Many conservatives are rightly upset that conservative politicians are rather passive when it comes to confronting and refuting progressive claims. I for one would love to see stiff, scientifically accurate rebuttals of two noxious progressive fantasies.
First. The U.S. is systemically racist; i.e. irredeemably racist, only systematic change can blot out this damned spot, our greatest national security threat. (A separate post is forthcoming.)
Second. Climate change, whether the global cooing of 50 years ago or the global warming of the moment, threatens to destroy the planet, unless government action stops the lethal emissions of carbon dioxide and achieves environmental justice.
By not attacking these head on, we tolerate the vocabulary and the underlying concepts. Otherwise we just stand for a light form of progressivism, like the Me-too Republicans of the last century. Rational discussion may be racist to some, but it is the best we can do.
Let’s look at one aspect of the climate madness, the quixotic quest for planetary salvation by means of wind and solar power sources and the associated goal of ‘sustainability.’ The University of Missouri and many other ‘woke’ institutions has been hog-wild about ‘sustainability’ for at least a decade. In their sleep-walking delirium they fancy the current naturally occurring and very moderate global warming has become an ‘existential threat.’ Pace their nightmare, moderate warming is actually a good thing. CO2 in particular promotes plant growth and reforestation, preventing untold deaths from starvation in the third world. By the by, there is far from a consensus about this from real climate scientists.
A little history can go a long way. For example, during the Roman warm period, comprising the five centuries ending about 500 A.D., the temperature of the Mediterranean Sea was about 2 degrees warmer than at present. And the Medieval warm period, 900 – 1400 A.D. produced the colonization of Greenland and healthier, better fed people of the British Isles. The next four to five centuries saw the little ice age, when the Thames actually froze over and the average Englishman lost 4-6 inches of height. But the imperious frenzy of woke climate-change nightmares has cancelled the prosaic reality of natural cycles. The ESG movement, in investments and elsewhere, promises virtue-signaling via environmental, social and governance leftwing policies, aka ‘justice.’ Not to speak of conquering the unjust forces of nature via invincible government. The results include Solyndra and similar Federal and state government ‘investments’ in sustainability.
Now comes word that the expected lifetime of windmills and solar panels is a brief 25 years. Click here for more detail. With care my old Honda can be expected to last that long. So the same people who worried about discarding old newspapers and beer cans without recycling have given us the avian genocide of windmills in the wind corridors and solar panels on our rooftops without worrying about sustainability. The costs of disposing of the old panels and manufacturing new ones do not figure in the progressive nightmare. Mention of costs versus benefits is considered racist. This makes retrogrades like me think more favorably about nuclear and hydroelectric power. Even with possible scientific breakthroughs in battery technology, which have bene impressive, wind and solar are still unreliable and futile. More detail here. Apart from the frenzied left, the rest of us are comfortable with sticking with what we know and what our infrastructures support until the costs, benefits, and true sustainability of all the contemporary nostrums have been proven. That means nuclear.
David A. Maskil (L. H. Kevil)
The Missouri Intelligencer 