Global warming can be interpreted in a number of ways. Matter-of-factly, it is the environmentalist, save-the-earth, sine qua non of the day. From a political perspective, it is a hot potato, one that astute politicians and corporate chiefs must handle carefully to avoid being tainted as anti-green, and thus viewed in the same light as ax-murderers. Practically and philosophically, however, global warming is really about vast new restrictions on freedom.
Global warming is the liberal-socialist God-send, the equivalent of the coming of the Marxist messiah. It is a manufactured problem, the truth of which cannot be tested or doubted, serving the interests of academics, technocrats and bureaucrats, whose only resolution is a huge expansion of government regulatory power. More important, the jurisdiction of that new power will be the very substance of life, carbon. Once carbon caps are in place, there is no theoretical limit to the amount and type of human activities the government will be empowered to regulate. In essence, global warming has become a backdoor method of instituting a kind of dictatorship of the human masses—Marx’s proletariat—i.e. you and me.
Who would have guessed it: Carbon caps succeed where Stalin, Mao and collectivism failed. In fact, as American liberals, pining for ways to make themselves relevant again, realized long ago, energy regulation is the key to the European welfare state: tiny cars, tiny apartments and high unemployment all endured for the greater “good”.
American society used to have some built-in resistance to liberal balderdash posing as moral good. No longer. This resistance has weakened as critical thinking skills have declined. American students rank below international average in testing in science, math and problem solving. The result is intellectual apathy and the growth of secular, anti-humanist, quasi-religious beliefs. Marx considered religion the people’s opium. He never could have guessed a religion called global warming would help his cause.
