Starting the Year with the Big Lie

By Alan Caruba

Ever since the scare campaign of the 1970s regarding the coming Ice Age failed to energize legions of environmentalists to “do something” about it, The New York Times has led the biggest hoax in recorded history, the claim that “global warming” was going to destroy the world unless all use of energy was reduced in order to limit “greenhouse gas” emissions, mostly in the form of carbon dioxide.

There is no global warming and climatologists tell us that we are still on the cusp of a new Ice Age because we are at the end of an interglacial period of some 11,500 years.

So it comes at no surprise that the lead editorial in the January 1st edition of The New York Times is “The One Environmental Issue” in which Democrat and Republican candidates are evaluated based on their commitment to get us all riding bicycles and banning all incandescent light bulbs beginning in 2012. Stock up on the 100-watt ones because that’s what Congress just banned and the President signed into law.

According to The Times, “The overriding environmental issue of these times is the warming of the planet.” This is a boldfaced lie. Nothing, absolutely nothing, Americans and the rest of the Earth’s population, can do will have any effect on the weather or the climate.

The climate will be affected primarily by the Sun. The effect of sunspot activity has been known since the days of ancient Chinese astronomers. They are magnetic storms and, in fact, they have known cycles of activity, fundamentally in 11 and 22-year periods when they increase or decrease due to the reversal of the Sun’s magnetic field.

This is of no consequence to The New York Times, a newspaper that has abandoned all allegiance to the truth, to accuracy, to anything other than its own demented liberal agenda.

“It is not clear to what extent Americans are willing to grapple with the implications of any serious strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; more specifically, whether they are ready to pay higher prices for energy and change their lifestyles to reduce their consumption of fossil fuels.”

This has got to be, on the first day of the year, the most spectacularly idiotic speculation. Americans are already unhappy about the rising cost of gasoline and all other energy sources, oil, natural gas, and coal, on which the U.S. economy depends. They do not want to pay more because the government has created obstacles to discovering, extracting, and refining these “fossil fuels.” They will, however, because Congress has done just that and, if Democrats gain greater control of Congress and/or the White House, life in America will become even more costly.

It didn’t help when the Supreme Court ruled this year that carbon dioxide was a “pollutant” that the Environmental Protection Agency could regulate. Other than oxygen, carbon dioxide is the second most essential gas for all life on Earth as every blade and leaf of vegetation depends upon it. It represents 0.038% if the Earth's atmosphere. Compare that to 20.95% for oxygen.

Voters of both parties need to check out their candidate’s record on the issue of “global warming” and what they would “do” about it. The Democrats are hell-bent to continue the UN debacle of the Kyoto Climate Control Protocol due to expire in 2012. On the Republican side, John McCain has drunk the global warming Kool-Aid.

“And what kind of sacrifices will they be asking of people who almost certainly will have to pay more for their electric bills and their greener cars?”

Politicians do not get elected by asking voters to sacrifice anything. Voters do not want to pay more for electricity and they wouldn’t have to if, in State-after-State, the Greens didn’t make it impossible to build a new coal-fired or nuclear-powered utility. Instead, States that mandate that part of their electrical power come from wind power had better stay praying that the wind blows all the time. It doesn’t.

Lastly, the only reason I know about today’s New York Times editorial is that the guy who delivers my daily newspaper left a free copy, presumably in hopes that I might subscribe. That will happen when Hell freezes over.