It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon in Cromwell, Connecticut as the Travelers Championship golf tournament was coming down to a fantastic finish with two great players battling for the trophy. Then, all of a sudden, six degenerates emerged from the crowd and stormed the 18th green while spraying smoke and powder and causing mayhem because they mistakenly believe that climate change is an existential crisis.
The group responsible for the incident, Extinction Rebellion, issued a statement shortly after the melee, declaring that, “Golf, more than other events, is heavily reliant on good weather. Golf fans should therefore understand better than most the need for strong, immediate climate action.”
Of course, this is not the first time Extinction Rebellion has caused a ruckus. Since being founded in 2018, the group has a long history of blocking traffic, ruining precious works of art, disrupting all types of events, and generally annoying the vast majority of people who are just trying to get where they are going or have a good time.
According to its website, Extinction Rebellion believes in “using non-violent direct action and civil disobedience to persuade governments to act justly on the Climate and Ecological Emergency.”
Among their demands, they want governments to “reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.”
Like so many other climate change groups these days, Extinction Rebellion wants the world to believe that global warming is an existential crisis that must be stopped at all costs.
Their claims are ludicrous. Here are just a few:
“We are in the midst of a climate and ecological breakdown.”
“Our world is in crisis and life itself is under threat.”
“We are in the midst of a mass extinction of our own making and our governments are not doing enough to protect their citizens, our resources, our biodiversity, our planet, and our future.”
“As we continue to destroy the natural world - the Earth’s life support systems - we risk spillover of disease from wild species, leading to the continued possibility of more pandemics like Covid-19.”
“Consequences of allowing us to go beyond 1.5°C would be disastrous on every level: islands and coastal cities disappearing because of rising sea levels, deadly extreme heat, droughts and shortages of food and water, forcing entire populations to flee their homes.”
Make no mistake, Extinction Rebellion is just one of many groups touting that the world will end unless humanity abandons fossil fuels. Al Gore raised similar concerns years ago, none of which have come to pass. In 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) stated that “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” This year alone, President Biden has repeatedly said that climate change is an “existential crisis.”
Fortunately, predictions of Armageddon due to climate change have not come true. Such is why people are beginning to take the climate alarmists less seriously.
More and more, polls reveal that the overwhelming majority of Americans do not think that climate change poses an existential threat.
In August 2023, the Pew Research Center released a report based on in-depth interviews that found a large portion of “Americans consider crisis language overblown, leading to added skepticism of claims.”
Here are two examples:
“People who are alarmist tend to want really drastic policies that seem to not make sense, so it kind of makes me disbelieve the other things they’re saying.” –Man, 20s, Midwest
“From a personal standpoint, whether it’s the climate or anything else, when the statements are too large … like when the statements are, ‘The world is getting warmer and Earth is going to be ended in five years because we’re all terrible humans and we throw trash on the ground.’ Those things cause me to be, instead of causing me to be concerned, it causes me to be more skeptical about where the information is coming from and why it’s being presented in such a grandiose term, for lack of a better word.” –Woman, 30s, Midwest
There comes a point when the climate alarmists, or alarmists of any kind for that matter, go too far. There is nothing wrong with environmentalists and conservationists trying to persuade people to become better stewards of their surroundings. When I was growing up, before the climate alarmism narrative had arrived in full, caring about the planet meant not polluting, not littering, and not leaving the lights on. That is a commonsense message most people would rally around.
However, the climate alarmists of today have morphed into anti-human clowns who literally champion depopulation, degrowth, and all other types of preposterous positions. They are a small band of lunatics supported by hypocritical politicians and two-faced business leaders who know better than to toe the climate alarmism line. They must be stopped in their tracks. And they must not be allowed to disrupt how we live, travel, eat, or simply enjoy ourselves at what should be a fun sporting event.
Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.org) is editorial director at The Heartland Institute.