OPINION:
Somehow, I don’t think the phrase “make my day” says enough about President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees.
Now that former Rep. Matt Gaetz, Florida Republican, has withdrawn from consideration for attorney general, the most outrageously volatile pick has to be Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of health and human services.
I’m not sure this will go over well with everyone, but anyone who gives Anthony “gain of function research” Fauci nightmares and has the pharmaceutical giants nervously watching their share prices fall is probably in the right place.
My favorite selection so far is the fracking guy to be the next secretary of energy.
That’s Chris Wright, CEO of the well-named, Denver-based Liberty Energy. Not surprisingly, he is a strong proponent of American energy independence and fossil fuels.
If climate extremists were vampires, this would be like appointing a garlic farmer whose hobby is making wooden stakes.
A major reason that America enjoys independence and prosperity is reliable oil, natural gas and coal. They have fueled the industrial and technical revolutions that have made possible indoor plumbing, automobiles, refrigeration, air conditioning, air travel, the internet, and medical and dental care, not to mention well-stocked supermarkets.
If the greenies who love solar and wind energy components from China were in power at the dawn of the industrial revolution, we’d still be reading by candlelight and hitching up Old Dobbin before he took us down a mud-packed road to Grandma’s house.
The climate hysteria movement is based on the idea that human-caused carbon dioxide poses an existential threat to the planet and human life, not in that order of importance, mind you.
The most extreme greenies dislike people. They see us humans as a cancer on the planet. That’s why they support euthanasia and unrestricted abortion and are obsessed with sex other than for procreation. They have traded worship of the true God of the universe to kneel at the altar of the ancient earth goddess Gaia.
What they don’t tell you is that humans emit only a tiny amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The vast majority of it comes from the environment itself.
Even if humans did cause an increase, it would more likely be beneficial than detrimental.
As Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore has said for a decade, carbon dioxide is critical to the life cycle of the plant and animal kingdoms — and we could use even more. Without it, we would perish.
Further, carbon dioxide cools 20 degrees Fahrenheit in less than four minutes, according to James Moodey, who tested it in his gas-physics Weights and Measures facility in California.
Carbon dioxide “cannot possibly retain heat from day to day,” he wrote in American Thinker. “No gas — not carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane, nor even humid air — retains temperature from day to day.”
Even if greenhouse gases emitted by humans somehow did increase global temperatures, it would actually save lives.
“Cold kills 4.5 million people yearly, almost 30 times as many as extreme heat,” Bjorn Lomborg, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, recently observed in The Washington Times. He points out that heat deaths have declined for decades thanks to air conditioning and other advances enabled by fossil fuels.
In July, President Biden asserted that “extreme heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States.”
“He is wrong by a factor of 25,” Mr. Lomborg wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “While extreme heat kills nearly 6,000 Americans each year, cold kills 152,000.”
All of this stuff is out there, but you’d never know it from the legacy media. The New York Times and Washington Post run scary, apocalyptic climate stories almost daily.
Even the food sections aren’t safe. The Post warned earlier this month that “current eating habits are unsustainable” in an article titled “How to get skeptical eaters to start trying insects and more.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has picked North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a friend of the oil and gas industries, to be the next secretary of the interior. Former Rep. Lee Zeldin, New York Republican, another energy champion, is to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.
Despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth coming from Georgetown salons and Laurel Canyon cocktail parties, not every leftist out there blames greenhouse gases for our allegedly dire weather situation.
Lamenting Mr. Trump’s election, rapper Cardi B said this in an X post: “This is why some of y’all states be getting hurricanes.”
That makes about as much sense as the fake climate science we’re being fed daily.
The forecast for January? Sunnier weather in lots of places.
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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