Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

By the time this article appears on TLE, Earth Day will have come and gone, which would have been an appropriate day to publish an article that once again bashes the modern environmentalist movement.  When I published “Enough of the Green” back in 2008 on TLE, it brought back memories of all the environmentalist propaganda that I had been exposed to as a kid, from the classic Dr.  Seuss tale, “The Lorax” to cartoons such as “Captain Planet” and “Widget the World Watcher”, which even for the time were pretty lame.  Though I did take “The Lorax”, the tale of an industrialist who wipes entire forests off the face of the earth just so he can use the trees to produce a clothing line, pretty seriously.  I also remember how bad I was made to feel that my family didn’t recycle, only to be mad as hell when I found out years later that recycling wasn’t nearly as environmentally friendly as the authorities claimed.  I became even more irate when I found out that the excuse that my school made about running out of trees for being stingy with their paper was also complete hogwash.  The trees that produce paper and pencils are grown in farms, where they are cut down and then regrown.  Come to think of it, why didn’t the industrialist in “The Lorax” do the same thing with the trees that he needed for his clothing line? Because the people who continue to peddle this nonsense want kids to believe that’s how capitalism works in the real world.  Sadly, schools still fill young minds with this same nonsense.  About nine-years-ago when I worked as a substitute, I came across a teacher who made her first-grade class tear the tissues they used to clear their little whiteboards, into two halves because the they were a “Green School.” The real reason was because the officials who ran that school were stupid and cheap.

Sadly, that isn’t the worst of example of environmental hysteria.  First, you have local governments who try to make your life harder by banning plastic bags and straws because they end up in the ocean.   Never mind that only one percent of all plastic in the ocean comes from the United States, while the rest comes from India and China, who dump it by the boatloads.  If that isn’t crazy enough, you have the scaremongering doomsday prophets who are always trying to convince us that the only way to prevent the sky from falling is to severely alter our way of life.  By now, you have probably figured out that I am referring to Climate Change Alarmists.

Before I take a swing at these scaremongers that are going out of their way to make life a living hell for people who want to do nothing but live their lives with minimal interference, I want to point out that I don’t know for certain if there is any truth to Manmade Climate Change.  I am not a climatologist, so I would have to say that my knowledge of how our climate works is at best rudimentary.  Unlike the Al Gores and the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs of the world I can admit when I don’t have all the answers.  Not that it makes much of a difference because unless you endorse the orthodox view of the Church of Climate Change, you will be labeled a denier.  Just ask Penn & Teller, who admitted on an episode of Bullshit that they didn’t know for sure if Manmade Climate Change was real.  They were treated liked Flat Earthers who managed to gain control of all of the science textbooks in America.

There are many reasons why I am skeptical about the Alarmist position on Climate Change.  One of them being the constant lies told by the environmentalist crowd.  I am not just talking about the whoppers that we have all been told about recycling and tree shortages.   I am talking about all those other impending dooms brought to us by acid rain, the hole in the Ozone Layer, Global Cooling and the overpopulation of the human race.  It reminds me of what ex-magician and paranormal debunker, James Randi said about doomsday prophets on “The End of the World’ episode of Bullshit.  “These end of the world people are never held to task when they are proven wrong.  And they are wrong all the time.” The same can be said about environmentalists, though I will say that Paul R.  Ehrlich, the author of “The Population Bomb” did lose a bet to a colleague, when his predictions about the human race running out of resources and resorting to cannibalism were proven wrong.  If you take a look at the predictions made in Al Gore’s PowerPoint presentation, (I don’t care what the Academy says.  That was not a documentary), such as the extinction of the polar bears and the ice caps becoming fully melted by 2014, he was never held to task when he was proven wrong.  Instead Gore made a sequel, where he either ignored the things he got wrong or he simply tried to pretend that his bogus predictions were proven right.  The same goes for all the computer models that failed to predict long-term climate trends.  Even in situations where we have certain climatologists who falsified data to prove the Alarmist position, Climate Change fanatics just shrug it off.

I also find it interesting that the Alarmists like to call anybody who disagrees with their position a denier of science, since they believe as Al Gore once said, “The time for debate is over.” I have always thought that science was supposed to be in a constant state of debate as we are constantly receiving new information.  Then they pull this debunked number about how 98% of all scientists share the exact same position on Climate Change.  Even if this number were true, I was always told that science isn’t supposed to work by census.  Interesting how none of the rules of science seem to apply to Climate Change.  Then you have fanatics that would deny broadcasting licenses to all meteorologists who don’t share the Alarmist view and some that would be willing to jail all deniers of the Climate Change orthodoxy.  Even more disturbing is an English PSA video that shows a teacher murdering students who were noncommittal about fighting Climate Change.  The kind of mindset where you would take away somebody’s livelihood, freedom and life, doesn’t sound like one that is backed by science.  It seems like a mindset that is more reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition.

What I really find disturbing about all the environmental fearmongering are those who are willing to use it to advance a political agenda.  It’s not just political hacks such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who wants to turn America into a medieval hell-hole that I find terrifying.   It’s that every single candidate that is running for president in the Democratic Party is embracing the same insanity that Cortez is proposing.   I also find it telling that these environmentalists always talk about saving the planet, yet they always want to put America on the hook for it, despite the fact that America has actually been polluting far less in recent decades.  Yet, unrepented polluters such as China and India will keep polluting at their hearts’ content, while America is forced to live in medieval conditions.  Yet, another reason why I never want to see the Democrats in power again.