Watermelon Politics

or... You Can't Bribe Mother Nature

Today is Earth Day.

If you just emerged from fifty three years of bomb shelter isolation and surmised it to be a day for animists, pagans, Wiccans, druids, Gaians, shamans, and the like to gather and and sing kumbaya about a planet that doesn't give a hoot's holler about them, you might be excused the misconception.

The rest of you know it's a day for global warming doomsayers to again beat their drums.

A few past prognostications, for your entertainment.

• 1982 - Mostafa Tolba, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program: "By the turn of the century, an ecological catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust."

• 1988 - James Hansen, climatologist: “The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won’t be there. The trees in the median strip will change….There will be more police cars….[since] you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up.” This was a 20 year prediction.

• 1989 - Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program: “Governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.”

• 1990 Michael Oppenheimer, climatologist: “By 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots. “[By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers… The Mexican police will round up illegal American migrants surging into Mexico seeking work as field hands.”

• 2006 - Al Gore, former US Vice President: “Unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.”

• 2007 - Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."

• 2009 - Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: “Negotiators had 50 days to save the world from global warming.”

• 2009 - Prince Charles: “We have just 96 months to avert "irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it."

• 2009 - James Hansen, NASA climatologist: "We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world."

• 2009 - Elizabeth May, leader of the Greens in Canada: "We have hours to act to avert a slow-motion tsunami that could destroy civilization as we know it. Earth has a long time. Humanity does not. We need to act urgently. We no longer have decades; we have hours. We mark that in Earth Hour on Saturday."

• 2011 - Tim Wirth, US Senator: called a second Obama administration term "the last window of opportunity" to enact policies that can avert a catastrophic rise in global temperatures."

• 2014 - IPCC Warning: “By 2018, no new cars, homes, schools, factories, or electrical power plants should be built anywhere in the world, ever again, unless they’re either replacements for old ones or carbon neutral.”

• 2014 - Laurent Fabius, French foreign minister: "We have 500 days to avoid climate chaos."

• 2015 - A Vatican Conference: “A 2015 climate accord may be the last chance to keep global warming within a range deemed "safe" for the world, its people and its ecosystems.”

• 2017 - Eric Holthaus, climate scientist: "But if carbon emissions continue to track on something resembling a worst-case scenario, the full 11 feet of ice locked in West Antarctica might be freed up." "All this could play out in a mere 20 to 50 years — much too quickly for humanity to adapt."

• 2017 - Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founder and now director emeritus of the Potsdam Climate Institute]: "The climate math is brutally clear: While the world can't be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence until 2020."

• 2018 - Sixteen authors of a National Academy of Sciences paper: "Our analysis suggests that the Earth System may be approaching a planetary threshold that could lock in a continuing rapid pathway toward much hotter conditions—Hothouse Earth."

• 2019 - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Congresswoman: "World will end in 12 years' if climate change not addressed."

• 2019 - Beto O'Rourke, Presidential candidate: "We have no more than 12 years to take incredibly bold action on this crisis."

Anthony Watts, who runs the wattsupwiththat.com climate change website, offered this list of 107 failed predictions back in 2014, should you want to read even more doomsday.

All this serves as irrefutable proof that the threat from anthropogenic global warming has been overstated, time and again, by the experts that our leaders tell us we should trust unquestioningly.

Does that mean the threat doesn't exist?

No, but neither the veracity of global warming theory nor the magnitude of the threat are of relevance to today’s discussion. Read on…

While many see these perpetually moving goalposts as a tell-tale that global warming is a massive fraud or hoax, I don't go down that path, in part because I don't believe massive conspiracies can exist for any appreciable period of time without being outed.

I do believe, on the other hand, that global warming doomsday is popular among those of a certain mindset, because it affirms that humanity is evil, rotten, and a destructive bane that must be actively managed. This popularity drives group-think, over-prediction, exclusion of dissent, and a blind, cult-like loyalty to a narrative that keeps falling short of predictions.

Guess who else feels this way?

Big-government types, whether they be socialists, 'democratic socialists,' progressives, leftists, fascists, communists, technocrats, corporatists, globalists, and fans of whatever de mode flavor of statism captures the mind.

Aslo known on these pages as the Best-and-Brightest, the people who feel they or their proxies should run society on all our behalfs.

Every so often, they let slip that they feel this way:

This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history. This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for the, at least, 150 years, since the industrial revolution.

Thus spake Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, back in 2015.

There you have it, in plain english. The free enterprise system, the dominant economic development model (with a stress on "development," since all the others have created economic stagnation or recession), is to be abandoned under the excuse of remediating climate change.

Lest you think this is just some UN ninny blathering in isolation, consider the Green New Deal resolution put forth three years ago by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It's not long, you can skim the whole thing.

Whereas climate change, pollution, and environmental destruction have exacerbated systemic racial, regional, social, environmental, and economic injustices (referred to in this preamble as "systemic injustices") by disproportionately affecting indigenous communities, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this preamble as "frontline and vulnerable communities");

Apparently, the climate doomsday is not so dire as to supersede woke politics, wealth redistribution, favoritism, partisanship, identitarianism, social justice, or giveaways to preferred groups, no matter if they live in climes where a little warming would be nice.

Read on:

providing all people of the United States with—
(i) high-quality health care;
(ii) affordable, safe, and adequate housing;
(iii) economic security; and
(iv) access to clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and nature.

See the word "providing?" This grants unfettered authority to socialize medicine, to socialize housing, to give out money, up to and including universal basic income, that was taken from others, and to take control of every industry in the nation. In short, it's a plan for government takeover of the entire economy. Now, that can be via government ownership (see: socialism), massive regulation of that which is privately owned (see: fascism), or some medley/mutation thereof. Either way, it's a collectivist political philosophy and a rejection of capitalism and the free enterprise system that built the world's wealth across the last 150 years.

The Green New Deal's dirty little secret is that it's not about global warming. Ditto for the global elites' plans and ambitions. Global warming is just an excuse, which is why I noted that its veracity is irrelevant. The Chicken Littles seek to scare us into ceding power and OPM to them and theirs, so that they can finally gain the control they've been lusting for. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is proving to be, like most UN endeavors, nothing more than a tool for some to lay claim to Other People's Money and impose their will on those they don’t like. Their carbon tax fantasies would wreak massive economic damage on the world's best economies, damage that'll do harm not only there, but globally, and convert productive capital into filthy lucre for the well-connected and loudly aggrieved.

With no appreciable benefit, as I recently discussed.

Want an even more overt proclamation? From 2019:

Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?

Amuse yourself, read the article, and bear witness to a supposedly serious person declaring that the Green New Deal is much too little, too full of compromises, and that:

We need to fundamentally re-evaluate our relationship to ownership, work and capital. The impact of a dramatic reconfiguration of the industrial economy require similarly large changes to the welfare state. Basic incomes, large-scale public works programmes, everything has to be on the table to ensure that the oncoming system shocks do not leave vast swathes of the global population starving and destitute.00

I imagine the previous thirty-plus years of failed doomsday merely inspired Phil McDuff to wax even more hyperbolic.

What of Earth Day, though, apart from all the global warming prattle?

First and foremost, we should recognize that the Earth is humanity's home, and it only matters in that context. Earth Day is really about the human race. Absent humanity, the Earth would be nothing more than one of a hundred billion large hunks of rock and gas orbiting stars in one of two trillion galaxies in this universe. Its only worth is as a life support system for the human race, and it behooves us to be good and proper stewards of that system. For humanity's sake, not for the sake of the third rock from the Sun. This view rejects the Malthusians' notions about depopulating, and it rejects Agent Smith's view of humanity as a virus.

It also demands we reject socialism (in all its forms), which has done vastly more harm to the environment than capitalism, and which has terribly dis-served humanity. That Greens are using the Earth as an excuse to undo the system that's benefited humanity far above all others goes beyond irony and toward unmitigated horror. Watermelon politics, i.e. a green rind over a red core, is a disaster in the offing, and we should reject it outright.

As for global warming itself… my broken record: Nuclear power and geo-engineering research. Those are the only two things that will produce "green" return on investment. The free market, absent government distortions and subsidies, will figure out where wind and solar are economically utile, and advancing human prosperity will continue to clean the environment in the many ways it has been across recent decades.

That’s right: Capitalism is greener, by far, than socialism. Next time someone suggests otherwise, send him or her my way.

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Editor's note: Versions of this post originally appeared at The Roots of Liberty here, here, and here.

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Yours in liberty,

Peter.