Leftists can scarcely contain their dismay that losses at the polls in November will likely obstruct their ability to foist meaningful “cap and trade” legislation upon Americans. A case in point: On Wednesday, New York Times reporter John M. Broder penned an article called “Climate Change Doubt Is Tea Party Article of Faith”[1] that is bursting with desperation, frustration, and bitterness.
As one might guess from the title, Broder’s thesis is that a primary driver behind the “denial of global warming” is religious faith. Did you catch that? It is not “global warming” itself but its denial that requires faith! This is an astonishingly brazen position to take considering that environmentalism demonstrates every essential attribute of a religion.
The report (if such an undisguised and biased opinion piece can be called a “report”) quoted exactly three people representing Tea Party groups. Here is what those three had to say.
“It’s a flat-out lie. I read my Bible. He made this earth for us to utilize.”--Norman Dennison, a 50-year old electrician and founder of the Corydon Tea Party
“This so-called climate science is just ridiculous . . . Some people same I’m extreme, but they said the John Birch Society was extreme, too.”--Kelly Khuri, founder of the Clark County Tea Party Patriots
“They’re trying to use global warming against the people. It takes away our liberty. Being a strong Christian, I cannot help but believe the Lord placed a lot of minerals in our country and it’s not there to destroy us.”--Lisa Deaton, small-business owner who started We the People Indiana, a Tea Party affiliate.[1, emphasis mine in all quotes.]
With cherry-picked examples like these, Broder easily characterizes the “deniers” as religious nuts: Two people explicitly cite God as the motivation behind opposition to “cap and trade” legislation and another brings up the John Birch Society, an organization with the mission “[t]o bring about less government, more responsibility, and -- with God’s help -- a better world . . .”[2] This distortion is completely consistent with the leftist efforts to discredit the Tea Party movement. The media and most politicians cannot fathom (or at least they pretend to not understand) that many ordinary, clear-thinking Americans are alarmed by the catastrophic policies of our government.
The closest that Broder comes to stating the actual rational view of “deniers” is in this passage:
For some, it is a matter of religious conviction; for others, it is driven by distrust of those they call the elites. And for others still, efforts to address climate change are seen as a conspiracy to impose world government and a sweeping redistribution of wealth. But all are wary of the Obama administration’s plans to regulate carbon dioxide, a ubiquitous gas, which is require the expansion of government authority into nearly every corner of the economy.[1]
With his suggestion of “conspiracy theories,” Broder does his best to make the non-religious positions seem nutty as well, but he has (perhaps inadvertently) neatly encapsulated the basic goal of “cap and trade.” There is no conspiracy about it; the goals to redistribute wealth and apply an increasingly consolidated and powerful regulatory government are explicit and entirely in the open to anyone who cares to listen and understand the meaning of policies.
Before closing, I must inject a word about the deceptive shorthand that is used by environmentalists. Notice how “global warming” is the term used to demonize the “deniers.” Lately, environmentalists have also been slipping in the term “climate change” instead of “global warming” because it covers all the bases--as in the title of the quoted Times article, for instance. “Climate change” is particularly convenient for those periods of cooling that will naturally occur; environmentalists won’t have to conceal or fudge the data anymore when facts do not cooperate with their policies. In any case, no rational person is denying that the climate is changing. The climate has been changing for four-and-a-half billion years. The earth gets hotter; the earth gets cooler. It always has and always will. What I deny is that even if any significant warming or cooling happens to be associated with human productivity--and that is a big “if” that would have be demonstrated with independent, privately-funded scientific data, not a self-proclaimed alleged “scientific consensus” published by government-funded agencies--it would still not call for a massive government power grab. The essential requirement for human life is freedom--and this is as true when the temperature is going up as it is when the temperature is going down.
NOTES
1. John M. Broder, “Climate Change Doubt Is Tea Party Article of Faith,” New York Times, 20 Oct 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/us/politics/21climate.html.
2. John Birch Society mission statement, http://www.jbs.org/about.
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