Climate activists from the #GasFreeNYC coalition and elected officials rallied before the city council passed an ordinance that ended the use of natural gas in new buildings. (Brittainy Newman/AP)
By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
New York City, to the extent it can, is not only banning normal, efficient, affordable natural gas-powered appliances (furnaces, dryers, water heaters, ovens and ranges) from new construction in the city, they are now attempting to require existing buildings to junk the perfectly good appliances they already have, too and replace them with electric-powered versions.
The state of California, to the extent it can, is not only banning some normal, functional, safe, efficient diesel-powered trucks from the congested seaports that need every truck they can get – they are even trying to find a way to ban strong diesel locomotives from their struggling state.
The wise men of Sacramento think that crossing the Rockies in electric freight trains is the wave of the future.
And the unelected nannies in Washington, DC, who have either risen through the ranks of bureaucracy or been appointed by a succession of corrupt administrations, are working day and night to regulate gasoline and diesel out of the automotive manufacturing industry, despite America being the world’s richest producer of gasoline and diesel fuels.
And they are working day and night to ban the manufacture of natural gas-powered appliances, despite America being the world’s richest producer of natural gas.
And they are working day and night to force businesses, utilities, governments and individuals to switch all these over to dependence on the electric grid, at the very same time they are kneecapping that electric grid by forcing the implementation of inefficient, overpriced, dangerous, and thoroughly destructive alternate sources known as wind turbines and solar panel farms.
Why?
Because of global warming.
Or climate change.
Or a climate crisis.
Or whatever they feel like calling it this year.
Is there such a climate crisis? Well, if you look at any snapshot of a few years – five years, ten, fifteen – you will find periods of time with hotter summers or milder summers, colder winters or more moderate winters.
Look at a small enough sample, and you can make any variance look massive.
In many metro areas with competing casinos, for example, commuters are routinely treated to billboard campaigns for a certain casino, offering “the loosest slots in Chicagoland;” or “the loosest slots in Las Vegas;” or “the loosest slots in Cincinnati.”
A huge graph will show that this one casino’s one-armed bandits pay off at an incredibly higher rate than its competitors – and only upon close examination do commuters eventually realize they had just blown up a tiny section of the graph, and in fact the difference in payouts is always miniscule, ranging between about 90 percent and 92 percent.
An utterly meaningless difference, magnified to look significant on the billboard. An advertising trick, nothing more.
When we look at our earth’s climate the right way – studying the big picture over a long time – we encounter the same phenomena. Over any century, there are periods of several warmer years and several cooler years, years with a lot of hurricanes and earthquakes, and years with fewer. Over the course of a century, these apparent differences average out.
Across recorded history – that’s just about the past 5000 years – we have seen such patterns again and again. In fifty centuries, we have seen it all. Anything we see in the past century; we see in the prior forty-nine. There is nothing new under the sun.
The climate crowd – whiny little Greta and all her acolytes, Big Al and all his fellow speculators – all dismiss such facts. The past doesn’t matter to them; the present scares them; the future motivates them – but it’s a present warped by unjustified fears, and a future colored by bad science.
It’s Carbon Dioxide that we must fear, they tell us.
Every bit of evidence they cited to justify it has been disproven, from the hockey stick graph to the Arctic and Antarctic ice predictions. Every claim that carbon dioxide is destroying our planet has been proven to have been either motivated by the pursuit of corrupt grant money or by the pursuit of carbon credit speculation dollars.
Dozens of notable think tanks – Illinois’ own Heartland Institute among the best of them, for example – have shown the climate activists’ caterwauling to be utterly baseless.
But the modern left wants to believe it, so they don’t listen.
All the evidence in the world disproving the silliness of the climate change mantra falls on deaf ears, precisely because the modern left likes the prescription for this nonexistent crisis.
The prescription is to ban petroleum. Well, petroleum is yucky, so they like banning it.
The prescription is to ban coal. Coal is dirty, so they like banning that too.
The prescription is to ban natural gas. Natural gas smells funny, so they love banning that.
The prescription is to ban meat. Farm animals are messy, and farms smell bad to city folk, so they like banning them most of all.
The prescription is to control population. Well, now, there’s the prize. People are annoying, they might not agree with you, they might know more than you. They might prove you wrong sometimes, so the left likes banning people most of all.
It is shocking how much of the modern agenda is justified by climate change hysteria. From the war on efficient fuel to the war on population, it’s all based on the theory that manmade carbon dioxide production causes the earth’s climate to change.
The prescriptions they offer increase dependence on an already unstable power grid, one being made more and more unstable every day by their policies. The prescriptions they offer result in massive tax increases and severe reductions in humanity’s standard of living. The prescriptions they offer result in ever greater power for the bureaucrats and technocrats who run the government, ever more control over rank-and-file civilians.
In the end, that’s what the modern left wants, because that’s what they like: power and control over their fellow man.
The ability to reduce the comforts enjoyed by their fellow civilians. The ability to reverse the wonderful advances that Western Civilization has made since the industrial revolution.
Sound like an exaggeration? Study your history. This has everywhere been the story of the left: from Lenin to Pol Pot, from Hitler to Mao. Power and control, turning back the clock toward feudal era class lines.
In the final analysis, that’s what it’s all about. The left grasps at the unbanned straw of “CO2-caused global warming” because it gives them the license to do everything that, as socialists, they have always really wanted to do anyway: to control their fellow man.
And the fact that it’s all based on bad science, on a single utterly ridiculous theory that makes a mockery of the scientific method, may not even be a negative for them. To the left, the ability to wreak such havoc with no justification at all is no bug; it’s a feature.
