Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
--C.S. Lewis

Saturday, February 20, 2010

The environmental movement is full of nothing but ignorant lying hypocrites

They want to fight Global Warming Climate Change by forcing everyone in the world to use the amount of energy that Americans consumed in the 1890s. This is not possible. Let me repeat that, because it is not an opinion but an empirical fact: it is not possible for the current population of Americans to use the same amount of energy as we used 120 years ago. Since that time, the American population has increased exponentially, and our energy needs have increased even more rapidly. An economist’s recent study has shown that a country’s production and economic well-being is a direct function of the amount of energy used in that country. This is an inescapable law of the universe; call it the fourth law of thermodynamics.

They claim that we can achieve this goal easily. They claim that by buying more energy efficient appliances, light bulbs, cars, and homes that we can effectively reduce our Carbon Dioxide emissions to levels not seen in a century. If this were the case, we would have already done it. The fact of the matter is that all of human commerce and activity consumes an enormous amount of energy. Our machines are already operating incredibly energy efficiently, and any improvements that come in the future will not be revolutionary leaps by an order of magnitude, but will instead be incremental evolutionary gains at the margins.

The only way to achieve the kind of emission targets that Obama and his Marxist ilk wish to achieve is by instituting a Totalitarian state that actively shuts down any attempt by free people to access energy that is currently freely available to us. We have the knowledge and the technology to access the energy reserves that are currently locked within the Earth’s crust. Free people will not willingly allow themselves to be made poorer by their government. The government will have to remedy this by taking away our freedom; it is as simple as that. For all of the screeching coming from the left during the Bush administration about the draconian steps they took to infringe on our civil liberties, there have been no cases brought to public attention where this was actually the case. Make no mistake, if an American citizen was wrongly detained and questioned for even ten minutes, it would have been on the front page of the New York Times for a year straight. We now have an administration that is actively seeking a Totalitarian state, and there has not been a peep from the Old Gray Lady.

Those who advocate on the behalf or this idiocy are perhaps the most execrable of them all. Al Gore, the godfather of the Global Warming Climate Change movement advocates moving the country back a century in terms of our energy consumption, while he emits more carbon in a year than most Americans emit in a decade, and most of the people of the rest of the world will emit in their lifetimes. Gore is not alone in this hypocrisy, however. For all of the sanctimony of the Prius-driving, organic food-eating greens, on the whole they use at most ten percent less energy than us carnivorous carbon-belchers.

If those who advocate for us to use so much less energy cannot do the deed themselves, they are either delusional or liars. Or both.