By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, March 29, 2019
Imagine there’s a movie about a meteor heading toward
Earth. It will be here in twelve years. Following Hollywood convention, once
you got past the part where the maverick scientist or precocious kid
discovering it struggles to convince the world about the threat, you’d expect
the president or the military to leap into action.
Congress is usually left out of such plots, but it’s not
a stretch to imagine that Congress would race to authorize a plan to send
astronauts into space to prevent Armageddon or a planetary deep impact. (If you
don’t believe me, I refer you to the movies Armageddon
and Deep Impact.)
The initial rollout of the Green New Deal, a sweeping
proposal to overhaul the U.S. economy and, taken seriously, society itself, was
supposed to follow a script like this. The United Nations opened the bidding by
announcing last year that we had twelve years to keep the pace of climate
change from accelerating too fast to contain the damage. Like a high school
game of telephone, this quickly became a blanket statement that we have “twelve
years to save the planet.”
Climate change is a real concern, but if we did
absolutely nothing to stop it, the planet would still be here in a dozen years.
So would the human race and many other living things. In fact, if America did
virtually everything the Green New Dealers propose, global emissions of
greenhouse gases wouldn’t change that much unless China, India, Russia, and all
the African nations followed suit.
There are people who nonetheless believe that climate change
is a world-threatening calamity and that exaggeration is a necessary tool to
galvanize public opinion. If you Google the phrase “twelve years to save the
planet,” you’ll find people who think it’s literally true.
The problem is that we’ve heard these things before. In
1989, a U.N. official predicted “entire nations could be wiped off the face of
the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by
the year 2000.” In 2008, Al Gore warned that the northern polar ice cap could
be gone in five years.
Melting polar ice is something to worry about, but it’s
not gone.
The reasons this is a political problem for
climate-change warriors should be obvious. First, they are their own worst
enemy when it comes to maintaining credibility. By working on the theory that
they have to scare the bejeebus out of the public, they made it easy for people
to dismiss them when their Chicken Little prophecies didn’t materialize.
Another problem, which compounds the first, is that they
get greedy. Working on the premise that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste,
progressives have a long record of trying to throw other items on their wish
list into the anti-climate-change shopping cart. The Green New Deal, as
presented by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), includes
high-quality health care for everyone, guaranteed jobs, paid vacations, a
living wage, and retirement security.
Indeed, it’s worth remembering that environmentalists
targeted the fossil-fuel industry for early retirement long before concerns
about global warming were on the agenda. The anti-oil campaign began with the
Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969, back when concerns about another ice age were
still taken seriously.
You can believe that climate change is a real problem and
also be forgiven for thinking progressives are trying to pull a fast one. This
is especially so when you consider that proponents of the GND also favor
phasing out nuclear power, which could provide vastly more electricity than
wind or solar (and more efficiently).
Which gets me back to where I started. Imagine there was
a movie about an incoming meteor that could be stopped only with a nuclear
warhead, and the heroes insisted that nuclear weapons are just too icky to use,
even to save the planet. Audiences would scratch their heads.
They might also think they missed a crucial plot point if
the protagonists proposed a sweeping government effort to stop the meteor and
then, when given the opportunity to vote for it, voted “present” in protest.
That’s similar to what happened this week. Senate majority leader Mitch
McConnell brought the Green New Deal to the floor for a vote, and Democrats
refused to vote for it. Instead, they harangued McConnell for pulling a stunt.
They were right. It was a stunt. But sometimes it takes a
stunt to expose an even bigger one.
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