By Rick Manning
The Big Green political lie of supporting an “all of the above” energy strategy was laid bare in an October 28, 2013 commentary in The Guardian authored by leading environmentalist Bill McKibben.
According to McKibben, the opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline’s real objective is so, “… the president would finally signal a shift in policy that matters, finally acknowledge that we have to keep most of the carbon that’s still in the ground in that ground if we want our children and grandchildren to live on a planet worth inhabiting.”
Any honest reading of this sentence lays bare the environmental movement’s real intention to block energy development regardless of cost to the economy, or whether their specific opposition to the energy development is valid at all.
After all, we have a planet to save is a higher calling than pesky little facts about real projects that produce energy that keeps manufacturing plants running and heats homes of real families.
In the mind of the environmental activist, the end justifies the means, because they truly believe that failing to shut down the world’s industrial economy by starving it of fuel means planetary doom.
There is no compromising with this mindset, and you cannot trust anything someone who believes this says, because underlying every argument is a belief that the greater truth of impending global warming supercedes every lie that must be told to stop it.
This is how the church of global warming can ignore the obvious ramifications of global temperature data that shows the planet has not warmed over the past sixteen years. When the facts don’t fit the computer models and the narrative that carbon based fuels are the source of our planet’s destruction, just deny them. After all, if the earth isn’t warming, how will the church justify itself to its worshippers?
If the ice cap in Antarctica has grown to the largest extent in history, clearly this abnormality is a sign that the earth is about to experience a dramatic rise in temperature.
If the sun is returning to a period of dramatically less activity meaning the earth will be subjected to far fewer of those heat producing rays, it can be dismissed as having only a minor impact on temperature. Who would ever be so naïve as to think that solar cycles and the radiation emitted from that big yellow object that lights our sky might actually have something to do with earthly temperatures?
No set of offsetting facts will satisfy the global warming zealot from their mission.
The truth is that there is increasing amounts of conflicting data that should give people on both sides of the argument pause.
It is true that a cargo ship traversed the Northern Passageway through the Arctic for the first time this summer, while it is also true that the Arctic was significantly colder this summer with ice growth occurring much earlier than in previous years.
Contradictory sets of facts should cause reasonable people take a step back and ponder what is really going on.
However, Bill McKibben and those of his ilk have dedicated their lives to stopping global warming and industrialization that they believe fuels it.
As U.S. environmentalists have opposed coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear power, and even renewable sources of power like hydro-electric (dams are bad for salmon), they have declared war on all but six percent of the energy that is consumed in the United States. This is nothing less than a wholesale assault on modern America under the guise of clear skies.
Given this dedication, there is no carbon based energy development project that environmentalists will not seek to oppose using every obstructionist tactic at their disposal, and there is no appeasing them, and any attempts to meet them with anything but scorn only encourages their death to America philosophy.
Remember this the next time you hear or read environmentalist save the planet platitudes, as their prescription for saving the earth is to destroy the energy sources which make modern life possible. Of course, you have to read the fine print to find out this dirty little secret.
Rick Manning (@rmanning957) is the vice president of public policy and communications for americans for limited government
