But never fear! A solution is at hand (wink wink) to this wasteful problem. Jon Sufrin helpfully provided it in an essay headlined “TP Free: Why I Stopped Using Toilet Paper (and You Should, Too),” published in 2018 by the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail. To save our planet, Sufrin helpfully explained that “four months ago, I decided to remove toilet paper from my life completely. I now step into the shower after using the toilet and use nothing but water (a miraculous cleaning agent) and my own hand, which I wash afterward with soap.”24
Lovely. Thanks, but no.
Progressives are deluded enough to think their climate change hype can frighten you into abandoning toilet paper, but they decided something more dramatic would be needed to take your gas stove—the health and safety of children. Their usual incantation is that fossil fuels are evil incarnate and must be abandoned completely if we are to save the planet. So out, damn gas stove, out!
In January 2023, when Biden-appointed Consumer Product Safety Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. announced that a ban on gas stoves was “on the table,”25 we suddenly saw a united media narrative declaring that gas stoves were responsible for over 12 percent of childhood asthma. That’s a scary headline that understandably would provoke worry, concern, and fear, and that’s the point. The media coverage coinciding with Trumka’s statement was prompted by a study asserting that a significant percentage of childhood asthma could be attributed to gas stoves. The problem is, it’s not true.
The group behind the study is the Rocky Mountain Institute, a green energy group that describes itself as an entity that “transforms the global energy system to secure a clean, prosperous, zero-carbon future for all.”26 The backlash was swift after the study itself came under scrutiny, leading the RMI to deny that their study made the connection. The Washington Examiner reported, “Responding to a request for comment, RMI manager Brady Seals told the Washington Examiner in an email . . . that the think tank’s study ‘does not assume or estimate a causal relationship between childhood asthma and natural gas stoves.’ Rather, she said, it ‘only reports on a population-level reflection of the relative risk given what we know about exposure to the risk factor.’”27
Why the confusion that led to the walk back? Perhaps it was due to how Seals had been promoting the RMI study. At her LinkedIn page, as an example, she wrote: “Our new study is finally out. We found 12.7% of US childhood asthma can be attributed to gas stove use. This is similar to children’s asthma risk of being exposed to secondhand smoke. In some states like Illinois, California and New York that number is around 20%. It is clear we must move away from fossil fuel appliances and go all-electric, not only for the climate but for our health,”28 with a link to the four-page study.29
Sounds at least like a causal relationship assumption, no? It’s good she clarified, but the gas-stoves-give-kids-asthma cat was out of the bag.
Yet, months after the debunking of the causal link to childhood asthma with gas stoves, as well as a multitude of other studies finding no connection between gas stoves and children’s health, Chicken Little news and opinion pieces continued to appear.30
In the meantime, legacy media and even Democratic senator Chuck Schumer told us that concerns about gas stoves being banned were a “MAGA conspiracy theory.”31 And yet multiple blue states and cities are—wait for it—banning gas stoves. The web magazine Fast Company cites ninety-nine US cities and counties having “some form of building decarbonization ordinance in place.”32 Most recently, New York State has banned gas stoves in new residential buildings. New York City already issued a ban for new buildings in 2021. Once again, a “conspiracy” that ended up being true.
Yet of all the fear-induced madness spawned by climate alarmists, the biggest and most breathtakingly idiotic of them all has to be the Green New Deal, introduced in 2019 by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and fellow Democrat Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. In addition to banning the use of almost all fossil fuels in ten years, the proposal is a far-far left wish list of irrational ideas, including providing universal health care and guaranteed jobs paying wages high enough to support a family for all Americans. The ten-year plan would cost taxpayers anywhere from at least $10 trillion, according to supporters, and up to $93 trillion, according to critics.33
The Green New Deal, which died in the Senate, also called for eliminating as many gasoline-powered vehicles “as is technologically feasible,” building hundreds or even thousands of renewable energy facilities around the nation, removing all greenhouse gas emissions and pollution from all industries and farms, making every building in the United States energy efficient by 2030, expanding high-speed train service on “a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary” (someone neglected to check with Hawaii for their opinion), and making college free.
“Green New Deal” is a misnomer. It should really be called the “Giant New Disaster,” considering that, if implemented, the only thing left would be the ruins of Western civilization. But once again, we stumble upon the point.
Besides blowing a gigantic hole in the federal budget, the plan would destroy millions of American jobs, sending US industries to other countries.34, 35, 36
Ocasio-Cortez proposed paying for all this by taxing income above $10 million a year at a 70 percent rate (the top tax rate is currently 37 percent), and by deficit spending and simply printing more money.37 Really.
Climate alarmism has run rampant for decades and has often been proven wrong over time. In fact, just listing all the exaggerated and inaccurate statements made by climate change alarmists would take up more pages than are in this book. The New York Post published a partial list in 2021 of planetary disasters that were wrongly predicted over the past fifty years.38 The newspaper reported that in 1972, a headline screamed, “UN Environment Protection Boss Warns: ‘We Have Ten Years to Stop the Catastrophe.’” Somehow, we have survived. Then in 1982, the New York Times breathlessly reported that Mostafa K. Tolba, executive director of the United Nations environmental program, said that if nations continued their prevailing policies by the year 2000, the world would face “an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust.”39 Yeah, no.
In 1989, another UN official predicted disaster would strike in 1999, with “Global disaster, nations wiped off the face of the earth, crop failures.”40 Funny, I don’t remember that one happening either. Piling on, the Guardian (a British newspaper) reported in 2004 that “a secret report from the Pentagon to President George W. Bush said climate change would ‘destroy us.’” One prediction was that Britain would develop a “Siberian” climate by 2020. News flash: it didn’t. Another was that the world would be plagued by nuclear war, severe droughts, famine, and rioting. Well, if this was a prediction of the impact of the disastrous Joe Biden presidency, this at least could have been fact-checked as partially true.41
Lies, Panic, and Bad Decisions
These hyperbolic assertions have been repudiated not just by the passage of time, but by many reputable experts, including Michael Shellenberger, president of Environmental Progress (an independent nonprofit research organization). A longtime environmental and energy expert who was designated as a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine for his work to reduce the impact of climate change, Shellenberger is also the author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, which is rooted in science rather than climate alarmism.
Shellenberger argues that while climate change is real, its harmful impacts have been enormously exaggerated. He points out that carbon dioxide emissions have been declining, and innovations like increased reliance on nuclear power (which emits no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases) can prevent the harmful impacts of a warming climate that alarmists claim are heading our way.42
In an article in Forbes magazine in 2019, Shellenberger wrote that “no credible scientific body has ever said climate change threatens the collapse of civilization, much less the extinction of the human species.”43 He wrote in the same Forbes article: “Journalists and activists alike have an obligation to describe environmental problems honestly and accurately, even if they fear doing so will reduce their news value or salience with the public.” He also noted that exaggerated fears of climate disaster “have real-world impacts,” pointing out that “a group of British psychologists said children are increasingly suffering from anxiety from the frightening discourse around climate change.”44
Bjørn Lomborg, who has authored three books about climate change and is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center think tank in Denmark, agrees that the dangers of a slight warming of global temperatures have been greatly exaggerated. He does warn of the grave dangers of such climate alarmism. “A YouGov poll in 2019 found that almost half of the world’s population believes climate change will likely end the human race,” he wrote in an op-ed published by Britain’s Sky News in 2020. “It makes school children ask why they should educate themselves, when they don’t have a future anyway. If climate change really could end the world, then perhaps this alarmism might be warranted, but that is simply not the case.” He added: “Climate alarm has real consequences. When we panic, we make bad decisions. Over the decades, we have consistently chosen expensive and inefficient climate solutions, costing trillions of dollars, that have had almost no effect.”45
Lomborg, Shellenberger, and other climate experts who shun alarmism say innovation is the best way to cut our reliance on fossil fuels and move to other energy sources—including solar, wind, hydropower, and nuclear power—that don’t emit greenhouse gases.46, 47, 48 They’re right. This climate alarmism prompts us to act irrationally, out of fear and anxiety, spending money on the wrong things, and neglecting more urgent needs, and sometimes doing more harm than good.
One example of irrational action caused by climate alarmism is the idiotic war on fossil fuels. For Marxists, fossil fuels must be targeted because they have driven wars and empires, but perhaps more importantly, personal freedom and genuine human progress.
Fossil fuels play a major role in modern agriculture around the world. Developing nations struggling to feed their populations need to prioritize increasing their food production, so it makes sense for them to move from primitive to modern farming practices, even though tractors and other farm equipment are powered by diesel fuel or gasoline engines that emit greenhouse gases. The mechanization of agriculture has allowed America to replace 22 million horses and mules with about 5 million tractors and enabled a mere 1.4 percent of the US workforce in 2020 to produce enough food for our nation and millions of people around the world. In contrast, in 1900, it took 41 percent of the American workforce working on farms to feed our population.49, 50
In addition, a by-product of oil refining, petroleum coke, is used to manufacture ammonia and urea ammonium nitrate used to create nitrogen fertilizers, which increase crop yield.51 It would make no sense for developing nations to refuse to modernize their farming and, as a result, let their citizens go hungry in the name of fighting climate change. And farmers in America and other developed nations obviously aren’t going to turn back the clock and start plowing their fields with horses and mules and stop using modern fertilizers on their crops, triggering food shortages that would bring about mass starvation.
Deadly Consequences
At its most extreme, climate alarmism has deadly consequences. Tragically, a fifty-year-old climate activist set himself on fire on Earth Day in April 2022 in front of the Supreme Court to protest the lack of action to fight climate change. He died of the severe burns he suffered.
Dr. Kritee Kanko, a Zen Buddhist priest and climate scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, tweeted afterward: “This guy was my friend. He meditated with our sangha. This act is not suicide. This is a deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to climate crisis. We are piecing together info but he had been planning it for at least one year . . . I am so moved.”52 To romanticize and essentially endorse such a horrific act is the height of irresponsibility and highlights the nature of the rhetoric the emotionally vulnerable hear far too often. The suicidal activist had posted a warning of “irreversible” climate change on his Facebook page and placed a fire emoji next to it with his planned date of self-immolation nearly three weeks before killing himself.53
Fortunately Dr. Kanko, perhaps recognizing the deleterious effect of the constant climate fear/catastrophizing on well-meaning people, adjusted her sentiment. She told the New York Times in an interview “that she was not completely certain of his intentions, but that ‘people are being driven to extreme amounts of climate grief and despair’ and that ‘what I do not want to happen is that young people start thinking about self-immolation.’”54
In the midst of the loss of her friend, she did not need to reject her concern for the environment, but recognized the unacceptable extremes to which some people are being driven by the liquid fear dominating “social justice” issues.
Similarly, in 2018, a sixty-year-old lawyer and environmentalist poured gasoline on himself and set himself ablaze in Booklyn’s Prospect Park to call attention to global warming and pollution. “My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves,” he wrote in an email he sent to news organizations immediately before ending his life.55
Both of these shocking events are a horrible but predictable result of unrelenting doomsday prophesizing and humanity-loathing by climate alarmists, leftist gadflies, and cynical politicians. They are indictments not of climate change but of the horrific rhetoric used to radicalize compassionate people with prophecies of annihilation. Accusations of human (ergo personal) responsibility for a global cataclysm can push some over an edge.
On Earth Day in 2022, one leftist candidate for Congress tweeted a meme saying, “Nature always wins. Maybe humans are the disease and COVID is the cure,”56 prompting at least one reader to suggest being anti-human and/or pro-COVID wasn’t exactly the best way to get people to vote for him.
David Graber, a research biologist for the National Park Service, asserts that human beings have become a “cancer” and “plague” on Earth, and to correct that problem, “some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”57
In 2020, Britain’s leftist The Guardian newspaper featured Les Knight, a man leading a campaign “for the extinction of the human race.” In his column, he explains, “We’re causing the extinction of hundreds of thousands of other species. With us gone, I believe ecosystems will be restored and there will be enough of everything. . . . If we go extinct, other species will have a chance to recover. I’ll never see the day when there are no humans on the planet, but I can imagine what a magnificent world it would be—provided we go soon enough.”58
The New York Times chimed in with its stamp of approval on the idea that the existence of humanity isn’t all it’s been purported to be by publishing an opinion piece by Todd May, a professor of philosophy at Clemson University, not very subtly titled “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?”59
Coy and manipulative, May’s answer to the headline is—surprise—nope, not really a tragedy. We’re just too awful, you see. “Our species possesses inherent value, but we are devastating the earth and causing unimaginable animal suffering.”60 And after all, how would it be a tragedy if everyone is gone and no one is left to lament our absence? “It may well be, then, that the extinction of humanity would make the world better off and yet would be a tragedy. I don’t want to say this for sure, since the issue is quite complex.”61
Remember my corollary about the left’s tactics mirroring domestic violence perpetrators—as you read this—domestic abuse victims are three times more likely to commit suicide than nonvictims.62 Their abusers inflict so much despair and hopelessness they give up, and the suicidal ideation often originates with their abuser. This is not an accidental similarity when we think about the goals of sociopathic abusive spouses and what we see coming from the far-left fringe.
Nonhostile coverage in the New York Times on any issue is viewed as its stamp of approval for the leftist worldwide intelligentsia. And so it is for the obscene idea of suicide as a national duty of humanity. Readers are introduced to thinking that their (and everyone else’s) very existence is a stain on nature and all that is good. This disgraceful rhetoric permeating so much of liberal society becomes one more piece of the puzzle explaining why human interaction is increasingly cruel, unforgiving, and violent.
The all-humans-must-die theme is not a new refrain from the left. As with everything rooted in envy, Marxism has finessed the reasons why we would all be better off with huge groups of people gone.