Green New Deal Exposes Climate Alarmists’ Insincerity Print
By Timothy H. Lee
Thursday, March 28 2019
Climate alarmists rarely believe their own rhetoric, or that the policies they advance would have any effect whatsoever beyond eliminating jobs across entire industries, increasing the power of government over our lives and making power more expensive and unreliable.

The anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change alarm movement is fraudulent and farcical. 

As if fresh confirmation of that reality was necessary, it arrived this week when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R – Kentucky) allowed liberals to match deed to word by bringing their “Green New Deal” to vote.  It failed 57-0, with its purported advocates voting “present” instead of for it. 

Predictably but laughably, Green New Deal proponents and their media apologists attempted to dismiss this as some sort of intricate legislative stunt by Leader McConnell, “a cynical ploy to ensure climate policy continues to go nowhere.”  The reality, however, is perfectly straightforward and damning. 

After all, it wasn’t as if McConnell concocted the bill’s provisions or distorted their extremist wish list.  He simply took their own bill and put it to a vote. 

In the House of Representatives, the bill was introduced as H.Res.109 on February 7 by freshman Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D – New York) and nearly 100 co-sponsors.  On the Senate side, the same bill was introduced by Senator Ed Markey (D – Massachusetts), along with ten co-sponsors, including 2020 presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Corey Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar. 

Both the House and Senate bills were introduced with the heading “Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal.” 

Sounds pretty earnest, doesn’t it? 

Both bills proceeded to exhaustively itemize the usual list of climate horrors that we’ve been told to expect since the 1970s, and descends into America-shaming by adding, “the United States has historically been responsible for a disproportionate amount of greenhouse gas emissions.”  The bills then demand “global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from human sources of 40 to 60 percent from 2010 levels by 2030,” as well as “net-zero emissions by 2050.” 

The text in both bills then state that, “the goals described … should be accomplished through a 10-year national mobilization (referred to in this resolution as the “Green New Deal mobilization”),” which it in turn describes as, “a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal era.” 

For good measure, Representative Ocasio-Cortez pleaded earlier this year that, “Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up and we’re like, ‘The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?’” 

Taking them at their own word, time is clearly of the essence, right? 

Leader McConnell accordingly allowed them to get to work immediately by holding a vote this week.  Instead of voting for their own bill, however, Senators Markey, Booker, Warren, Sanders, Harris and the rest voted “Present” in protest, and the bill went down to a 57-0 defeat. 

Senator Markey complained that it was a “stunt” for McConnell to allow a vote “without hearings, without expert testimony.”  But all that would have done would be to allow others to water down his bill, so it was an odd rationalization for his vote. 

Additionally, those who introduced the bill are the same people who falsely complain that McConnell somehow violated his constitutional duty by not allowing a confirmation vote on Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s nominee to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court.   Yet now McConnell is some sort of villain for taking the opposite approach, and allowing an immediate vote on an issue they claim only possesses a ten-year window to avert disaster? 

Do they prefer to wait another several years to see if their party recaptures the White House and Senate in 2020, leaving only eight years to save the planet?  What if President Trump wins another four-year term, or the Senate remains in Republican control?  What then?  We’ll only have six years to meet their own self-imposed 2030 deadline. 

The answer, of course, is obvious.  Climate alarmists rarely believe their own rhetoric, or that the policies they advance would have any effect whatsoever beyond eliminating jobs across entire industries, increasing the power of government over our lives and making power more expensive and unreliable.  If they truly believe that we only had ten years to save the planet, then they’d want a vote immediately. 

For the record, climate alarmists would also support nuclear power if they truly believe their own rhetoric.  Nuclear power is carbon-free, and more reliable than “green” energy sources like wind and solar, at one-third to one-fifth of the effective cost. 

But they don’t believe their own words.  They simply seek to signal their alleged virtue without taking concrete action that might cost them.  In that way, they’re no different than friends on social media who profess alarm over climate change and mock “deniers” of the “scientific consensus,” only to hypocritically post photos from their latest exotic vacation to which they traveled via carbon-burning jet, cruise ship or long-distance automobile travel. 

Climate alarmists don’t believe their own words, even as they malign “deniers” who question their dogma.  This week’s “Green New Deal” embarrassment merely offers the latest confirmation.