In a recent article for the Daily Signal, Professor Walter Williams of George Mason University wrote how each Earth Day is "accompanied by predictions of doom."

He points to the first Earth Day in 1970, when Professor George Wald of Harvard proclaimed that "civilization will end within 15 to 30 years," and how Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford repeated the Malthusian claim that the world population would overrun the food supply.

Earth Day has consistently been marked by apocalyptic environmental prophecies that never come to fruition.  This year's Earth Day was not at all different.  The Huffington Post warned us that we had passed a "frightening milestone" of CO2 in the atmosphere, and GreenPeace tweeted that we have only ten years to save the planet.

If these scare tactics are a reflection of the climate alarmism on Capitol Hill, the politicians aren't showing it.  When it comes to climate policy, there are two common trends with liberal politicians: a desire to grow government and blatant hypocrisy.

A perfect example of climate hypocrisy comes from former vice president Al Gore.  Gore was one of the first climate alarmists to make the discussion of so-called global warming popular with his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

In the film, Gore claimed that sea levels would rise upwards of 20 feet "in the near future."

He then took his share of the $24,000,000 the documentary earned and bought himself an $8-million mansion on one of the beaches he said would soon be underwater.  Clearly, the most universally known champion of climate change doesn't buy his own rhetoric.

It seems as if what constitutes as "good policy" to climate alarmists is any initiative that will increase the size and scope of the federal government while costing Americans their jobs.

For example, take the defining climate policy of the Obama administration, the Clean Power Plan.

Obama's former head of the Department of Energy, Charles McConnell, claimed that the Clean Power Plan would "reduce sea-level rise by the thickness of three sheets of paper ... and reduce the global temperature by 0.003 degrees Celsius."

The cost?  A measly $39 billion per year and a loss of 300,000 jobs per year.

And what happens when a climate change initiative doesn't meet liberal activists' goal of increasing the size of government?  Take a look at what happened in Washington state.

Washington's referendum "Initiative 732" called for a revenue-neutral carbon tax in exchange for decreases in the state's income tax, expanding tax credits for low-income families, and lowering the business tax rate.

While a carbon tax is a terrible idea, it is clear that this ballot initiative would not achieve the dramatic increases in taxes and spending that the left has become accustomed to in climate change legislation.

And this didn't sit well with the climate hawks.

Groups such as the Sierra Club, the Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy, and the Washington state Democratic Party came out heavily against the measure, stating that it did not invest in "green jobs, energy efficiency, transit, housing, and renewable energy."

In other words, it didn't expand the government enough.

The tax-and-spenders succeeded in defeating that measure, even at the risk of jeopardizing our planet!  The fact that Democrats in D.C. haven't offered a plan to fight climate change without growing government (or maybe a plan that, on net, shrinks it) shows they are very much on the same wavelength.

The only conclusion one can draw is that either liberals didn't believe the climate alarmism they peddled this Earth Day or they are willing to hold the planet hostage in order to raise your taxes.

Colton Grace is a free-market activist who has worked for a variety of campaigns and conservative non-profits.