Colin McNickle At Large

Bill Peduto’s Fantasyland foe

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Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto issued an executive order last week calling for, among other things, a reduction of fossil fuel emissions and making the city “carbon-neutral” by 2050.

But the order is problematic on a number of levels, beginning with its dubious opening claim:

“Whereas, climate change is a global issue with severe local impacts, and as a result of our changing climate, Pittsburgh has experienced record rainfall and snowfall, hotter than normal summer months, and landslides that have devastated our neighborhoods and strained our municipal budget … .”

But no reasonably educated human being can make the cause-and-effect claim that “climate change” (formerly “global warming”) is to blame.

And that’s just the beginning of an entreaty that only can be described as cow tripe, overstuffed with fantastical (as in “illusory,” not “wonderful”) social re-engineering designs.

Peduto’s executive order is such a mishmash of political causes masquerading as public policy that it is a gross perversion of, and embarrassment to, the latter.

There’s divesting pension funds from those dastardly fossil fuels that fueled great philanthropies that, to this day, Peduto attempts to exploit.

Then there’s forcing corporations to heel to “climate change”-related “social … guidelines.”

Consider Peduto’s inexplicable call to make it government’s role to provide “culturally acceptable” food.

Or to encouraging “Pittsburghers to ‘recycle right,’” never mind that the claimed benefits of most recycling long has been dubious.

And, lest it be passed over, the gobbledygook of “a comprehensive strategy to lead a just transition from heavy industry to a more sustainable future.”

A “just transition”? Really? Well, you get the warped picture.

And this social manifesto nonsense goes on and on in Peduto’s executive order. As does the specter of regionalization that one is forced to ask: “At what cost, economically and to personal liberty?”

Is there any redeeming value in Peduto’s executive order? Some, such as calls for greater energy efficiency – as long as the energy it takes to implement the “efficiency” is not greater that the energy already used, as too often is the case.

And, yes, we all can, individually, become greater stewards of our

environment. Indeed, that is the difference between environmentalism and conservationism.

As Heartland Institute scholar H. Sterling Burnett often has reminded, there is little doubt that the Earth has been warming, just as it has gone through cooling periods. It is, after all, the natural, cyclical nature of the planet in which sunspot activity plays a major role, he reminds.

“(B)ut the list of breaches of the scientific method and ethics by researchers whose careers are intimately tied to the ‘truth’ of climate alarmism provides more than enough reason to doubt the claim that the science is settled and the Earth is doomed, absent giving government authoritarian control over all aspects of peoples’ lives.”

Bill Peduto is not the first and he won’t be the last politician to exploit “climate change” in an attempt to re-order society in the name of “progressive equity.”

And in a once proud city now plagued not by “climate change” but by, among other maladies, a rising serious crime rate (a child recently had his throat slashed in a Downtown McDonald’s) and an utterly failed public school system (“achievement” is an oxymoron in Pittsburgh Public Schools), declaring war on a largely mythical foe should force residents to wonder in what Fantasyland its leaders are living.

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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