Tom Shepstone

Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

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Global warming advocacy has descended to incredible depths with a grotesque video that involves the usual fractivist suspects showing zero respect for facts.

Yesterday, one of our ever alert readers sent me a link to a Tweet featuring one of the most grotesque example of demagoguery I have ever seen. It was an outrageous political video intended to advance the cause of global warming advocacy. It also involved the usual fractivist suspects we fight here on a daily basis, demonstrating global warming advocacy isn’t about global warming at all but, rather, much more radical political agendas.

Here is the Tweet, which includes an embedded video:

The #ClimateCrisis poses a threat unlike any in human history. It’s a catastrophe of our own creation—but it doesn’t have to end this way. We can choose a different path. Watch & share our new video: pic.twitter.com/km7iYxLmUC — Andrew Romanoff (@Romanoff2020) December 16, 2019

The Tweet and video are put out Andrew Romanoff, who is running to be one of Colorado’s U.S. Senators. He’s also served as the Speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives, which tells us a lot about why things have gone badly for common sense in Colorado recently. This fawning piece in the Denver Post tells us who he really is; a socialist at heart whose global warming advocacy is a means to that end.

That’s a longer discussion, though, so let’s just focus on the video. It is assembled with the help of ActBlue, who we’ve covered here in regard to their role in ginning up opposition to Mariner East. Consider that the first clue. The second clue that the usual suspects are at work here is this scene from the video:

This is, of course, a scene from Gasland, a propaganda screed that obviously didn’t age well. Notice, too, that fellow Democrat and former Governor Hickenlooper is attacked for having the nerve to defend fracking. Romanoff represents a new generation of extremist Democrats whose real constituency is spoiled child urban elites.

Our reader points out the video also features “the anti-fracking teen rapper involved in that federal climate change lawsuit involving kids, and the anti-fracking Reverend of the Hip-hop Caucus among other “climate leaders.” The whole thing is simply grotesque, in other words, and is 100% pure demagoguery with no relationship to the facts. It is simply one bombastic claim uttered after another as if loudness equates to credibility. It doesn’t, of course, but impending catastrophe and gloom are more appealing to a lot of folks.

This curious aspect of human nature is discussed in a wonderful article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal and is also published at Human Progress (emphasis added):

As the world improves, people expand their definition of bad news… Consider air travel: Plane crashes have been getting steadily scarcer—2017 was the first year with no commercial passenger plane crashes at all, despite four billion people in the air—but each one now receives vastly more coverage. Many people still consider planes a risky mode of transport. We’re even capable of fretting about the bounty of prosperity, as “Weird Al” Yankovic highlights in his clever song, “First World Problems”: “The thread count on these cotton sheets has got me itching/My house is so big, I can’t get Wi-Fi in the kitchen.” …Other psychological effects apply as well. There is a tendency to remember the good things about the past and to forget the bad, a phenomenon known as the “reminiscence bump”: People have rosy nostalgia about the days of their youth, whatever it was actually like. There is also the vested interest that pressure groups have in selling bad news in exchange for donations. Finally, there is what I call “turning-point-itis.” This is the tendency to think that things may have improved in the past but will no longer do so in the future, because we stand at a turning point in history. It’s true, as brokers like to say, that past performance is no guide to future performance. But as the historian Lord Macaulay wrote almost two centuries ago, “On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”

There is nothing new about any of this, as the Lord Macaulay quote demonstrates. Ben Wattenberg wrote about it. So has Bjørn Lomborg. Lomborg and Matt Ridley, the author of the above quotes, and are also folks who have recognized human beings may well be contributing to global warming. But, they’re sensible enough to have put it in perspective, too, which is what demagogues such as Romanoff and ActBlue and special interests such 350.org, spawned by the Rockefellers, are incapable of doing because it accomplishes none of their personal objectives. Romanoff’s video, though, is an incredible new low.