The 200-plus “youth activists” who stormed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s offices (see yesterday’s Common Sense) were protesting Pelosi’s leadership on climate issues. Soon-to-be Representative Ocasio-Cortez (D‑NY) was there to encourage Pelosi to listen to them.
“We need a Green New Deal,” Ocasio-Cortez informed her natural constituency, journalists, “and we need to get to 100 percent renewables because our lives depend on it.”
An impossible task, of course. Which means activists would always possess a reason to protest — forever and ever without end.
Still, Ocasio-Cortez and her friends seem earnest. The Representative-Elect insists “we have 10 years left and I — not just as an elected member, but as a 29-year-old woman — am thinking not just about what we are going to accomplish in the next two years but the America that we’re going to live in in the next 30 years.”
A little skepticism is in order. Prophecies to the effect that we have only “ten or 12 years left” after which “global warming will be irreversible” are made repeatedly … every ten years or so. Rinse.
“I think in 2018, when fires, floods, storms are getting worse,” another Pelosi protester reiterated, “and when the U.N. climate report says we have 12 years to radically transform our entire economy at a scale that’s unprecedented in human history, I think studying climate change is absolutely the wrong thing to do.”
What pearls of wisdom to conclude the coverage. Of course “studying climate change is absolutely the wrong thing to do” to “fix” climate change! Who needs information?
To fight climate change … or “radically transform our entire economy.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.