The political left is ready to go to war, but not against any real threat. It wants to fight global warming — and of course that will require Americans to make sacrifices that just happen to align with the left’s objectives.
Al Gore popularized the phrase “fighting global warming” to underscore what he thinks is the seriousness of the matter. Though profoundly childish, the expression caught on and apparently inspired a Seattle-based writer to lay out in the Atlantic a plan for war.
According to Venkatesh Rao, “solving global warming” is going to be “like mobilizing for war.” And of course, war requires us to give up some things in the name of the effort.
“If emissions targets still remain out of reach, some growth must be temporarily sacrificed,” Rao argues in the Atlantic’s science — “science”? — section.
“In other words, we are contemplating the sorts of austerities associated with wartime economies.”
Rao says that “for ordinary Americans, austerities might include an end to expansive suburban lifestyles and budget air travel, and an accelerated return to high-density urban living and train travel.”
At the same time, businesses might need to rethink “entire supply chains, as high-emissions sectors become unviable under new emissions regimes.”
In this wartime, Rao is also demanding trust in “academic and energy-sector public institutions” as well as in “the integrity and declared intentions of institutions” that understand “the intricacies” of climate science.
No thanks. We’ve seen too much corruption in the academic institutions and political bodies that are squawking the loudest and longest about the dangers of CO2 emissions. Maybe Rao has never heard of the ClimateGate scandal, the broken climate models or the moneyed influence — also known as the government — that have fueled the global-warming hysterics.
Rao has not jumped out there alone with his strategy for war. He’s merely a representative of what the political left is asking for in the “fight” against climate change. The fight, however, isn’t against climate change or global warming or carbon-dioxide emissions. It’s against free-market economies and the prosperity they produce. This is what the left ultimately wants to destroy. The climate-change scare is merely a vehicle.
In unguarded moments, the “fighters” admit this. Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, conceded earlier this year that “we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic-development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”
