New EPA rules restricting carbon emissions could cause frequent blackouts across the country, according to a new study commissioned by the power-grid-loving North Dakota government. But hey, the posturing Greta Thunbergs of the world have better things to worry about than consequences and practical tradeoffs.
They vaguely sort of think they might be saving the Earth a century from now, so if their mania for environmental regulation causes suffering in the present, who cares? Like terrorists, they purportedly have their idealistic hearts in the right place.
Or so they can tell themselves, as long as they remain distracted or stupid enough not to consider any downsides to their control-freak crusades. But I suspect it takes a lot of anger and mental gymnastics for them to so thoroughly suppress the suspicion they may be wrong.
Maybe it’s time I ditched that most precious rule of liberal discourse: assuming my political opponents have good motives. Let’s stop thinking about the trees and the animals for a minute and consider plain old human psychology, which presumably goes on inside the heads of environmentalists in some form or other.
Is it so hard to imagine they’ve become just one more political faction that has turned of late into an outlet for sadism?
If ill will can motivate breaking a Starbucks window in the name of anti-globalization or chasing a Mexican migrant away from a Trump rally, might it not also motivate punitive fines against rich, energy-providing carbon-emitters?
If you can’t believe greens would be so reckless as to impose purportedly planet-saving regulations in a morally irresponsible or incompetent fashion, have you noticed, for instance, the random experiment a San Diego resident did with a GPS tracker to see where his collected recyclables go? Into the landfill with the rest of the trash, it appears. No explanation from the recycling company as of this CBS report.
But then, even recycling-promoting groups themselves say only about five percent of deposited “recyclables” actually end up getting recycled (and at great effort and expense, we should add), most of the rest deemed unusable due to mixing with other discarded materials.
And even if we were assured each step in the environmentalists’ preferred procedures had the imprimatur of real science, which certainly isn’t the case, how reliable is science itself, given all we now know about its political biases and fudged experiments? One of the most vaunted studies of the 21st century, the one suggesting embryonic stem cell research could be backburnered because adult stem cells are almost infinitely malleable, now appears to have been faked with a bit of early Photoshop-style image enhancement, and the science journal originally reporting the breakthrough has withdrawn the article.
Not for the first time in recent years, I wonder why we ever trusted the academics and gatekeepers—all those stuffy folks who pretend they’ve earned the right to look down their noses at the Bigfoot researchers and UFO witnesses. Dismissing the academy is a practice with its own esteemed historical pedigree, after all: England achieved more scientific breakthroughs in the 18th century than did France, though most English science was being done by amateur enthusiasts and capitalists with spare time on their hands, while France was giving out prestigious awards and naming vast royal academies.
Maybe a real indicator of the hyper-political and wishy-washy likely future of science is suggested by the current battles over how to define “milk,” which industry groups are well on the way to convincing the public can as easily come from almonds or virtually any other source as from cows. Who’s to say what is or isn’t milk? The legal squabbling may end up resolving itself through the adoption of a “milk spectrum” akin to that we are now told defines the sexes, sometimes by people with apparent biology degrees.
In a world where a beautiful, depressed twentysomething young woman in Europe has herself euthanized with the “support” of her creepy boyfriend and indifference of her estranged family, some gas pumps in the U.S. cut people off when they exceed the amount allowed to be dispensed under “carbon rules,” and many hectoring newscasters are as ignorant as the one who told Bill Nye the “Science” Guy that she viewed an approaching asteroid as evidence that global warming is out of control (and you thought that awful Adam McKay movie Don’t Look Up drew too strong an analogy between asteroids and climate alarmism), I don’t hold out much hope that the greens will show us mercy when their policies start to kill us off.
They indulge their political whims, fallout be damned. They’re demonstrably less likely to hesitate in their march to a lush green utopia when they notice they’re trampling our freedom and prosperity than to embrace “degrowth communism,” the latest reformulation of the two-century-old leftist desire to stop humanity from living, this reworking of the old, wrong idea coming from a very popular Japanese environmentalist Marxist and bestselling author.
They’ll seize any excuse to tighten the screws on us, in short. It’s high time to stop pretending the next person who demands you become carbon neutral is nice, objective, well-informed, and politically neutral. When their bland, bureaucratic foot soldiers come one day to disconnect your house’s electrical supply and seize your car, telling you the Earth demands it, you might miss the comparatively civil good old days when a hectoring Swedish college girl yelling at you was the worst thing the greens were dishing out.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey
