It's so easy and comfortable being a liberal. You never have to admit you're wrong when you're demonstrably wrong. Nor do you have to be concerned with lack of support, because the liberal establishment — from the news media to your fellow Democrats, academia, "science" and Hollywood elites — is always with you (like The Force). None is about to admit error, so they simply move on to the next cause.
For half a century, we have been told that the end is near and if we don't immediately allow government to impose significant changes on the way we live and use energy, we will burn to death. All the elites have made bold predictions that the end is coming in two years, five years, 10 years (choose your own number) if immediate action isn't taken. Those dates arrived and the sky didn't fall. History was not allowed to be a guide when it showed temperatures rising and falling in a cycle through periods of warming and cooling.
Now comes a report by the once highly credible (by liberals) International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and backed by the United Nations that consistently predicted the end is drawing closer unless we convert to other energy sources and significantly alter our lifestyles. The IPCC has now concluded, presumably after research untainted by political presuppositions, that the extreme scenarios they once were guilty of selling us are now "implausible". The presumptions were wrong, it says, and so was the fearmongering, I say.
In the immortal words of the character Emily Litella (played by the late Gilda Radner on "SNL" ), "never mind."
Never mind that global investment in climate action has surpassed $1 trillion annually, according to tracking by the Climate Policy Initiative. This has been a cult-like false god our overseers have demanded we worship. If we refused, we were to be ostracized to the land of the ignorant, the uneducated and those who don't believe in "science." Recall the days 50 years ago when "science" was convinced — and demanded we believe — that the Earth was cooling so much that if we (meaning government) didn't do something, we would all freeze to death. In 1975, Newsweek did a feature article titled "The Cooling World."
Carbon taxes were said to be one answer. Liberals celebrated rising gas prices — then and now — because they believed people would be forced to drive less, thus reducing carbon monoxide and lowering global temperatures. Electric cars were subsidized by the government. California passed the Advanced Clean Car II standards requiring all new vehicles sold in the state to be free of emissions starting in 2035.
Perhaps the most notorious of the IPCC predictions, as reported by the New York Post, was that "Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5, or 'RCP 8.5' — posited a hellish world of 12 billion people in the year 2100. The projection assumed the world would be burning more coal than exists, without such likely technological improvements as emissions-free nuclear plants."
There are responsible ways to care for the environment — once called conservation — but "Chicken Little" scenarios rob science of its credibility. It might also rob politicians of their credibility if that had not been lost some time ago.
Again, it's good to be a liberal. You feel at peace and are surrounded by people with similar views. The celebrities among them attend climate change meetings, flying in on their private jets and driving up in their large SUVs. They never admit they were wrong, much less apologize. Why should they? Don't they know anyone who believes otherwise?
Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas' latest book, "A Watchman in the Night: What I've Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America" (HumanixBooks).
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