AMAC Exclusive – By Seamus Brennan
Though many conservatives have understandably grown tired of the left’s perpetually apocalyptic language surrounding climate change and environmental concerns, few would have guessed that President Joe Biden—who has repeatedly claimed that “there is no greater challenge facing our country and our world”—would fall into this category. Yet this is quite literally what appeared to happen during last week’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, as Biden fell asleep mere minutes into the event. Could there be a more perfect portrayal of Americans’ growing exhaustion with the far left’s climate obsession?
As expected, Biden’s post-nap remarks at COP26 adopted much of the bleak vocabulary that has come to permeate Democrats’ environmental policies in recent years. “We only have a brief window left before us to raise our ambitions and to raise—to meet the task that’s rapidly narrowing,” he grimly warned. “There’s no more time to hang back or sit on the fence or argue amongst ourselves. This is the challenge of our collective lifetimes. The existential threat to human existence as we know it.”
Biden, much like others in his party, now exclusively refers to climate change as a “crisis.” To give this supposed crisis added drama, Biden and Congressional Democrats have now also begun insisting that addressing climate change is necessary to combat “systemic racism.” The term “environmental justice” is quickly gaining popularity among progressives, with the implication being that if you don’t completely embrace the far left’s narrative on climate change, you must be racist. It’s unsurprising, then, that this doubly-urgent crisis now justifies the use of ever-more-forceful language from Joe Biden: “This is our last chance,” the President threatened in October.
If that threat sounds familiar, there’s good reason for it. Despite the radical left’s contention that right now is the world’s last chance to take dramatic action on climate change, the fact remains that progressives, the media, and the expert class have been forecasting impending environmental catastrophe for more than half a century. In 1970, The Boston Globe reported that “scientists predict a new ice age” by the start of the 21st century. In 1978, The New York Times cautioned that there was no end in sight to the then-30-year global cooling trend. Americans were told by various supposedly authoritative sources that oceans would be dead by 1980, rising sea levels would “obliterate” and “wipe nations off [the] face of the earth” by 2000, New York City would be underwater by 2015, the Maldives would be completely submerged by 2018, children soon wouldn’t know what snow is, and Britain would become Siberia by 2024. The list goes on. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute aptly put it, “None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true.”
Perhaps the most recognizable example of the left’s climate fearmongering in recent years is former Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 book-turned-documentary An Inconvenient Truth, in which he decried global warming as “a true planetary emergency” and infamously insisted that, absent “drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, “the world will reach a point of no return” by 2016. Needless to say, come 2016, we were all still standing.
In his 2017 follow-up documentary An Inconvenient Sequel, notwithstanding the obvious shortcomings of his predictions a decade prior, Gore doubled down on his doomsday predictions, alleging that if we failed to act immediately, future generations would inherit “stronger storms, worsening floods, deeper droughts, mega-fires, tropical diseases spreading through vulnerable populations in all parts of the earth, melting ice caps flooding coastal cities, unsurvivable heat extremes, and hundreds of millions of climate refugees.” Americans can likely expect a third installment of the Inconvenient Truth series whenever Gore’s latest batch of predictions inevitably prove false.
The left’s endless pattern of dire predictions for the future of the planet makes clearer than ever that their political strategy has been rooted in either fabricating or deeply exaggerating environmental concerns as justification for imposing a progressive vision for American society—a ploy most noticeably seen with behemoth far-left bills like the Green New Deal—that the American people would otherwise never even entertain without a looming planetary disaster as pretext. Though Americans of every political persuasion are right to support policies that will protect the environment and stave off legitimate environmental devastation, both the left’s pattern of hyperbolic opportunism and an honest review of the facts demonstrate that, despite Joe Biden’s overwrought doomsday rhetoric, Americans have no reason to panic—and they most certainly have no reason to sign on to a massive and unprecedented transformation of American life for the sake of averting an apocalypse that the left has been promising since the 1960s.
As former President Donald Trump said in a statement referencing Biden’s dozing off at COP26, “Nobody that has true enthusiasm and belief in a subject will ever fall asleep.” If not even the most progressive president in American history who campaigned on the notion that climate change is an “existential threat” can bear to stay awake to hear the latest iteration of climate hysteria, the American people certainly won’t either.
