The Latest Things Climate-Change Fanatics Insist You Make Do with Less Of

By Noah Rothman

Monday, February 05, 2024

 

Environmental activism seems increasingly inclined toward one panacea in the effort to arrest the effects of climate change: deprivation.

 

The environmentalist fanatic’s answer to every environmental challenge appears to be ensuring that more people have access to less: less red meat, less on-demand energy, fewer reliable appliances, and so on. As the movement retreats inward in an effort to reduce its exposure to skeptics outside its cloistered ideological bubble, its demands have become ever more bizarre. Thus we are forced to add a few more items to the list of things to which climate change radicals want you to have less access.

 

Among them, tires.

 

“A new bill in Washington state would give regulators the ability to ban tires that create a drag on fuel efficiency,” read a Wall Street Journal editorial published Sunday. Washington lawmakers have set their sights on tires with treads that produce excessive “rolling resistance” — which is to say, vehicles that trade maximum fuel efficiency for increased driver control over the vehicle in adverse weather conditions. If it went into effect, the law would make driving a more dangerous activity in exchange for a dubious and theoretical reduction in overall carbon emissions. “It underscores how progressives are using climate as an excuse to intervene in nearly every corner of the U.S. economy,” the Journal concluded. But they needn’t have stopped at tires.

 

Next up on the ban list: balloons.

 

“Environmentalists around the country are cajoling city councils into banning the release, sale, and public use of mere party balloons,” the Washington Examiner’s Tiana Lowe Doescher writes. She recounts how activists across the country are successfully lobbying states to make the release of lighter-than-air balloons a misdemeanor criminal offense. But beyond that, some American municipalities have gone so far as to propose a wholesale ban on the sale of balloons.

 

Another thing America’s most environmentally conscious communities are toying with putting downward pressure on is, apparently, tourism.

 

In response to activists’ demands that Hawaii do more to combat the ecological damage done by visitors to the state every year, Governor Josh Green has proposed a small “green fee” that would serve as a tax on tourism. According to scoring, the proposal would raise only about $68 million per year from tourists — fees that might go a small way toward floating bonds designed to finance climate-related mitigation projects. But as the adage goes, when you tax something, you get less of it. For a state that is economically dependent on tourists, making the trek that much more of a financial hardship is a self-defeating proposition.

 

The ban list is forever expanding. And yet the scale of the problem environmentalists claim to want to confront never seems to shrink in scope. It, too, is always growing, which leads skeptical observers to wonder whether restricting consumers’ access to life’s small pleasures is a remedy to a problem or an end in itself.