The Washington Examiner: Should we #EatTheBabies, or live like an Obama?

By The Gazette Editorial Board via The Washington Examiner Editorial Board 10/11/2019 | updated 6 years ago

Last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was confronted at a town hall by a frantic woman – either lunatic or troll – hailing from what’s left of the late Lyndon LaRouche’s political cult.

“We’re not going to be here for much longer, because of the climate crisis,” the woman shouted. “We only have a few months left. I love that you support the Green Deal, but it’s not gonna get rid of fossil fuel. It’s not going to solve the problem fast enough. A Swedish professor said we can eat dead people, but it’s not fast enough! So, I think your next campaign slogan needs to be this: We’ve got to start eating babies.”

She even removed her jacket to reveal a T-shirt that said, “Save the planet, Eat the children.”

Ocasio-Cortez, recognizing that her interlocutor was either facetious or mentally disturbed, handled the situation about as well as could be expected. Obviously, no one will be taking the Jonathan Swift route to avoid climate disaster any time soon.

But the outlandish suggestion of eating babies should be enough to make anyone think, especially given the hyperbolic and alarmist rhetoric that surrounds climate change nowadays. Greta Thunberg’s needless anxiety problem serves as a reminder that at some point, irresponsible rhetoric about climate change can cross the line from merely stupid to dangerous – or at least to a point where it moots any need or desire to act.

Scientists broadly agree that the earth’s temperature is warming due to human emissions of greenhouse gases. But that hardly settles climate change as a political issue. This scientific reality does not on its own produce any obvious policy prescription that is both practical and potentially effective in solving the problem: In fact, most proposals, like Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, fail on both counts.

More importantly, the broad scientific consensus does not by any means extend to the precise timeline, nature, or magnitude of the consequences of that warming. News organizations can generate clicks from scary predictions about how Miami will soon be underwater, but no one knows the day or the hour when it will happen or even with certainty that it ever will. Very rich people who claim to believe in science, including the Obama family, are paying enormous sums of money to live right on the ocean’s edge. Are they climate deniers? Or are they just not hyperventilating?

To hear Ocasio-Cortez and others discuss the subject, one comes away with a clear impression that the world is beyond hope.

“The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,” she has said. To be fair, she meant to say only that the world will end if we don’t address climate change within 12 years. But with only about 11 years left to act as of this writing, and certainty that the world’s largest emitter (China) will increase its emissions over that period, we would normally conclude that the world is lost – even if we do start eating babies.

If this environmental millenarianism is real, then at least it helps puts other things into perspective. Impeachment hardly matters if the world is about to end anyway. No point in going through another wearying, divisive election season.

And why save up in your 401(k) when you’ll never get to use the money? Why save for college when the world will be uninhabitable by the time their kids reach adulthood anyway?

Then again, maybe the Obamas are right. Maybe you’re saving and planning for the future and buying houses on Martha’s Vineyard because deep down, you don’t believe in the alarmism, either.

The Gazette Editorial Board via The Washington Examiner Editorial Board

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