Well-meaning people fret about whether humans really are warming the planet and whether Trump is doing harm. I recognize their rationalization. What harm could it do to go along with the Paris Accord? It’s like an insurance policy, right? And if you’re a guy in your fifties or sixties and your money is already made and you’re getting ready to retire that’s probably an easy way to accept it. But if you’re twenty or thirty or even forty years old you need steady work and steady growth to make your life work. You’re starting a career or buying a house or trying to get kids through college. And trying to do that in a low growth, energy poor economy is pretty ugly. That’s the Jimmy Carter/Barack Obama model. Small businesses disappearing, big businesses contracting and squeezing the workers for the privilege of keeping their jobs and government providing more bureaucrats and doling out the food stamps and misery to the serfs.
I saw this in the late seventies when I was coming of age. Jimmy Carter had an economy so bad that one of the cheapest insurance companies in the world gave its employees a bonus just because inflation made their paychecks so pathetic that even they felt pity for the workers. Now my kids and grandkids are growing up in this latest nightmare. The Masters of the Universe have exported all their opportunities to Asia and the Trust Find Kids have outlawed combustion because the planet has a fever. This was okay for George Bush and Barack Obama and the rest of the Washington gang because their kids all have jobs with the State Department or NBC. But mine don’t.
Donald Trump’s kids have all the money they’ll ever need and so do his grandkids. And maybe he really doesn’t care that our kids don’t. But at the very least he heard the people who are hurting and figured out how to get their votes. Let’s take this least flattering case. He’s just taking advantage of the ideological situation of working class white people revolting against progressive policy neglect. All just naked power politics no human feeling whatsoever.
I’ll still take it. It’s the best deal we’ve been offered in a generation. Ronald Reagan was a friendly face and a reassuring voice and a sensible speech. Donald Trump is an angry face and a hectoring voice and he communicates in staccato sound bites and slogans. But both of them are on my side. Whether ideologically or pragmatically they are aligned with me. And that’s good enough for me.
George Will was deploring the barbarians that have replaced his beloved conservative losers. Those cheerful cultured republicans of yesteryear who happily went down to defeat but kept their dignity and trust funds intact while the rest of us were fed to the progressives. Somehow, we need to be grateful for the manly effort they expended while adhering to the Marquess of Queensberry rules and gloriously not winning.
Well, sorry no. I want the narrative where we don’t lose and my descendants aren’t serfs. So no, no climate scam for me, thanks. If the temperature does increase by ten degrees F, I’ll move to Canada or Alaska or Siberia. In fact, that may be a better climate profile since Canada and Russia are the two largest countries on earth and both of them are too cold for much agriculture. And the idea that New England might be able to support orange trees and bananas doesn’t disturb me overmuch. Maybe I’ll become an orange rancher like my hero Harold Bisonette.
But anyway, that’s why I don’t have any sympathy for the environmentally sensitive. If they really are that worried about carbon emissions then let them get Leonardo DeCaprio and Al Gore and Barack Obama and Prince Charles to start taking sail boats when they travel to the latest environmental summit. Or better yet, let them skype instead. But either way I’ll keep using gasoline and heating oil as long as they last. After that I’m hoping hydrogen produced electrolytically from nuclear power plant generated electricity will be the fuel of the future. But, however we do it I’m certainly not going to worry about global warming. I’ll leave that to really smart people like Cher and Miley Cyrus.
