The Concern Troll Who Came In From the Cold

“How do you top making national news for bigotry?”, Dan Gainor asks at CNS News. “Trying getting people to ‘Give Up (Eating) Hamburgers to Stop Climate Change.'”

For loony lefty syndicated columnist David Sirota, it’s all just another day at the office. Sirota made national news for his bizarre and bigoted hope that the Boston bomber would turn out to be “a white American.”

Fresh off that fiasco, Sirota has turned his sights to changing the climate by changing America’s diet. According to Sirota’s May 2 column [at Salon.com] , “the fastest way to reduce climate change” simply “requires us all to eat fewer animal products.” In cast that wasn’t sufficiently clear, he added that “we are incinerating the planet and dooming future generations simply because too many of us like to eat cheeseburgers.” Sirota’s article on the left-wing site Salon included a photo of what appeared to be a bacon cheeseburger with an egg on top of it.

“That’s right; essentially, if every fourth time someone craved, say, beef, chicken or cow milk they instead opted for a veggie burger, a bean burrito or water, we have a chance to halt the emergency,” he added.

But Sirota wasn’t optimistic that conservatives would join him in his veggie crusade. “I’m sure some conservatives will read this column and send me email smugly pledging to eat even more meat than they already do, just to make some incoherent point about freedom.” Somehow “freedom” is always incoherent to the left. No matter. We either stop eating what we want or we are endangering what Sirota called our “ecological survival.”

You know what else the left has claimed exacerbates global warming? Air conditioning:

. . .as science writer Stan Cox argues in his new book, “Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer),” the dizzying rise of air conditioning comes at a steep personal and societal price.

• We stay inside longer,
• exercise less, and
• get sick more often — and
• the electricity used to power all that A.C. is helping push the fast-forward button on global warming.

The invention has also changed American politics: Love it or hate it, refrigerated cooling has been a major boon to the Republican Party. The advent of A.C. helped launch the massive Southern and Western population growth that’s transformed our electoral map in the last half century. Cox navigates all of these scientific and social angles with relative ease, providing a clear explanation of how A.C. made the leap from luxury to necessity in the United States and examining how we can learn to manage the addiction before we refrigerate ourselves into the apocalypse.

That’s according to a 2010 article written by those ace climate scientists at…Salon. (Link safe, goes to Stacy McCain’s blog.) When I see the announcement that Salon has gone offline, having voluntarily given up its air conditioned Internet server rooms for the sake of preserving Gaia and staving off “the apocalypse,” I’m willing to revisit the cheeseburger argument.

…Well, this cheeseburger argument, at least.