How Dare You?

On Thursday, teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg’s group ‘Fridays for Future’ launched a series of rallies to protest Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Greta gained fame for her infamous speech in 2019 at the United Nations climate action summit in New York where she screamed, “How dare you? How dare you?” at UN diplomats because of the world’s lack of progress on combatting climate change. Last Monday, the UN issued a report warning that “billions” of people are in danger from climate change. Juxtapose that ambiguous warning to the millions of Ukrainians facing a real-life threat as they stare down the convoy of Russian tanks encircling Ukraine’s Capital city of Kyiv. Ironically, climate change alarmists like Greta Thunberg, have helped to create the invasion of Ukraine that she is now protesting against.

It has been well established that the “green energy” policies of Europe and the United States have directly enabled the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the deaths of thousands of innocent Ukrainians. Joe Biden shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline, ending oil and gas leases on federal land while opening up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in Russia has made the United States dependent on Russian oil again. European countries shutting down their nuclear power plants at the behest of environmentalists, have forced Europe to become more reliant on Russian to fill their energy needs. The millions of barrels of oil the West purchases from Russia every day is funding this illegal war against one of our allies.

It doesn’t make sense why the Biden administration would enact policies limiting America’s oil and gas supply while at the same time lift sanctions against Russia which expanded their oil and gas production. That hypocrisy is reminiscent of Climate Czar John Kerry flying in a private jet spewing carbon into the atmosphere to attend climate change conferences. This begs the question, do the climate change alarmists actually believe in climate change? If they did, they would not lift sanctions on Russia’s oil pipeline, nor would they fly around the world on private jets.

The calling card of totalitarians is hypocrisy. Totalitarians never want to live by the rules they impose on the rest of us. We have to nail solar panels to our roofs, and deal with rolling black outs in the dead of winter or heat of summer while John Kerry is globetrotting on a private jets or Al Gore is living in 2 ten thousand square foot mansions with sasquatch-sized carbon footprints. We saw this power-hungry hypocrisy from Democrat politicians who imposed the strictest Covid mandates on their citizens but were the ones continuously caught violating their own mandates.

Pushing the United States to green energy is making us weaker on the world stage, and Russia and China stronger. As we transition to green energy, who is the United States’ leading supplier of solar panels? China. So, China will use its heavy influence over big tech to continue to promote climate change propaganda in the US because the more we buy into climate change, the weaker we become as a country, and the stronger Russia and China gets.

As a result of our far-left policies, the price of gallon of gas is now $5 in states like California and is averaging $3.72 nationally. And there appears to be no end in sight. On Friday, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said expanding US domestic drilling to counter the dramatic increase of oil and gas prices has never been on table, and "we have to transition into clean energy." Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that President Joe Biden did not want to re-authorize the Keystone Pipeline because he did not want a “permanent solutions to immediate short-term problems.” Apparently, we do not want permanent solutions, just stop-gap measures.

This intentional ratcheting up of gas prices is driven by our green energy policies. It is prepping our population for the carbon taxes that will be imposed on us when this crisis in Ukraine is over, and at the same time, it is an attempt to cause more people to start buying electric cars, with the intent of rendering the internal combustion engine obsolete.

The left always fails to give proper credit to the people and things that have made this country what it is. We are living the lifestyles we live today primarily because of fossil fuels, and the internal combustion engine. If not for the efficient energy produced by burning fossil fuels, there would not have been an industrial revolution, and the world would be a much bleaker and dire place. Most of us wouldn’t be sitting in air-conditioned offices, emailing and zooming our way through life. We would be out in the field doing back breaking labor just to get enough food to survive. Would scientists have had the ability to even attempt to create solar cells which capture the suns energy if we didn’t have the energy created by fossil fuels?

This is the ultimate privilege. Greta Thunberg life of privilege which allows her the time to protest the use of fossil fuels was created primarily because of the use of fossil fuels. John Kerry flying around the world in fossil fuel burning private jets to climate conferences whose goal is to eliminate fossil fuels. And when the green new deal fully kicks in, John Kerry’s and AOC’s lifestyles will not have decreased one iota while yours and mine will have diminished dramatically.

But far-left activists never appreciate the most of the important parts of our country. They tear down statues of the founders of this country, and rewrite our history, claiming the United States was founded on evil and slavery, never acknowledging that the words and principles the founders wrote into our founding documents were instrumental in eradicating slavery from this country. When Thomas Jefferson penned the words “all men are created equal”, he had to put that concept into writing because at that moment in time, nobody believed that all men were in fact created equal. That was not a self-evident truth at that time as it is today. His words set the world in motion toward the level of equality most people living in the western world have the privilege to enjoy on a daily basis. Yet the people who want to tear Jefferson down will never acknowledge the importance of his legacy even when they are benefitting from it.

This Friday, social justice activist Elie Mystal on ABC’s “The View” said, “The Constitution is kind of trash…. written by slavers and colonists and white people.” The very Constitution he is trashing protects his rights to trash the Constitution. That is the height of privilege, being so privileged that you can use your privilege to criticize the source of your privilege. He does not acknowledge that even in the 21st century, speaking out against one’s own government, in countries like China and Russia is illegal.

Russia's top independent radio station, Ekho Moskvy (the Echo of Moscow), and Russia’s leading independent TV station were closed this week, as Russian authorities moved to shut down criticism of their invasion of Ukraine. During the recent Winter Olympics, China proclaimed no “disharmonious voice” will be allowed, and “any behavior or speeches that are against the Olympic spirit, especially against Chinese laws and regulations, are also subject to certain punishment.” These countries control the power, so they control the people.

We tend to take for granted how liberating our use of fossil fuels can be. Is it strictly a coincidence that the century in which slavery was eradicated in the Western World is the same century when the most advancements in the internal combustion engine were made, and the same century that spawned the industrial revolution? Did the creation of engines that power machines which do the work of ten men end slavery, or did the end of slavery prompt the necessity for the development of those engines. Either way, those engines were powered by fossil fuels that climate activist want to eliminate.

In a previous article, I wrote “whoever has the gold, makes the rules”, to put a finer point of it, “whoever has the black gold, makes the rules.” Russia, a world leader in black gold production, is currently making the rules in Eastern Europe, and the rest of the world is hesitant to take a truly hard non-symbolic stand against them because the world needs their oil. All of this plays right into the communist/totalitarian end game to control the means of production. If you control the energy supply, you control the means of production. And if you control the means of production, you can oppress an entire people.

Our oil and gas industry has been a relatively free market since the break-up of Standard Oil in the 1920’s. It has been free flowing and available to the public aside for times when the government intervened like in the 1970’s with Jimmy Carter. But when we transition fully to green energy, it will be controlled top down by the government which is the first step in the communist take-over of our country. When people and companies have to go to the government for their energy needs, the government owns you, because it controls the means of production you rely on.

But as the West is chasing its green energy tail, China and Russia will continue to burn fossil fuels until every last molecule of them has been turned into carbon emissions. And when they are ruling the world because of it, how close will mankind be to achieving true equality and human rights? How many more million innocent people will be murdered, or stripped of their human rights when murderous totalitarians like Putin and Xi are calling the world’s shots? The battle for mankind is not against some colorless, odorless gas; it is and will always be against totalitarianism that today is fueled by the top-down control of energy which ironically both green energy activists and dictators like Putin and Xi are fighting over.

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Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.