EDITORIAL: With friends like these

OPINION:

It wasn’t supposed to go down this way. When Democrats who said they wanted a congressional resolution calling for a global fight against global warming, were forced to declare their allegiance to the cause, they ran for the tall grass. It’s just as well. Despite their stated preference for fanciful notions, liberals (who call themselves “progressives”) recognize that the common-sense voters they serve don’t share their flights of fancy.

The Green New Deal that sprang from the genius of freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Democrat, and the over-the-top environmentalism of Sen. Ed Markey, Massachusetts Democrat, calls for a radical makeover of nearly every element of modern life to save the planet from the ravages of human industry.

When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called their bluff by giving them an opportunity to vote for their resolution, all but three Democrats (and one lonely independent), simply voted “present.” That’s the congressional equivalent of pleading the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. To a member, Republicans voted against the resolution, bringing the final tally to 57 nays, zero yeas and 43 presents. What courage of conviction. What a deal.

Intended to model the New Deal, an array of public works projects championed by FDR to enable the country to climb out of the Great Depression, the 14-page Green New Deal resolution calls for a plan to make a plan, including among many other things “zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing, building a more sustainable food system that ensures universal access to healthy food,” and a guarantee of “a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacation, and retirement security for all the people of the United States.”

Supporters of the Green New Deal complained that their resolution was only meant to be “aspirational” and that it was unfair for Sen. McConnell to try to put them on the spot with a recorded vote. (“Just kidding, guys. Can’t anyone take a joke?”) Before the Senate voted, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez had pouted on Twitter: “The GOP’s whole game of wasting votes in Congress to target others ’on the record,’ for [legislation] they have no intent to pass, is a disgrace. Stop wasting the American peoples’ time + learn to govern. Our jobs aren’t for campaigning, & that’s exactly what these bluff-votes are for.”

There’s certainly nothing wrong with aspiration. Certain inalienable rights championed by the Framers in the Declaration of Independence, among them “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” are aspirational. When those patriots of yesteryear reckoned that the price of freedom put at risk “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor,” they understood they were gambling with their own chips.

Not the Green New Dealers. By vowing to rid the nation of fossil fuels within a decade and replacing them with renewable sources like wind and solar power that currently supply less than 15 percent of America’s energy needs, they are wagering with the future of each American. All told, the price tag is calculated to be $93 trillion, nearly five times the entire U.S. gross domestic product. That’s real money. In all likelihood the measure’s passage, something advocated by most of the growing crowd of Democrats running for president in 2020, would force the deindustrialization of the nation.

It requires a lot of confidence by the warmest school of climate science to bet the nation’s prosperity on trying to tweak the temperature of the planet. The U.S. Capitol, where Congress crafts the laws affecting the fate of 325 million Americans, rests not much more than a couple of hundred miles from land that was buried under a glacier as recently as 11,000 years ago.

Members like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez dutifully profess firm belief in the United Nations’ warning that without radical action, the global climate will reach the point of no return by the year 2030. Forecasting the future is difficult. Vice President/climate guru Al Gore predicted in his 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” that humanity would cross that point of no return in 10 years. That was three years ago, and the surviving polar bears are still not basking under the palms in Montreal.

If Mr. Gore is a worthy prophet, the die is cast and our fate is sealed. If he is wrong, then what assurance do Americans have that the catastrophe predicted by the Green New Deal is real? None, which may explain why, when forced to choose between fantasy and the real, all those “progressive” senators lit out for parts unknown.