OPINION:
America is the land of opportunity for everyone. Since Donald Trump was elected president, there has been no end to the occasions for the losers to pull on their sneakers and take to the streets. They only have to remember the cause of the day and show up with an appropriate sign or banner. Marching is the social life of the lonely and the sore of foot.
Monday was May Day, the annual celebration of the misery of the left. Last week was the March for Science, which gave way at the weekend to the People’s Climate March, and the climate seemed sent from the heaven good leftists imagine to be a myth. The mercury topped 90 degrees, with few clouds to break the sun’s unrelenting burn. It was just the sort of day to affirm with extreme prejudice the message of the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, the celebrity of the day who trudged among the thousands holding aloft a placard: “Climate change is real.”
Who could doubt the climate is changing? Certainly not the “progressives” in Denver who, while the nation’s capital sweltered, marched in warm coats and galoshes through a foot of snow. Each day on Planet Earth brings a change in the weather. Hot or cold, wet or dry, flood or drought, it all fits comfortably under the heading of “climate change.”
But it’s an exercise in euphemism, meant to paper over actual meaning. Beneath the diverse universe of signage — Go vegan, Coal kills, USA: Too Beautiful to Trash, and even Land Rights Now in the Peruvian Amazon — is a place where the rubber of the sneaker and boot meets the road. The hot air about climate change was once focused on “global warming,” said to be caused by humans burning fossil fuels to build the civilization that is the envy of the ages. But the globe didn’t warm the way Al Gore said it would; the polar bears still have their ice floes and lower Manhattan is still above water. “Climate change” was coined to cover the inconvenient facts.
The fads and foibles of human behavior encourage the urge to settle on an object of scorn that can be blamed for every woe, large and small. Barack Obama famously blamed George W. Bush for everything that went wrong in his administration, and now Donald Trump has become the perfect target for the warmists. During his first 100 days as president, Mr. Trump reversed Obama-era regulations meant to force the nation to substitute expensive renewable (and often unreliable) energy for affordable and dependable fossil fuels.
The new president has pulled the plug on his predecessor’s Clean Power Plan, rescinded the ban on offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean, and paved the way for construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.
Marchers in Washington, Denver and elsewhere itch to influence Mr. Trump’s coming decision on whether to honor the Paris Climate Agreement. The Paris pact was signed in 2015 and Mr. Trump has hammered it ever since. At his 100th-day rally in Harrisburg, Pa., on Saturday, Mr. Trump said the deal would reduce the U.S. gross domestic product by $2.5 trillion over a decade. It’s a drag on the American economy that a sea of protest signs can’t obscure.
A pact that forces the United States to cut back its industrial emissions while leaving economic powerhouses like China free of restrictions until 2030 is a bad deal for the United States. The United Nations concedes its proposal for limiting emissions will not achieve its temperature target, and envisions a “global stocktake” in 2018 to pressure nations to impose further restrictions.
Thousands march for “science” and “climate,” but millions labor to “make America great again,” the men and women who get up early to make their contribution to a more prosperous nation. They’re wasting no time searching for a social life in the street.
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