by Robert M. Traxler

“Millennials, and Gen Z and all these folks wo come after us, are looking up and we’re like ‘the world will end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change, and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?'” — United States House of Representatives Alexandra Ocasio Cortez 2018.

History teaches us that the much sought after Northwest Passage, an all-water route across North America, was believed to be found in northern Canada. An ice-free opening was discovered, and a few ships made the passage to China and its lucrative trade; many were trapped in the ice with the loss of all hands. Climate change (warming) changed the ice thickness for short periods of time in the 19^th century.

History teaches that explorers from Scandinavia established settlements in Greenland, around 870 AD, lived in them for 20 generations, then disappeared. The consensus that is because of climate change making it colder, fish and whales relocated, and it became harder to raise the cattle and crops necessary to survive.

An old saying is that history started the day we are born; humans tend to see history in the short term in our own lifetimes. Israel was founded in 1947 by the United Nations, by the way, not more than 2,000 years ago as we find in historical documents.

Native Americans have made war with each other for centuries before the white man arrived on the North American continent. Which Native American group owned what land area when, who has a claim to original people status in what areas, are questions one should ask, but it is not politically correct to do so.  

Slavery existed before the white man enslaved the first black man in the Americas. Native Americans joined Europeans, Asians and Africans in the practice of slavery. No one can condone slavery, but we must realize it did not start in 1619 in the Dutch colony that is now the United States as the 1619 project teaches.

History teaches us that it existed among Native peoples in what is now the United States of America and the rest of the world for 14,000 to 11,000 years before 1619, but who cares?  We are not allowed to question politically correct history. Progressives will be angry that this has been pointed out and cite the treatment of original peoples. Their treatment was horrible, even criminal, but it does not change history before the first European arrived in the Americas. 

We should look to history to evaluate future actions, not necessarily to repeat it, but to learn from it. Climate change has existed before man, or humans or persons (we must be politically correct), inhabited the earth. Current belief is that an extermination event happened before we have any record of human life that killed the dinosaurs. Current science tells us that the deserts were once oceans in the time before humans; the climate changes. 

Quite frankly, we must be concerned that we are spending trillions on programs based on global climate change that we have no control over. Like it or not, China, and India and increasingly Africa pollute more than Western Europe and North America, a good bit more and increasing.

Progressive political correctness dictates that we export pollution to poor, massively populated areas, effecting more folks than our paltry 4% of Mother Earth’s humans. The progressives are patting themselves on the back, receiving awards and decorations for reducing carbon in our nation and Western Europe, while massively increasing worldwide carbon emissions.

Symbolism over substance is the goal; ignoring the deaths of millions of poor folks from respiratory diseases in Asia, the Asian sub content and Africa is the norm to our progressive friends — denial is not just a river in Egypt. Industry and environmentalists joining together to reduce carbon in our nation is a marriage made in nirvana.

The corporations pay a tithe to the progressive groups; the United Nations and the environmental groups give the corporations political cover, all the while overall carbon increases worldwide.

Time to wake up and accept the one planet concept and look at the environmental facts; we have met the enemy, and it is not us. My opinion.