Happy Earth Day, but…
In the spirit of reminding us exactly where we have been, remember that on the first Earth Day in 1970, global cooling was the rage.
We weren’t yet sleeping in fur coats and galoshes to ward off the threatened Ice Age, but it was drawing inexorably closer.
The earth would not be spared if urgent action were not undertaken.
Familiar?
How little the world changes.
In the 1970s, a mixture of hucksters and sweet, sincere people formed the alarmist-based environmental movement.
Their job, then as now, was to warn us that if 98 percent of Americans failed to morph into Paul Reveres before the end of the week, our country, our planet would be vanquished by the vengeful gods of nature. They would be punishing us for failing to sell ourselves into slavery for the planet’s sake.
All together now, in harmony: The earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth.
Then as now, science boys in long white coats, pandered to psychologically starved collegiates of the day. Thirsting for any social cause, the wannabe environmentalists sighed, took another drag on the weed of the day, coughed and exhaled through the blue haze:
“If we don’t act within weeks, months at the most, our planet is doomed to be buried beneath layers of impenetrable ice.”
Hey, dude, what are you doing to defeat global cooling?
Our creatively challenged environmental forefathers in the 1970s plainly were lacking in one critical aspect: Imagination.
Tue believers, they were more stubborn than their descendants of the 21st century. The ‘70s environmentalists believed in what they were selling to a skeptical public.
The huckster dimension of the current environmental movement, by contrast, subscribes to rhetorical flexibility.
When global warming turned into a glum marketing and scientific failure, the hucksters merely slid down the stage, burped, and proclaimed, “Welcome to climate change,” as if that had had been their plan all along.
When cooling flops, when warming flops, who can criticize a guy if he declares “change? Yeah, that’s what is going on.”
Welcome to the delivery room where, we are told, the panic-driven environmental movement, a bouncing baby boy with a curl in the middle of his forehead, was born.
Recovered observations from 1970:
“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.” — Kenneth Watt, ecologist
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — George Wald, Harvard biologist.
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” — Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist.
President Obama yesterday enriched his reputation as the most dishonest occupant in the history of the White House with his freshest lie in tribute to Earth Day:
“Fourteen of the 15 hottest years in history have occurred in this century.”
Both hardcore environmentalists and Sen. Ted Cruz concur there has been no warming for 17 consecutive years.
Mr. Cruz, derided as a denier, answers the closely scripted chorus across the table with this conversation-ender: “I am always troubled by a theory that fits every perfect situation.”
Stay warm today. Or cool. Or something. And have a greenhouse gas emission on me.