Losing Our Grip on Reality

By Alan Caruba

As one approaches Earth Day, April 22, my fear increases that as a nation we have lost our grip on reality. The Greens have substituted their “truth” for what anyone can see with their own eyes.

Is the world warming? No, it is now into a cooling cycle. This passed winter included record-breaking blizzards in China and elsewhere, along with snow showing up in the Middle East and in places in the southern hemisphere where it has not been seen, often in living memory. Glaciers are advancing. Both the Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves have been expanding.

Can America be “energy independent”? No. In fact, no nation can be energy independent. Even Iran imports gasoline for lack of refining capacity. Meanwhile, the Congress of the United States refuses to permit exploration and extraction of vast known national oil reserves while individual States thwart efforts to build coal-fired plants to generate the electricity we need.

How insane do we have to be to permit Congress to ban the purchase of incandescent light bulbs by 2014?

How insane do we have to be to insist that so-called “endangered species” take precedence over access to energy, the building of hospitals, schools, housing, and other elements of our national infrastructure?

For reasons known only to him, President Bush has reversed seven years of sensible policy to advocate reducing “greenhouse gas” emissions.

How out of touch with reality do we have to be to believe that 0.038% of the Earth’s atmosphere, carbon dioxide, determines the Earth’s climate when a child can look up and see the Sun, intuitively understanding that it is the primary driver?

How can we ignore the food riots occurring around the world and not understand that is a Congressional mandate to turn corn, soy, and palm oil into a fuel additive that is causing these shortages? Unless repealed, the situation, aggravated by weather-related crop losses, will only grow worse.

How bizarre is it to believe that man “controls” the climate when it is and always has been manifestly evident that mankind’s success has been the adaptations we have made to survive the challenges the climate poses? How we heat and cool our homes is just one of these adaptations and, without oil, coal, and natural gas, without electricity, we will be at the mercy of nature once again.

Why would any people turn to the two least efficient and reliable forms of energy, solar and wind, when there are ample reserves of fossil fuels to meet our present and future needs?

A nation that began with a protest against “taxation without representation” now submits to all forms of visible and invisible taxation of all goods and services, on all means of transportation, on investments and savings. We are being systematically impoverished as individuals in order to fund a profligate government system based on the redistribution of income.

The tyranny of demography, the demands of an aging population, hold forth serious challenges to our pension and entitlement systems. The funding will not be available no matter how successful our economy may be.

While all this occurs, a warrior cult called Islam threatens to drag us all back to the culture and values of a seventh century Bedouin tribe. No efforts to compromise will succeed and elements of Islam have nuclear weapons or soon will. The most repressive societies on Earth want to impose their religion on the most successful.

Until and unless the nation can regain a grip on the realities of the world in which we live, we risk losing our nation to the lies environmentalists tell, the laws a blind Congress passes in the name of the environment, an economy transformed from capitalism to socialism, and perhaps the very freedoms embedded in our Constitution.