OPINION:
Earth Day used to be a celebration of our individual and collective responsibility to protect the planet and improve human health. It was about science and data. Unfortunately, today, Earth Day has little to do with the planet and more to do with far-left agendas meant to increase control over the population.
The paint-throwing, street-blocking activists will be out in force pushing their narrative of climate doom, more than happy to ignore science in the process. The media will reflexively add credibility to the nonsense.
President Biden will tout the importance of some patently unachievable electric vehicle or emissions goal. Social media Pied Pipers will play their silly tune about how more of our money in the hands of runaway bureaucracy can change the temperature of the Earth.
Today’s socialist Democrats have used climate change to alter the national conversation from reasoned environmental protection to an irrational, emotionally damaging hysteria only loosely based on science.
The information management is working. Mr. Biden has spent hundreds of billions supposedly addressing the climate. The return on this alleged investment in protecting the planet’s ecosystem is not proven by scientific data and analysis, making it the perfect perennial excuse for more spending and more government.
As was laid bare at the height of the pandemic, far-left liberals in America are willing to be openly anti-science to drive their agenda of division and control. They routinely ignore or deny the substantial environmental progress that the United States has made in the last half a century, as well as the nation’s long-standing leadership role in environmental protection.
They ignore that even before the breathless push for electric vehicles and emissions caps, the U.S. was beating Europe in reducing carbon dioxide emissions. They ignore that while geologic history and environmental science make clear that the climate changes, there is little scientific data to support any effort by the U.S. government or Western governments collectively to affect the planet’s temperature.
They ignore that since the 1960s, predictions of overpopulation, running out of fossil fuels, palm trees growing in New York’s Central Park, a new ice age that would turn most of the country into Fargo in January, and dozens of other theories about climate doom have been inaccurate.
In 1989, The Associated Press ran a story that proclaimed “Rising Seas Could Obliterate Nations” in just 11 years. A senior U.N. environmental official at the time, Noel Brown, said that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.”
The United Nations and Mr. Biden have repeatedly doubled down on the notion that the planet will be unlivable within a decade if we don’t give far-left institutions more power, money and control.
In recent congressional hearings, however, Biden administration officials couldn’t provide any projections for the impact of the proposed spending and regulations. They didn’t even know how much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere.
Most tellingly, climate activists routinely ignore the massive environmental destruction, including deforestation, which affects emissions and air quality, as well as human rights violations associated with mining for lithium and cobalt, two components necessary for electric vehicle battery production.
EVs put money in the pocket of the biggest global polluter and most prolific human rights violator, China. The leftists don’t care. They ignore that EV adoption will require massive increases in power generation, which will, in fact, increase emissions to accomplish.
They often ignore that photosynthesis — something most of us learned about in third grade — is a scientifically proven way to clean our air. But planting more trees is so 1970s. It doesn’t require massive new bureaucracies and controls.
How many people think the U.S. is the source of the vast majority of ocean plastic? Three-quarters of it actually comes from a few Asian countries, including China and India.
The far left ignores the medical data that climate chaos messaging is adding to the mental health crisis among young people.
Earth Day, climate change and eco-doomsdayism is not about earth science. It’s about projection.
The far left uses climate chaos to deflect blame for just about everything, from immigration to asthma to obesity to crime. They use it to cover failed policies and the repeated failures of government programming to solve any crisis. It all is neatly pushed off on this murky, manufactured enemy.
As with so many other issues that are favorites of today’s socialists, the pattern of deceit is clear. Abortion really isn’t about women’s health. Welfare isn’t really about empowerment or social justice. “Obamacare” wasn’t really about cheaper health care. The trans movement isn’t really about helping anyone. Electric vehicle mandates and getting rid of gas stoves aren’t really about the environment.
Republicans cannot be afraid to use facts and science, including medical data, to end this great con. They need to recapture the spirit of Republicans before them, who thread the needle to grow the economy, preserve freedom, and reverse the damage of a century of unbridled industrialization on the planet.
You can be pro-environment, pro-science and pro-taxpayer while continuing to make technological progress.
Protecting the environment is a critical effort that should be an ongoing human mission, but only the rational American right can revive Earth Day and make it great again.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax TV and a Washington Times columnist.
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