by Robert M. Traxler

To all the supporters of the Green New Deal: where are you?

After four columns, not one supporter has posted a comment in defense of the Green New Deal. When it came out, it was trumpeted by our friends on the left as the savior of the world, but no one is available to advocate in the Town Broadcast for its passage or feasibility?  No one has yet to repudiate the columns posted on the subject; could it be the Deal fails the common- ense test? Are Senator Sanders and Representative Ocasio-Cortez wrong?

We have seen reports of the end of the world coming any minute now before, in 2004, because of “slashing and burning of the Amazon Rain Forest.” If slashing (removing trees and brush to plant crops, build farms and homes) and burning the jungle along the Amazon River was going to destroy the earth, why did slashing and burning the land you are on now not do it? We all live on land that was dewatered or deforested in the 19/20^th century.

In 1985, climate scientists proclaimed the end of the world was coming any day now due to a growing hole in the ozone layer. The hole was near an arctic weather/research station the experts were living in at the time, and due to close because of a lack of funds. In a real stroke of luck, just in the nick of time to save their jobs/homes, the hole in the ozone layer protecting us from being fried by the sun’s radiation was discovered, a hole which later miraculously closed after funds were made available to maintain the station for a very long time. Why the hole was not over the cities of Beijing or Mexico City, the most polluted places on Earth, was always a mystery.

President Thomas Jefferson predicted around 1799 that climate change would be a disaster if the United States ever expanded west, past the Allegheny Mountains. The temperature had already increased 10 degrees, according to Jefferson and Harvard Professor Samuel Williams. In what today would not be allowed by the media elite, a journalist, Noah Webster, proved them wrong.

President Jefferson did not want our nation to expand, even banning settlements west of the Allegheny Range; Americans ignored him and moved west. This is the earliest use of climate change as an American political issue I could find. President Jefferson went on to purchase the Louisiana Territory in 1803: every acre was west of the Allegheny Range, all 530,000,000 acres. Politicians? Go figure.

Acid rain was predicted to destroy the Earth in the 1970/80s. A lake in the Adirondacks Mountains, Big Moose Lake, was the poster child for acid rain. It was ugly fish, dead trees, dead foliage in the lake and around the lake; it was a harbinger of the end of the Earth. We must stop acid rain, or the world would not support life.

The acid rain scare went on for years, then folks realized things were not getting worse, and surprise, the acids in Big Moose lake came from the ground the lake sits on and the poisoning of the lake is a force of nature that has been going on and off for as long as records have been kept. No problem; research grants worth millions had been paid, Pulitzers given out to journalists and Nobel prizes to scientists who predicted the world’s destruction. It was time to move on to the next end of the world disaster and new pay day. There was global cooling in the 1970s; permanently frozen ground by now in lands north of Tennessee were promised, then global warming starting around 1988.

Today global climate change may just be the best yet; it is a heads I win, tails you lose event. Changes in the weather have always occurred, but today if it rains, it is climate change. If we have a drought, storms, a lack of storms, cold/warm, hurricanes, tornadoes, or a lack thereof is climate change.

The Norsemen or Vikings lived in Iceland for more than 300 years until climate change caused them to depart. The question is, how many American fossil fuel vehicles did it take to cause the climate to change in the 930-1250 AD time frame? Arctic explorers in the 1800s who were iced in, in waters that had been open for years, victims of man-made climate change?

If the Green New Deal is needed, why are folks supporting its adoption mute in support, and why has support been vague in the liberal media?