OPINION:
Once upon a time the inquisitive and the young, the reckless and the incurably naive wore their convictions on the rear bumpers of their Volkswagen Beetles: “Question authority.” Time marches on. Now those purveyors of rebellion have become the authority, and they want no further questions. “Shut up,” they advise.
The rest of us are to speak only when spoken to. Gina McCarthy, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, took a jet to Aspen the other day to the X Games, something like a Winter Olympics wannabe, to “bring attention to the extreme weather impact of climate change.” She performed no 360s in the snowboard half-pipe or barrel rolls off a snowmobile jump. She wanted to spruce up the image of the EPA by being seen with Generation Y at the venue of extreme winter sports. The young and reckless millennials, who can’t quite give up their droopy drawers or their tattoos, are the current definition of cool. Some of that cool might rub off on Ms. McCarthy and her extremist agenda.
She’s eager to sell global warming hysteria and unquestioning acceptance of her authority to regulate the air over the Rockies. Standing with snowboarders Alex Deibold and Gretchen Bleiler, Ms. McCarthy made her case for tougher regulation of carbon dioxide, which she says is the way to protect the winter sports industry, which by her calculations adds $67 billion annually to the U.S. economy. The future of the X Games (and the planet, too) by her reckoning depends on big-government control.
Players in the game of politics have descended on Davos, nestled in the Swiss Alps, to discuss strategies for reinforcing authority over everything. The annual World Economic Forum opened on Wednesday with the glitterati focused on “closing the climate deal” by regulating the human production of carbon dioxide, which is what everybody, even the beautiful (and rich) people, exhales. They have no apology for exhaling, nor for the damage to the environment done by the 1,700 jets that deposited them in Davos. Among the 40-odd heads of state and 2,500 business leaders expected to decamp there this week is Al Gore, the environmentalist guru who has made millions shilling for companies promoting expensive renewable energy products. Though Al has one of the biggest “carbon footprints” of all, there’s no apology for that, either.
No challenge to dogma is welcome in Davos, where groupthink decrees that climate change is “settled science.” The term “climate change” is all the woolly-headed linguists could come up with to replace “global warming” once that term was discredited by exposure of the scam, and once it was clear that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are increasing and the globe stubbornly refuses to warm. President Obama, on one of his frequent visits from his home on Fantasy Island, nevertheless told Congress in his State of the Union remarks that “the best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate …” Don’t question authority.
Whether they like it hot or cold, most Americans are more concerned about real things that make a vibrant economy than the fantasies that might or might not influence the climate of the globe. A Gallup poll conducted early this month found that 34 percent think the economy is the most important problem facing the country, and only 2 percent think the environment is an important problem.
Undeterred, Mr. Obama and Ms. McCarthy depend on people in high places — like the Rockies and the Alps — to persuade Generations X, Y and eventually Z that hysteria about the changing weather is cool. Alas, the young eventually grow up, and there’s not enough hot air in all the mountains to do anything about that.
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