RUSH: Ed in Wheeling, West Virginia. Nice to have you on the EIB Network, sir.
CALLER: Thank you. And you’re worth it.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: My son, who I love more than life itself, is as far left as I am right. He’s a believer in global warming. But the one thing we have in common is we both enjoy a fine cigar. But my question is, what if the global warming people are correct, and we do nothing?
RUSH: Well, two things about this. Depending on how far back you want to go, if you go to RushLimbaugh.com to our Essential Stack of Stuff, you will find numerous stories on global warming where the advocates say, ‘It’s already too late that. We’ve passed the point of no return! There’s nothing that we can do.’ My answer to you, Ed, is, I don’t think we could cause it; and if we can’t cause it, we can’t fix it. When all of this industrialization started and people began to buy automobiles and electricity and electrically powered items, utensils, and gadgets and so forth, did anybody warn us back then that this might lead to the climate getting warmer, that we were going to perhaps bring about significant, catastrophic climate change?
Nobody did this. This first came up in 1984 shortly after five years of a global freeze attempt that was headlined in both the Newsweek magazine and TIME Magazine. ‘The coming ice age,’ they said. This is a purely political movement. It is ideological. Ask yourself why people on the left and right disagree. Because it’s understood that liberals are pushing this. It is the latest platform to expand what they believe in: Big Government, higher taxes, less mobility, less freedom, blaming America. This issue has it all, and it has it all in a way that is brilliant in this sense ’cause the damage isn’t supposed to happen for 30 years or so. The catastrophe is not supposed to happen for 30 years, so they get to own an issue for 30-years. Now they’re really wrong about that because if we did everything that they say, the earth would get dirtier.
Pollution would not be cleaned up. We wouldn’t have the energy or the power or the technology to do it. Lives would be lived in a much dirtier fashion. There would be far more pollution. Sanitation wouldn’t be nearly as good. It would be like in the 1800s, the late 1800s when your average city had horse manure in the streets. If they successfully ban the use of fossil fuels, all it would do is create a much larger mess. We already clean up our messes. We have already expanded the ability and the technologies to clean up pollution far better than any other major industrialized country in the world. If we sat around and did nothing? I can’t tell you what’s going to happen with the climate, neither can anybody else. Their models are flawed. If we did nothing, what’s going to happen? We can’t tell.
CALLER: Why can’t there be a compromise (garbled) in carbon emissions, and do something? I believe it’s cyclical, but my son believes it’s — it’s — it’s happening.
RUSH: See, I don’t want to compromise with communists. I don’t want to compromise with socialists. I don’t want to compromise with people who are going to blame one country for this, while we are supposed to compromise and be concerned about our ‘carbon footprint.’ The ChiComs have basically told the world to go to hell when it comes to that, that they’ve got an economy to grow, that they’ve got people to feed, that they have people to move around. What kind of compromise? Carbon footprint? Do you realize CO2 is not even a pollutant? It’s a necessary element —
CALLER: We have to have it, yes.
RUSH: — for life to take place on the planet. The complexity of the climate is such that there’s no way to measure why things happen climatically. All of this is a bunch of smoke and mirrors. A lot of people ask, ‘What if we do nothing?’ I would suggest to you that for the last 20 years we’ve actually been doing a lot. We’ve been engaging in carbon offsets, and people have been trying to conserve. There are a lot of Priuses and hybrids out there. You know, some people are actually unplugging their appliances, and some people are not using their air conditioners. There are a lot of guilty people out there who think they’re to blame. For 10 or 15 years they’ve been following the recipe. I ask you, have you yet heard one environmentalist wacko say, ‘Good job! We’re making progress!’
You don’t hear that. What you hear is, ‘My God, it’s getting worse! My God, we don’t have any time! Ten years and it’s over. The oceans are going to die.’ They have some of the most crazy claims. They say, ‘Terrorism will increase with global warming!’ They have all these scare tactics. The people in the UK, in a recently released poll, say they are fed up with all the tax increases and the restrictions in driving and other lifestyle areas that they have made in order to reduce carbon footprints, because they’ve been at it a lot longer than we have, and they now say they’re fed up with it because they understand that all this is is a ruse to raise taxes.
Because while they have been following orders and driving their little bubble cars and reducing their carbon footprints and paying the increased taxes, the advocates of manmade global warming continue to berate them and continue to whine and moan and sound apocalyptic, and so the people at the UK are saying, ‘Wait a minute. We’ve been doing a lot here, and you’re not going to give us any credit?’ They figured out it’s not about ending global warming. It’s about expanding government. It’s about raising taxes. It’s about making people feel as guilty as they can with prosperity. It is about making people think they are to blame for taking action with the way they’ve lived to destroy the planet, and therefore they have sinned. Because global warming is a religion, and the wages of sin are new taxes and more control by bureaucrats over people’s lives. It is a hideous, hideous, deceitful policy that is designed to do only one thing, and that is not affect the climate of the planet because we don’t have that power. It’s plain and simple. So why compromise with them?
CALLER: The one thing I keep thinking about is, I’m a downside energy manager and manufacturing engineer, and I’m a total believer in cause and effect, and maybe possibly — possibly; I’m not saying we are, because I believe that this is cyclical — we might be causing some problems. That’s my comment.
RUSH: Okay, your a downsized energy manager and manufacturing engineer?
CALLER: Yes. Yes.
RUSH: And you’re a total believer in cause and effect?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Is that what you said?