Colin McNickle At Large

A republic of eco-bludgeoned subservient sheeple

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The Old Farmer’s Almanac is predicting a cold and snowy winter for our region. But new federal ecocratic policies sure to be embraced by the plethora of “progressives” in state and local leadership positions could make the coming winter and every season to come unbearable.

As The Wall Street Journal reported last week:

“The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has launched an office that will treat climate change as a public-health issue, designed to address what the White House says are health risks, including those that disproportionately affect poor and minority communities.”

The mission of the new Office of Climate Change and Health Equity (there’s a loaded name for a government office if there ever was one) is “to protect the health of people experiencing a disproportionate share of climate impacts and health inequities from wildfires to drought, to hurricanes to floods,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.

Never mind such linkage is specious at best.

But as George Mason University economics scholar Donald Boudreaux noted in the aftermath of the report, “The policy change triggering this headline is as predictable as it is ominous.”

As Boudreaux sees it:

“Politicians and bureaucrats – assisted by mavens in the media – have learned over the past 18 months that hysterical assertions of imminent danger to the public health are sufficient to frighten the populace into abject submissiveness.”

He reminds that the actual degree of danger relative to that of the countless other risks that we humans routinely confront — as well as the likelihood that the coercive measures ostensibly imposed to protect us from the trumpeted danger will succeed — are irrelevant.

“All that matters is that some risk be portrayed as posing an unprecedentedly lethal threat to the public health,” Boudreaux continues.

“If such a portrayal succeeds, there are no limits to the amount of freedom and dignity that ordinary people will sacrifice in exchange for the promise of protection from the putative danger.

“And also, of course, no limits to the amount of power that government officials will seize and exercise under the pretense of supplying such protection.”

Coincidentally, all this coming new government enviro-health overlording arrives at the same time as do damning reports that don’t even come close to jibing with the planet-is-melting narrative.

As Issues & Insights, the offshoot commentary site of Investor’s Business Daily, recently reported, citing scholar scientific reviews:

  • There’s been no change in sea surface temperatures along Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in 150 years.
  • S​​​ea levels near British Columbia were almost 300 feet higher 14,500 years ago than they are today and were about 30 feet higher 1,800 years ago.
  • Deaths associated with extreme temperatures have been declining since 2000.
  • Environmental Protection Agency and National Hurricane Center data show hurricanes have neither become more numerous or more powerful during the past half-century of modest warming.

And lest we forget this biggie (again, as Issues & Insights recounts):

“According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, (Antarctica’s) annual maximum sea ice has grown for three straight years. The annual mean is increasing, and the annual minimum has also expanded for three consecutive years.

“The long-term trend lines for the annual maximum and mean, starting in 1979, are noticeably moving upward, while the trend line for the annual minimum is ascending, as well, though much more modestly,” Issues & Insights notes.

And, oh, by the way the Great Lakes are not drying up, as the eco-wackos predicted they would by now. And those same mavens of hysteria pretty much as ignoring the legion of scientific evidence that suggest the Earth is entering a cooling cycle.

But none of this will stop those at the federal, state or local level from pushing their “social justice” agenda all in the name of “saving the planet from humans.” As but one of many putrid examples, think of the head-long rush by Pennsylvania officials to join the fraudulent Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

It is behavior – an eco-bludgeoning of the populace – that is wholly unbecoming of, and embarrassing to, our human intellectual capacity. Unchallenged – and worse, unstopped – our grand republic will be reduced to a subservient sheeple nation.

Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).

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Colin McNickle
Colin McNickle

Colin received his B.G.S. from Ohio University. The 40-year journalism veteran joined the Institute in October 2016. That followed a 22-year career with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 18 as director of editorial pages for Trib Total Media. Prior that, Colin had a long and varied career in media — from radio, newspapers and magazines, to United Press International and The Associated Press.

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