RUSH: I found something; I brought it in with me today. When I was home at Christmas with the familia, my sister-in-law, Lisa, gave me a copy of the Saturday Evening Post from 1958 and a story about the climate — 1958, how to control the climate — which reminds me. I touted this thing all day yesterday; never got to it. This literally… This is just odd, the weirdest, strangest piece. This is a law professor at Columbia University. I’m not gonna mention his name ’cause I don’t want to embarrass him.
He’s written a hand-wringing piece over the struggle of the decision whether or not to have a child, whether or not to bring a child into a world that’s on the verge of destruction because of climate change. The guy’s a law professor. He’s teaching law at Columbia University. And before the program ends today, I’m gonna share with you some of the excerpts from this. It’ll tell you why there are young kids like Greta Thunberg running around scared to death that the earth will not support human life in 12 years or 30 or whatever.
It’s frightening in and of itself, in addition to being insane.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now to this piece here. The Atlantic is where it was published. I say that the guy is a lawyer. He is a “professor of environmental law,” so he’s probably just an environmentalist wacko, and his piece is entitled, “The Concession to Climate Change I Will Not Make — I’ve never thought we should stop having children. But I will have to teach our son to wonder at the world before he learns to fear for it.” Now, before I give you some pull quotes, I just want to remind you.
Folks, this audience is growing at geometric proportions, and there are new people tuning in every hour. There are new people tuning in every minute, certainly every day. And, you know, I’m in the communication business, and I want people to be able to put things in context as quickly as possible, because understanding is what I’m attempting to achieve here, among many other things. I have to acknowledge that with new people turning on this show each and every day, they’re starting at ground zero.
They’ve only heard what they’ve heard about the program. It’s largely untrue and negative. They tune in and realize they’re shocked and stunned that I and the program and you on the phones are not what they’re expecting. To some people, I guess it is. They hear true things about it. So this is why I sometimes am repetitive, and I appreciate your letting me do that. One of the things to set this up, this is a piece is written by somebody who obviously has devoted his life to scaring people.
I think the climate change movement, the politics of it and all that are one thing. But what they have done… It’s a political issue. It’s nothing more than a political issue, and they have failed. They have failed to make it mainstream, and so they keep going more extreme and more extreme in their warnings and in their predictions in order to get people to pay attention and believe it — and in the process, they have literally scared some people to death.
It’s one of the most irresponsible things the left has done because this issue of climate change contains every issue and mechanism for persuasion or propagandizing or indoctrination that they employ. They seduce people by preying on their desire to have their life mean something. They acknowledge that you probably have a meaningless life, but you can now have meaning. Then they blame people for the problem but then offer them redemption. You have caused this problem. Your parents have caused this problem! But you can help fix it.
Climate change takes every notion of individuality out of people. It scares; it frightens; it causes panic. I mean, every element that the left uses to advance its agenda is contained in this one issue. So I ran across this piece over the break. It’s in The Atlantic, which is a widely read by a bunch of liberals online magazine.
” Our first child was born at the end of August. I am not a young parent; I was born in 1974, and in the span of this one generation, global carbon levels rose by nearly twice as much as in all of human history before. I teach environmental law, so naturally people get around to asking whether my wife and I struggled with what it means to bring a child onto this troubled planet, and whether it is a good thing to do at all. I take the point.”
Now, listen to the way this guy describes his son, folks. This is how he views his new baby. “James added his seven pounds, 10 ounces to a planet where humans and our domestic animals together outweigh the other land-based vertebrates by 24 to 1. As an American, he can expect to emit 16 metric tons of carbon a year, compared with five for a French newborn and about two for a baby in India or Indonesia.”
So you see, his son’s already guilty. His son’s guilty of polluting the planet worse than a French kid or an Indian kid simply by virtue of the accident of his birth, where he’s an American, he’s more destructive than any kid anywhere in the world. Imagine the guilt complex this kid’s gonna have growing up. But wait. We haven’t even gotten started yet.
“Unless he’s a saintly hermit, he’ll have little personal choice about that carbon load. Most of it is dictated by the roads, engines, and sources of energy that will keep him cool or warm, provide his food, and move him around. He can’t opt out of these systems without opting out of human life as we live it now.”
But the option is there, isn’t it? To save the planet, his kid could die. “Sometime not too long after he starts asking about the change from winter to spring, or the migration patterns of the geese that sometimes pass high overhead, I will need a way to explain that climate change is destroying habitats, acidifying the oceans, and making large parts of the planet’s land uninhabitable for people. To quote the cards from friends and family that we’ve lovingly placed around our apartment: Welcome, baby.”
So this is the world he’s welcoming his kid to. You’re gonna destroy the planet. You have nothing to say about it because you live in America. You don’t have anything to do about it. This stinks. Your forebears have made much of this planet uninhabitable. Imagine the guilt trip this kid’s gonna have.
“This is what I find myself saying, to this little person who can’t understand me quite yet: ‘The world is good, for all the bad in it—a good place. And you are good: full of joy, born innocent. But you are not good for the world. When you do all the things you will do—work, play, love—you will be breaking down its systems, making it unlivable. And there is very little that you, personally, can do about it.’”
What kind of person thinks this way? What kind of person ponders transmitting messages like this to their own sons and daughters? But they’re all over the place, folks. They’re everywhere. This is why I’ve always told our climate scientists, you’re wasting your time debating this issue in terms of science with these people.
This is so beyond science. This is in the realm here that you and I can’t even relate to. You and I would no more raise our kids with this kind of fear and panic and blame and then send ’em off to school where they’re gonna double down on this kind of teaching. And this guy’s — well, he’s not gonna move to India because there’s no Columbia University there to teach environmental law.
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