OPINION:
NEW YORK — As this city burns, Nero zips around on an electric scooter.
You think I am joking? No. This is actually true.
Crazed leftists have a dream that all of human existence can be boiled down to walking, eating tofu, taking cold showers and riding electric scooters that are magically powered by Chinese solar panels. Or something.
Even if this meant we could all live longer, who would want to? In these leftists’ grand calculations, if we all just killed ourselves, it would be better for the environment.
So say these people who live in concrete jungles. Seriously, why is it that the freaks who shout the loudest about “Mother Earth” and saving the “environment” always live the farthest away from Mother Earth and the environment? They are always cocooned in tall glass buildings, away from the dirt and bees and manure that make nature so great.
They are internet “naturalists” hiding from the sun. They are always so pasty white and walk with an unhealthy gait.
But they love their electric scooters. Or “e-scooters,” as they call them.
Yet these e-scooters are literally e-killing people.
Environmental wackos and the politicians who represent them go to extraordinary lengths to hide information about how many people are injured and killed every year by e-scooters and their dorky communist cousin, the e-bike.
These wackos want to ruin everything about your life, but they don’t mind littering. They leave these treacherous death traps all over the cities that have been infested by these things.
Piled on sidewalks, junked up against street curbs, and leaned against light poles, these unwieldy obstacles are a hazard for innocent citizens just trying to walk down the street. How many old people have been severely injured or killed tripping over these death traps?
Nobody knows. City central planners hide this information.
They are too busy doing the work of wackos, not to mention the companies that supply the e-scooters and e-bikes that are killing people.
These companies are also highly effective at killing efforts to require that people riding their e-scooters and e-bikes wear helmets.
This, of course, doesn’t really matter to those of us in trucks — so long as the e-scooter doesn’t damage the undercarriage of the truck. And it doesn’t matter to the wackos and central planners because to them, having more people die is a good thing.
Thankfully, however, the Manhattan Institute keeps track of at least one statistic involving the infernal e-scooters: deadly fires.
Just last week, three people were killed in a fire in Brooklyn sparked by the battery in one of these e-scooters.
The victims were aged 33 to 81. Making matters worse, the flaming e-scooter blocked the fire exit. Hopefully, some of New York’s famous ambulance-chasing lawyers are capable of chasing hearses as well.
This deadly problem is shockingly familiar, according to the Manhattan Institute.
So far this year, 17 of the city’s 93 fire deaths have been cause by e-scooter batteries.
Since 2021, the year e-scooters were legalized in the city, 27 New Yorkers have died in fires sparked by e-scooters. Before 2021, no one had ever died in such a fire.
“We’ve quickly reversed decades of progress,” writes Nicole Gelinas, contributing editor for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
“Between 2014 and 2020, the average number of annual civilian fire deaths was 66, including a low of 43 in 2017, the smallest number in a century,” she writes. “Last year, though, fire deaths, at 102, exceeded 100 for the first time in 19 years, and we’ll likely top 100 deaths this year, too.”
If this sounds like bad news to you, then you obviously don’t care about Mother Earth or the environment.
On the contrary, this is what these people call “progress.”
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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