In the mid-1960s, liberals believed that all things were simultaneously possible — putting a man on the moon, fighting the Cold War, ending poverty, racism and disease. FDR had the New Deal; LBJ super-sized it Texas Style and dubbed it the Great Society. After the apocalyptic year of 1968 and the election of Richard Nixon, the American Left turned punitive and depressed, and introduced a whole new set of worries to occupy their time: mass starvation, overpopulation, global cooling, and a belief that pollution was about to destroy us all.
“Progressives Against Progress” is how Fred Siegel summed it up at City Journal back in 2010. That mindset culminated in Jimmy Carter’s infamous Malaise Speech in 1979; no wonder when Ronald Reagan campaigned the following year with a sunny optimistic worldview, Americans were thrilled to put a decade worth of hopelessness behind them.
But the American left never fully recovered from its doomsday decade of the 1970s, which brings us to a troika of schadenfreude inducing items today.
Back in the old days, prior to arrival of the left’s permanent malaise, “The Talk” parents gave their kids involved birds singing and bees trying to have sex with them, as noted family councilor Bartholomew J. Simpson would say. These days, as spotted by William Teach on his Pirates’ Cove blog (H/T: Maggie’s Farm), “The Talk” amongst far left environmentally correct sandwich board wearing parents involves telling their kids that the planet is completely hosed, and that they’re doooooomed:
When Ian Kim imagines the world his 7-year-old daughter will be living in 20 years from now, he says, it keeps him up at night. Images of ever more frequent super storms like Sandy, along with rising seas, or drought and heat waves wreaking havoc with crops haunt his waking hours.
“It’s a huge worry for me,” said Kim, a self-described environmental and social justice activist. “On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s a 10.”
It’s a sentiment likely shared by parents the world over, though it’s especially pronounced among those working close to the issue. Kim described climate change as “a slow motion disaster that is already happening right now.”
As Teach responds:
Interestingly, what’s missing in the entire article is any notion that these climaparents are actually making changes within their own lives.
Unsurprisingly, the people quoted in the story are far left activists (one worked for a Van Jones group) or have a vested interest in pushing hotcoldwetdry (one has husband who works for a solar panel company).
Fortunately, an entire generation will soon graduate having experienced no statistically significant warming.
Unfortunately though, the mindset that the planet is hosed is over 40 years old and deeply imprinted on the left’s collective brain; even though the causes change from time to time. It helps to fuel both their collective depression, and their Moral Equivalent of War Mindset. As they say at David Horowitz’s Front Page Website, “Inside Every Liberal Is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out.” and “Climate Change” is the current mechanism for attempting to organize the masses.
Yesterday at Power Line, Steve Hayward noted with an amusing video, “Our friends at CFACT (Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow) are on hand this week at the latest round of UN climate talks in Bonn:”
CFACT took its video cameras around to ask delegates whether they were aware of the fact that global temperatures have stopped rising for the last 15 years or so. Hilarity (and some revealing comments about how the facts don’t really matter to these folks) ensues. Who are the “denialists” now? I’d give these guys a Green Weenie, except they’ve already won so many that I don’t want them to start hoarding.
Steve’s post at Power Line is titled “A Case Study in Denial and Fanaticism,” which would also be great subtitle for this item from Matthew Sheffield of Newsbusters: “Delusional: Google’s Eric Schmidt Claims Media Help Climate Skeptic ‘Liars:’”
In a bizarre speech, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt blasted the news media, saying reporters “don’t believe in facts” when it comes to their coverage of the discussion over whether or not humans are increasing the Earth’s temperature.
But Schmidt was not talking about the fact that the Earth’s median temperature has not increased in over 10 years or that the Earth has experienced ice ages when the atmospheric CO2 content was 5 times its current amount. Instead, the top Obama adviser was ranting against “liars” who do not believe in anthropogenic global warming.
Because a sufficient number of people do not buy into the climate hype, this creates inaction on the part of government, Schmidt alleged, according to a report by the technology blog The Verge.
“The media gets confused because they don’t believe in facts, and public policy people get confused because they don’t believe in innovation,” the former Google CEO is quoted as saying at an event his company sponsored called “How Green is the Internet?”
It would also appear that Schmidt sees some sort of conspiracy to prevent people from knowing the “truth” as he sees it. Such a conspiracy cannot last long, however, according to the top-dollar Obama donor:
“You can hold back knowledge, you cannot prevent it from spreading. You can lie about the effects of climate change, but eventually you’ll be seen as a liar.”
As the photo atop William Teach’s post on the anti-nuclear family talk on their kids’ future being doomed is captioned, “I have to talk to kids about climate change. And then drive to soccer and run errands in the ugly mommy minivan.”
Similarly, note the cognitive dissonance in Schmidt’s freakout: “Climate Change” is destroying the earth. So has Schmidt ordered Google to retire its private jets or shutter its air-conditioned server farm yet? Or dismissed former global warming maven turned media mogul turned shill for Big Oil Al Gore from his role as Google advisor?
See also: Barack Obama, burning 3600 gallons of fuel per hour to fly Air Force One to fund-raise and play golf, while telling the rest of us, “I don’t have much patience for people who deny climate change.”
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