The Boston suburb of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has become the first U.S. city to mandate warning labels on fuel pumps meant to alert drivers to the “dangers” posed to the climate by filling their vehicles with gasoline. The labels will be on all fuel pumps in the city and will premier “fairly soon,” according to a city spokesman.
City officials are apparently just waiting on the printer to deliver the stickers to begin plastering fuel pumps in the city with bright yellow warning signs, which caution drivers, “Warning. Burning Gasoline, Diesel and Ethanol has major consequences on human health and on the environment including contributing to climate change.”
The city, which is home to Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes that the warning stickers will engage citizens in the fight against climate change.
“The city of Cambridge is working hard with our community to fight climate change,” the city spokesman said. “The gas pump stickers will remind drivers to think about climate change and hopefully consider non-polluting options.”
Cambridge has a goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 80 percent and using carbon offsets to appear “carbon neutral” by the year 2050.
The final version of the warning label is rather tame compared to other suggestions. The climate alarmist group Beyond the Pump favored a version the read, “Continuing to burn gasoline (or diesel) worsens the climate emergency, with major impacts on your health increasing over time.”
“Labels are designed to create a feeling like someone has broken a rule or violated the law,” said Jamie Brooks of Beyond the Pump. “This feeling, along with increased social pressure, like smoking labels, can translate to a collapse in trust for the current system, thereby increasing the public appetite for alternatives.”
Vancouver, British Columbia, in Canada already has warning labels on its pumps. Those labels accuse drivers of contributing to the starvation of children by gassing up. A photo of Africans, mostly children, is followed by, “Use of this fuel product contributes to climate change which may cause drought and famine.”
An organization called Our Horizon, another climate alarmist organization, claims responsibility for the Canadian stickers. Other designs include a photo of a deer being trailed by a fawn on a snowy landscape with the warning, “Use of this fuel product contributes to climate change which may put up to 30% of species at a likely risk of extinction,” and an underwater scene saying, “Use of this fuel product contributes to ocean acidification which puts much marine life at risk of extinction.”
So, they’re not very subtle about their claims, dubious as they might be.
The Earth allegedly produces some 800 billion tons of CO2 emissions annually — a number claimed by climate alarmist John Cook and cited by such sources as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC). According the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a normal vehicle produces an average of 4.6 tons per year. As Tony Heller from Real Climate Science points out, that’s a staggeringly small percentage with each vehicle producing 0.00000000006 percent of the globe’s total CO2 output. But sure, let’s make drivers feel guilty about gassing up their cars anyway.
There are benefits to more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that climate alarmists generally will not acknowledge. NASA has published evidence that the increase in CO2 is having a greening effect on much of the Earth. Even the UNIPCC has acknowledged that some greening has taken place, though it maintains that CO2 is more scourge than savior.
Make no mistake: Warning labels such as these are designed to give gasoline the cigarette treatment. Warning labels on cigarettes, and punitive taxation on the product, eventually led to smoking becoming a commonly recognized taboo in much of the developed world. Now, we are starting to get warning labels on fuel. How long until increased taxation will make buying fuel for your personal vehicle untenable?
Without fear mongering, the climate alarmist movement doesn’t have much going for it. Warning labels on fuel pumps are meant to scare the under-informed into gradually decreasing their fuel consumption. It’s not about saving the planet; it’s about transforming our behavior in a way that makes us less free.
