The Ugly Heart of the Left

I recently had a chat with the pastor of our congregation. He made the statement that our church, meaning the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America was a "social justice" church. Now, "social" deals with the community. When costs are socialized, that means that they are spread throughout the community, usually in the form of taxes. "Justice" on the other hand is a very individual thing. Only individuals can sin, and only individuals can be judged. Can you imagine an entire community being charged with a crime and put in jail? Thus, social justice is a meaningless term which sounds very noble and high minded, but is actually used to shield a suite of Leftists notions from those who would force the Left to explain them.

Similarly, "sustainability" is such a code word. The article today in the American Thinker today entitled Sustainable Nonsense by Jeffrey Folks provides an good road map of where the Left wants to take us on this journey to "sustainable" energy.

When applied to energy, for example, sustainability has almost nothing to do with the ability of certain fuels to meet the nation's needs over an extended period of time. With the advent of hydraulic fracking, it is obvious to all, including experts at the U.S. Energy Information Administration, that America possesses enough reserves of natural gas to meet our energy needs for at least a century. Our reserves of coal are even greater. Yet neither of these fuels is deemed "truly clean" enough to be a sustainable fuel by environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, nor by Energy Secretary Stephen Chu, judging from his words and actions.

In line with the environmental lobby, the Obama administration has the odd notion that sustainability can be brought about by restricting consumption alone. Driving a full-size Cadillac with a 4.6L V-8 engine, 208" frame, and a cargo capacity of almost 19 cubic feet leaves one with a respectable fuel efficiency of 15 mpg city, 23 mpg highway. That must seem practically criminal, however, to the planet-saving fuel misers in the Obama EPA. A compact hybrid with a reported fuel economy of 51 mpg city, 48 highway may seem to some a better, more sustainable option. But why not a bicycle with no fuel consumption at all? Why not walk and avoid those harmful manufacturing practices necessary to produce a bicycle? Why not walk barefooted and avoid shoes? There is no limit to how far the left will go in stripping us of our liberties and reducing us to Gandhian poverty.

In the 1930s, before much of the South was electrified, and even after for quite a period, most poor farm families used wood stoves to cook their food, and wood or coal stoves to warm their homes. I am amazed that my grandmother was able to bake cakes and breads to perfection without knowing the temperature of the oven.  But, how does burning wood or for that matter, horse dung, fit in with the notion of "sustainability" since these fuels contribute to pollution and global warming?

The ultimate frontier, or "solution," is to legislate the removal of human beings from part or all of the earth's surface. More than a few environmentalist leaders, including our current national science and technology advisor John Holdren, have advocated the reduction of human population to what they consider a "sustainable" level. What the left intends in this regard varies from one policymaker to another (from current global population of nearly 7 billion to somewhere between two billion and a few hundred million, or even none), but in nearly every case the concept of a "sustainable" population involves reductions that cannot be achieved by voluntary means.

One thinks that the real problems of the Left are that they never learned the lessons taught in kindergarten. They never learned to share. Instead, they see the world being utilized by so many, and think how wonderful it would be for them if there were fewer people with whom to share the world's abundance. They are like spoiled children asking their parents why they had to have the other children, and not accepting the answer.  Of course, being adults, they are able to hide behind high minded notions, and noble sounding language, even from themselves.  But at the end of the day, deep in the core of their being, this is the ugly truth of the Left.

Meanwhile, the truth is becoming apparent to almost everyone who pays attention:

"Sustainability," like all pretentious verbiage, is not simply used to suggest a meaning that is not there -- it is also used to hide meanings that would be obvious if not obscured by an impenetrable abstraction. The reality that "sustainable" is meant to mask is simply this: that the earth possesses enough conventional energy resources to supply even an expanding global economy for decades if not centuries to come; that those resources may, over time, become more difficult to exploit, whether for geologic, political, or economic reasons; and that, in time, other sources of energy, some of them now unknown, will supplant fossil fuels, and that those sources will in turn be supplanted by yet other forms.