Every time you think that global warming alarmists can’t possibly look any sillier, they surprise you and sink to new self-parodic depths.

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On this very week in 1942, coffee was added to the list of rationed items in the United States, joining butter, sugar, milk and approximately one-third of consumer food items.  Gasoline purchases were limited to just three gallons per car per week.  Those who lived through it can confirm that it wasn’t enjoyable. 

Today, climatologists meeting in Cancun, Mexico contend we must return to those same austere methods to address the supposed “crisis” of climate change.  Not for four years this time.  For twenty years. 

So let’s see a show of hands.  Who is willing to endure three gallons of gas and one venti coffee per week for the next twenty years to combat climate change?  No volunteers?  Then we may just have to resort to New York Times columnist Tom Friedman’s authoritarian “China for a Day” idea and dictate it anyway. 

Every time you think that global warming alarmists can’t possibly look any sillier, they surprise you and sink to new self-parodic depths.  Such as Tom Friedman suggesting that the repressive Chinese autocracy offers a better alternative to the constitutional republic our founding fathers established. 

Or such as now, with sanctimonious climate scientists dictating that Americans must “halt economic growth” and impose rationing due to global warming doomsday models.  Which, just thirty years ago, happened to be global cooling doomsday models – see the May 21, 1975 New York Times or June 24, 1974 cover of Time.  But never mind that.  This time, they are sure they finally have it right.  We must starve ourselves to avert catastrophe. 

Kevin Anderson, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester in England, has published a paper asserting that the only option to sufficiently reduce global carbon emissions while allowing developing nations to grow is “to halt economic growth in the rich world over the next twenty years.” 

Hey, China could get on board with that. 

According to a report in The Telegraph, Professor Anderson considers global cooling – pardon us, global warming – a crisis on the order of World War II: 

“’The Second World War and the concept of rationing is something we need to seriously consider if we are to address the scale of the problem we face,’ he said…  This would mean a drastic change in lifestyles for many people in countries like Britain as everyone will have to buy less carbon intensive goods and services such as long haul flights and fuel hungry cars.  Professor Anderson admitted it ‘would not be easy’ to persuade people to reduce their consumption of goods, and he said politicians should consider a rationing system similar to the one introduced during the ‘last time of crisis’ in the 1930s and ‘40s.  This could mean a limit on electricity so people are forced to turn the heating down, turn off the lights and replace old electrical goods like huge fridges with more efficient models.  Food that has traveled from abroad may be limited and goods that require a lot of energy to manufacture.” 

But don’t worry.  Professor Anderson assures us that “halting growth in the rich world does not necessarily mean a recession or worse lifestyle, it just means making adjustments in everyday life such as using public transport or wearing a sweater rather than turning on the heating.” 

Wait a minute…  Didn’t Jimmy Carter already instruct us to “turn the heating down, turn off the lights and replace old electrical goods” during one of his famous sweater-wearing “malaise” speeches from the White House? 

“I am not saying we have to go back to living in caves,” Professor Anderson told The Telegraph.  Then what, mud huts?  A tree house like the one from which Joan Baez recently tumbled? 

This all sounds like fun and games, until one realizes that the consequences can be very real and very serious.  After all, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge sought to “halt economic growth” and return to an agrarian society. 

Nobody suggests that people like Professor Anderson or the Cancun Climate Crazies are ready to commence mass executions or concentration camps.  But consider for a moment how difficult economic conditions already are.  In America, unemployment has stalled at 9.6% for three consecutive months, and that’s with gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates of 3.7%, 1.7% and 2.5% over the past three quarters. 

Imagine how much worse we’d be if we “halted economic growth.” 

Global warming, or “climate change” now that temperatures have actually declined since 1998, is merely a pretext for those who seek to control our lives and impose their ideology upon everyone else.  This just provides the latest vivid illustration.