Biden’s ‘green vision’ is forever failing its visionary, and the average Americans he would draft into its execution are made to suffer to realize his dream.
What’s worse? A mechanized war of conquest in Europe with the prospect of thermonuclear weapons parked in orbit over the United States and an illiberal coalition of near-peer competitors, rogue states, and their terrorist proxies — all of which are bent on putting an end to the age of American dominance by force? Or bad weather? According to Joe Biden, it’s the latter.
pool reporter at the fundraiser amends to say this was the full quote: “This is the last existential threat, it is climate. We have a crazy SOB like that guy Putin, and others, and we always have to worry about nuclear conflict, but the existential threat to humanity is climate.” https://t.co/30Bp5tnUtb
— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) February 22, 2024
Of course, statements like these are designed for the exclusive consumption of the Democratic Party’s most blinkered donors, whose largess insulates them from the world’s most acute crises. It’s probably a little foolish to parse a statement designed only to flatter the pretensions of the Left’s most effete parochialists. But why not?
The belief that severe weather events constitute more of an “existential threat to humanity” than modern great power conflict demands so much willful idealism from the believer that we might as well call it faith. All around us, we see the encroachment of the Hobbesian horrors America’s post–Cold War power temporarily held at bay. Survey the devastation wrought by Russia’s invading forces, the terror instigated by Iran’s terrorist allies, and the commensurate efforts by embattled countries to fortify their borders against barbarians with designs on their lands and their families, and we are privy not only to what actual “existential” crises look like but how serious polities respond to them.
By contrast, when we evaluate the effects of extreme weather events, we see disasters, not atrocities. What’s more, those disasters can be mitigated. We are forever being bombarded with eschatological predictions about our nightmarish future in which the living will envy the dead. “Climate change catastrophe” looms just over the horizon. In 2013, we were informed “how we’re all going to die in 2050” from meteorological episodes. Proponents of this sort of apocalypticism commit themselves to sheepishly explaining to the unenlightened public with an air of unearned pretension that just because fewer people are dying as a result of extreme weather events, that is not “evidence against climate ‘emergency.’”
Drawing a straight-line projection from today’s climate data — data that, in 2021, a Washington Post investigation found to be woefully inaccurate — toward a species-threatening cataclysm demands that we forget everything we know about how humanity engineers itself out of challenges. It is also a paradigm that allows its adherents to ignore all the unendurable impositions so-called green-transition initiatives impose on people who cannot afford to fork over five figures for a plate of warmed-over tilapia at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. Biden’s “green vision” is forever failing its visionary, and the average Americans whom Biden would draft into its execution are made to suffer to realize his dream.
This flight of fancy wouldn’t cause so much consternation if it didn’t come at the expense of addressing real, acute threats to the American way of life. If we are to take Biden’s word at face value, meeting the threats posed by hostile foreign powers and stateless terrorist actors and addressing climate change are mutually exclusive. If we must privilege one over the other, we should err on the side of national security. Priority number one must be to effectively deter our foreign adversaries and mitigate the menace posed by their desire to put an end to the peace and prosperity the Pax Americana has bestowed on us. The weather will be there waiting for us when that mission is concluded.