Democrats and their odd 12-year doomsday clock

OPINION:

Rep. Barbara Lee, in a recent Twitter post, said her fellow House mate, the freshman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was quite right: The world has only 12 years to properly address the environment or else face total devastation.

Curious.

She drew that assessment from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, released in October of 2018.

By that token, it should seem the world has only 11 years and something-something to fix climate change or else face utter devastations — but with Democrats and environmentalism, neither logic nor rules of time seem to apply. Facts are very often a toughie for them, too.

“@AOC is right,” Lee wrote, “we have an expiration date when it comes to climate change. The @UN’s newest report gives us 12 years to turn things around before environmental catastrophe. We need to take climate change seriously. Now.”

The United Nations, of course, has been trying to bind American into its green shackles for years. In 1997, it was the Kyoto Protocol and its demands for dramatic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. The United States dropped from complying; Canada later followed; China, one of the world’s biggest polluters, never joined in the first place.

More recently, it’s been the Paris agreement, imposing similarly strict production and economic cuts on participating nations. Then-President Barack Obama jumped the congressional gun and signed America on to this agreement, absent Senate permission. President Donald Trump, thankfully, quickly withdrew.

And even more recently, it’s been Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal — which again, thankfully, went down in flames, this time with a sound Senate 0-57 mocking.

So Democrats, just this March, brought forth their Climate Action Now Act, requiring Trump get back into the Paris climate agreement and by God, deliver us all from the “existential threat of our generation,” also known as climate change, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it, during a press conference on H.R. 9.

With Democrats, everything’s always about life and death — except, of course, the things that really are about life and death, like curbing border crossings from illegals with felonious backgrounds who come to America and kill Americans. (Can you say Jose Inez Garcia Zarate? It’s a mouthful. How about instead Kate Steinle’s killer?)

Nothing kills like a gas-guzzling SUV, though.

“The world’s leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people,” The Guardian wrote, while reporting on the U.N.’s IPCC assessment.

So eat, drink and be merry?

That’s one way to look at it. Then again, by Democratic figuring, that “12 years ’til doomsday!” cry could translate into 112 years. Or 212.

Or even never. It just depends on how the politics goes.

In other words: Might want to hold off blowing the mortgage money on a trip to the Bahamas.

• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.