple of climate change believers (and funders) and they’re both definitely down with nuclear.
My point to them was that—assuming that the world is going to end in 50 years (or whatever unpleasantness that hyperbole stands for) —the “messaging” has been terrible. The messengers are behaving like the stewardesses on the plane, and the Democrats are doing their best to make half the country loathe them over stupid, trivial issues…which wouldn’t matter, except that (supposedly) THE WORLD IS GOING TO END.
I suggested that, given the strong impression Trump offered back in ’16 of a man who is inclined to think well of those who flatter and suck up to him, it would’ve behooved the Climate Change Cassandras to flatter and suck up to Trump and not condemn him and all who voted for him as knuckle-dragging morons. “He’s not in thrall to the Koch brothers (who seem mysteriously immune to arguments based on the well-being of their grandchildren and great-grandachildren) . He’s not being bankrolled by Big Oil (ditto). He could’ve been swayed by a charm offensive and, given the stakes, wouldn’t that have been worth a try?
That’s a portion of what I kind-of expected to happen in general. If Democrats spoke nicely to and about Donald Trump, I think he would have signed onto almost all their agenda items.
So I’m kind of glad they stuck to their basic programming.
I reject the premise. It’s pretty obvious to me DJT doesn’t give a rip what anyone thinks of him. He’s about winning, and the climate change gambit is for losers. Only a buncha Luddites would advocate the destruction of advanced economies by outlawing God’s gift of fossil fuels and returning us to wind power. Serious losers.
I don’t think it’s that he cares what people think of him, rather that if someone speaks well of him, he will do what he can to side with/support that person. So I agree that if the Democrats had used the charm offensive against the President, he would have considered their views.
But like the scorpion who must obey its nature, the Democrats stuck to their smear, slander, and destroy approach. And as a result, it’s far less likely that President Trump would work with them now than if they’d used a different approach at the start.
That’s the part I reject. Give me an example of someone charming Trump to their side of an issue.
I agree. I don’t think the Dems can charm Trump out of trying to fulfill the agenda he ran on, or into an agenda his supporters would oppose.
Well, first of all, I can’t even think of an example of someone charming Trump to get what they want. (That’s not in his opponents’ nature.) But generally speaking, if you speak well of him, he’ll speak well of you. He seems loyal to a fault. So I extrapolate from all those aspects of his character — what I observe anyway.
I dunno, he’s been pretty tough on Jeff Sessions, despite Sessions’s early and steady support of him. I think Trump’s combativeness with his opponents causes people to be surprised when he’s good to his friends, but I don’t think it means he’s a pushover for flattery.
No, I don’t think so either. Which is why it wouldn’t work now if the Democrats changed tactics. Because the “flattery” would have to be genuine in order for it to work on him.
Trump was vilified by all the Democrats. For them to try and flatter him now, well . . . do you think Trump is so stupid as to not recognize insincere flattery from the same people who ridiculed him before?
There’s no going back for the Dems, and they realize it. This is all out war, and stand by for physical violence like you haven’t seen since the 60s . . .
What I meant was: you’d think it would at least have been worth a try. If the stakes are as high as claimed.
I have another question I haven’t asked yet: “What would you, politically, be willing to give up or trade in exchange for buy-in on climate change? For example, would you be willing to agree to outlaw abortion?”
Yeah, Democrats don’t believe the stakes are that high. You’re right. Which is why it’s appropriate to question their motives. Why is it so important to them to control energy production/consumption?
My thoughts? They know energy is life. It’s game, set, match. It’s what makes us rich and innovative, and, in many respects, free. If they had control of energy and our healthcare (which Obamacare was the most recent takeover attempt)? It’s the totalitarian’s dream come true.
Both preserving liberty and saving innocents are fundamental moral issues. Compromise isn’t possible.
Here in the US, energy is plentiful and relatively cheap. And because of that, your garden-variety environmentalist doesn’t understand how critical energy is to developing countries. They dream of a world lit only by candles. But even if they pat themselves on the back for turning out all the lights during “Earth Hour,” they have the luxury of easy access to electricity when they need it. Many in the developing world don’t have that luxury, and a world lit only by candles marks a life that is poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Which brings us back to the premise that Greenists don’t really care about or even consider what the effects of their policy prescriptions would have on the poor.
Drew,
You are about 1000% right on this. If the Greenies get power for any length of time not only are the poor kaput but the middle class will be chewed up too. They love the environment. They never said anything about loving the human race.
Regards,
Jim
Environmentalism is a pagan death cult.
Gaia will get you for that.
I believe your thinking on this is ocrrect. Trump went out and appointed Gen Mike Flynn, a lifelong Democrat, to the post of National Security Adviser. Then Trump used the massive hysteria that surrounded the issue of “Trump banned poor people from six nations” to allow him to get Flynn stealth-appointed to the National Security Council.
To me, that seems to say Trump valued a lifelong Democrat and wanted the man’s knowledge, experience and support. Since the DNC is all about making Trump as uncomfortable as possible, they ensured that they go after one of their own and they then hung the felony of lying to the FBI around Flynn’s neck.
It comes out just a little while afterwards that Comey had instructed FBI agents to falsify if necessary the 302 reports that serve as the record of the interviews. So we will never know if Flynn really lied or not. (Two FBI agents claimed that did not think Flynn lied.)
I really believe if the DNC and all their minions had not been so shamelessly cruel to Trump that he would have been a bi partisan leader on many more occasions than he was willing to be these days. Many of the things that Democrats flaunt as proof that Trump is evil, overly militaristic, anti-environmental etc are all things that Obama himself did. But apparently they don’t remember that far back, unless doing so helps their Cause.