To the editor:
It took a lot of mistakes on the Democrats’ part to elect Donald Trump to the presidency in the first place. As the midterm results show, he isn’t re-electable unless the Democrats make more mistakes. So why are they trying so hard to make mistakes that will re-elect Trump?
An example of these types of mistakes include the Alexandria Democratic Committee’s resolution to declare a “climate emergency” – as if oblivious to Energy Secretary (and former Texas governor) Rick Perry’s quip about scientists “manipulating large amounts of data to keep money flowing into their projects.” As if common folks are going to put aside common sense to fall for an expert-generated apocalypse if we fail to turn our economy on its head in 12 years.
By pursuing moderate policies, former President Bill Clinton carried Louisiana and West Virginia twice, no longer imaginable for a Democrat to pull off thanks to Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” and Hillary Clinton’s insistence on “putting a lot of coal workers out of work.”
With almost religious fervor, environmentalists have been trying to get us to reform our environmentally sinful ways for many decades – to no avail. So, like fire-and-brimstone preachers, they have settled upon this latest doomsday scenario to scare us into eco-righteousness.
But it isn’t feasible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so long as (1) the country’s population keeps increasing, largely due to liberal immigration laws about which Democrats used to be more ambivalent but now embrace, and (2) rising worldwide standards of living driving increases in fossil fuel use and deforestation for development and agriculture. When we don’t turn around our fossil fuel use in the scientists’ 12-year time-frame, does anyone believe they won’t find some excuse to extend their “doomsday deadline”?
New social programs’ track record of costing more than first projected (for example, Medicare cost thrice what Congress said it would), means average folks are wise to be skeptical about the “Green New Deal’s” pie-in-the-sky projections, especially since the Democrats seem so reluctant to embrace population policy changes to make their environmental goals more attainable.
The worst consequence of the Democrats’ declaration of a climate emergency is their abandonment of traditional environmental goals, resulting in backsliding on key environmental improvements. In a letter in last week’s Alexandria Times, “Make the effort to better recycle glass,” Jillian Jones exhorts us to take our glass to one of six drop-off centers, as if more than a small percentage of households will bother doing this.
Will the Alexandria Democratic Committee demand our city government do a better job cleaning up the glass folks put in their blue recycling bins so it can continue to be usably recycled? Will the Alexandria Democratic Committee call upon our federal government to condition tariff relief on China resuming importing our recyclables?
Where once both parties spoke the “no net loss of wetlands” mantra, will the Alexandria Democratic Committee pass a resolution opposing the permanent destruction of wetlands for a new Metro station when the station could be built nearby without any damage to wetlands?
-Dino Drudi, Alexandria
