Roth: We are in a reality emergency

We are having a climate emergency. I am sure it’s true because important people have said so. These are the same people who have been wrong about everything of late: solving crime, COVID, printing money, and energy transitions, to name a few. They have pushed a half-century’s worth of climate predictions — all of which I have managed to live through — from acid rain to Manhattan being underwater by 2015. They also travel around on private jets and yachts when they are not living in their massive waterfront properties, because they are the safest places to live in an emergency, obviously.

Yes, I am sure there’s an emergency, but it’s an emergency of indulging people entirely uncoupled with reality.

The "boy who cried wolf" routine isn’t cute, it’s destructive. People who are in charge of major decisions have bullied their ways into having their fantasy narratives accepted and acted upon. Large cities and even non-urban locales are experiencing outbreaks of crime because the fantasy crowd said it was mean to enforce laws. They wanted to defund the police and go easy on criminals, which, entirely unpredictably, has empowered the criminals. Stores are being robbed, people are getting attacked and car jacked, and overall, violence is increasing. Even Starbucks is closing stores in formerly desirable locales like Santa Monica, California, and Union Station in Washington D.C., for Pete’s sake!

We were told that printing trillions of dollars and injecting trillions of dollars more of stimulus money into a supply-constrained economy — one that was supply-constrained because those who shut it down didn’t realize there would be consequences — wasn’t going to produce any inflation. Then, we were told inflation was going to be transitory. Then, it was the consumer’s fault and greedy businesses’ fault, all before blaming Vladimir Putin even when inflation hit a 40-year high the month prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Now, individuals and small businesses alike have to contend with labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, and massive inflation that are all threatening their financial security.

We were told that we have to transition to “green” energy and start to execute a full-scale plan when there was no “green” replacement available at scale or at a viable cost. They said this without a plan and without any consideration of the most clean energy source widely available: nuclear energy. This has led to not only sky-high energy costs in the U.S. but to our president begging countries like Saudi Arabia to produce more oil. This is the “green” equivalent of believing that an unpartitioned smoking section works. And, given that global demand for energy will only increase, this is also not a transition to “green” energy, it’s a transition of our economic and national security into the hands of bad actors around the globe.

You can be a good steward of the planet and its resources and still be in touch with reality.

Now, because they have put everything else in disarray and have nothing to fall back on for their power and money grab, the climate emergency has come out of the playbook. I know preppers — people who are actually concerned about outcomes — and they act accordingly. Riding on a private jet, vacationing in your oceanside mega-mansion, or taking a yacht cruise with friends is not the action of anyone who is concerned about anything other than their own money and power.

The lunatics are running the asylum. This needs to stop. They need to be held accountable for everything that they have gotten wrong. Those areas that they have destroyed and impaired need to be fixed and restored. And it needs to be clear that they don’t get to dictate and bully us anymore. We cannot afford, financially and for the sake of our safety and quality of life, to indulge one more minute of their fantasies.