PrintDecember 27, 2023
A prophetic warning about the latest global warming narrative going around
A couple weeks ago, American Thinker contributor Eric Utter noted that a U.K. study is out there, claiming that human breathing is contributing to global warming.
This story has been making the rounds among conservative websites, so I call your attention to a prophetic take on it from fifty years ago.
Back in the late 70s (while still in my 20s) I taught a course in energy and environmental policy at Metro State University in St. Paul, Minnesota. While I was "James Watt" there even before there was a James Watt, and made that clear to my students, I also made it clear that I was not toeing anyone's line.
The theme of the course was "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch," in environmental policy just as in everywhere else. The point was to get my students to understand the tradeoffs involved in such policy decisions. For example, if you were against nuclear power, you had to recognize the cost of alternatives or of going without.
I didn't assign it as required reading, but I did recommend D. Keith Mano's 1973 novel "The Bridge"--the story of a world in which the enviros obtain complete hegemony. Food as we know it is forbidden, and humans live off an inorganic "e-diet" instead. Finally, the powers that be conclude that breathing results in the death of airborne microorganisms whose right to survival is surely at least as legitimate as ours, so everyone has to commit suicide. One man, Dominick Priest, resists. He and his spawn eventually re-populate the earth, and the epilogue takes place six hundred years later when the predominant religion is based on him as humankind's savior.
I'm sorry D. Keith Mano didn't live to see his satire frighteningly become real. The WEF has explicitly called for human population to be reduced to no more than 500 million, and they're doing a pretty good job on that so far, what with assaults on food production, exotic pestilence, fentanyl, abortions, feminism and trannyism, and endless war.
To me this is the most urgent political issue of our time. I wish it were on the GOP radar screen, but the Stupid Party continues to blow its chances.
Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License
