RICH LOWRY:  Joe Biden’s climate agenda is all about creating a crisis — not actually fixing one.

As Thomas Sowell said in 2004, “There’s something Eric Hoffer said: ‘Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.’ There always has to be a crisis–some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.”

Although today, 50 years after “Earth Day,” the left’s obsession with global warming is beginning to feel like a bad third season Star Trek rerun you’ve seen waaaay too many times: We’ve had FDR’s original New Deal (which itself was staffed with lots of WWI retreads under the motto of “we planned in war”), then LBJ’s Great Society, his Texas-sized version of the New Deal, then Obama’s “New, New Deal,” (which was dubbed the “Green New Deal” in some quarters in 2009), then AOC’s stillborn Green New Deal last year, which promised to ban “farting cows and airplanes,” and pretty much everything else, and now Biden’s version of the Green Nude Eel.

Also 50 years on, to paraphrase Kathy Shaidle on Trump as Hitler, I’m already on (at least) my fourth apocalypse:

Of course, as Nick Gillespie of Reason noted earlier this year, Joe Biden’s $2 Trillion Green New Deal Is Just a Worn-Out Democratic Jobs Program: