Since the notion of manmade climate change has been debunked by a number of experts, the dialogue on the subject has undergone some dramatic changes. Rather than attempting to assert the truthfulness of manmade climate change, environmentalists and supporters of cap and trade have redirected the American people’s attention to high gas prices and the effects of pollutants on children, in the hopes that voters will be swayed to inadvertently elect global warming warriors to office.
“You don’t have to be James Carville to figure out that talking about people’s health and the health of their children … is going to make a difference to the average voter,” said Daniel Weiss, director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Environmentalists have reportedly turned their attention to the Midwestern portion of the United States, focused on swing voters. The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has purchased an expensive advertisement to be shown in the swing states which features children breathing through asthma inhalers. The ad is intended to make the claim that a reduction in regulations for greenhouse emissions is directly related to incidences of asthma attacks.
“We’re going to talk a lot about the health implications of dirty air,” said Heather Taylor, director of NRDC’s political arm. “I think that the Midwest is one of those places where [there are] a million great clean energy stories, especially. And they’re not being told right now, because we’ve tended to be in other markets. That’s an area where we feel like it’s time to go tell those stories.”
The timing of the advertisement coordinates well with the release of poll numbers on public health and environmental regulations by the American Lung Association. According to the figures from that poll, the majority of respondents believe it is more important to ensure clean air quality than reduce unnecessary environmental regulations, 51 percent to 43 percent.
Notably, those figures change in battleground states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, where the Lung Association noted it was less likely that voters in those states believe protecting air quality outweighs the need to rein in regulations. In Ohio, for example, the numbers were turned on their heads, with 51 percent supporting repealing regulations over 43 percent who believed ensuring clean air quality was more important.
The American Lung Association has also launched a multi-million-dollar campaign against Republican efforts to repeal environmental regulations.
“We are sort of stepping up our public advocacy on who’s standing up for clean air and who’s standing up for big polluters,” said ALA Assistant Vice President Peter Iwanowicz.
Politico notes the wisdom of the strategy:
Republicans have portrayed President Barack Obama and his minions at various federal agencies as job killers in a time of high unemployment and fragile economic growth. The left has figured out it needs a better message — one that’s more resonant on the local level — to combat the job-killer talk.
So melting glaciers are giving way to smog-induced asthma. And fuel-efficiency is now a matter of pump prices, not pollutants.
But industry attorney Scott Segal has called the advertisement a “new low,” and asserts that it exploits childhood asthma.
Sierra Club National Political Director Tony Cani notes that the issues being addressed in the advertisement and clean air campaigns are directly related to climate change without explicitly saying so. He explained, “When we’re talking about the immediate effects of some of these policies and some of these issues that will lead to climate change, they’re very serious too. We think that when we’re talking about [health] issues … we’re still talking about climate change,” he added. They “might not be using that word or that phrase.”
Advocates of the notion of manmade climate change have been forced to retreat from their assertions because significantly fewer Americans now believe in it following the Climategate scandal.
Americans grew wise to the climate change scheme when it became clear that progressives and Marxists were seizing upon claims that the planet is in peril to negotiate cap and trade and climate change policies. Through the formation of the Chicago Climate Exchange, coupled with the failed cap and trade bill, innocuously named the “American Power Act,” industrialized “wealthy” nations such as the United States would have had to pay for carbon credits. The process would have taken American wealth and redistributed it to the rest of the world.
Still, environmental activists have attempted to repackage the notion of climate change a number of times over the course of the last few decades in an effort to sell it and the radical agenda that comes with it to the American people. The dialogue on climate change has been dramatically transformed since it first entered the American political sphere. In the 1970s, the progressives first attempted to convince the country that “global cooling” was the immediate threat. But by the 1980s, scientists had refuted that theory, prompting the progressives to turn their attention to “global warming.” Now that “green” scientists are in the uncomfortable position of trying to reconcile increased ice formations at the southern polar cap, long periods of cooler temperatures, etc., with global-warming theories, they have renamed the environmental issue “climate change.”
Obama’s science czar John Holdren even went a step further, introducing another term that would allow environmentalists to talk about any climate phenomenon and still package it as climate change: “global climate disruption.”
It was during his lecture to the Kavli Prize Symposium on September 6 that Holdren first coined the expression “global climate disruption.” He discussed a variety of aspects related to global climate disruption, summing up the focus of his speech by explaining, “The problem is that the world is getting most of the energy its economies need in ways that are wrecking the climate its environment needs.” Holdren said it is a myth that the Earth is no longer warming, and described the phenomenon as “highly uniform, not just about temperature, rapid compared to capacities for adjustment, and harmful for most places and times.”
At the start of his lecture, Holdren explained the transition from “global warming” to “global climate disruption”: “Climate change means disruption of the patterns. Global average temperature is just an index of the state of the global climate as expressed in these patterns. Small changes in the index [lead to] big changes in the patterns.”
Obama’s Science Czar could not very well allow the issue of climate change to die, as it would thwart efforts to pass tyrannical measures such as the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, which regulates virtually every product produced in America, and Cap and Trade, a system that punishes thriving industrial economies by imposing a tax on whatever bureaucrats decide is an excessive use of carbon. For Holdren, the solutions do not end there. According to the 1973 book Human Ecology: Global Problems and Solutions, which Holdren co-authored, he has long supported government population control, by any means necessary, and the destruction of the American economy.
As Americans are now on alert to the radical environmental agenda, President Obama is in the delicate position of having to avoid taking an extreme environmentalist position. Democratic pollster Thom Riehle contends that Republicans will attempt to force Obama into taking such a position. He explains, “Once the administration issues a proposal to reduce carbon dioxide from power plants, I would expect that Republicans and their super PAC would pounce on that proposal with all their might.”
In the meantime, the Democrats may be embarking on a losing battle if they pursue an agenda that is based on cleaning up air quality, as polls show that the majority of adults are satisfied with air quality.
