On Friday’s The Lead with Jake Tapper, CNN’s resident historian Douglas Brinkley expressed concern that Americans aren’t clamoring for far-left 1970s-style environmental policies, even as he praised California Governor Gavin Newsom as a “hero” for pushing for the utterly unrealistic policy of outlawing all fossil-fuel vehicles within the next dozen years.
Brinkley proposed that ordinary Americans may influence the weather:
“Until the public talks about climate change as being the issue — we had a midterm election and it’s ranked number five or something — until we’re demanding it of our public servants, we’re going to be in these kind of weird climate events one after the other, wondering what to do, and kicking the can down the road.”
Brinkley naively applauded the California Governor for a ban on internal combustion vehicles starting in 2035: “The hero, Jake, right now in my mind is California, under Gavin Newsom and others. By 2035, they’re not going to be selling, you know, vehicles that are run on fossil fuels….”
What about the poverty, crime, and drug issue in the state? I guess those are nonissues? I suppose Brinkley isn’t affected by the state’s widespread blackouts. He’s assuming that everyone in the overpriced state will be able to afford new electric cars by 2035.
Give me a break!
Newsom isn’t some savior of the people. He’s allowed his fellow lawmakers to wreck California’s economy, growth, and viability through special interests and cracked-out taxation.
Partial Transcript:
I write about the first Earth Day in 1970, and it was musicians like Marvin Gaye writing “mercy me, the ecology,” and Andy Warhol ended up doing the series of endangered species, the great painter Robert Rosenberg did the poster, and grassroots organization were saying “We want clean air. We want the lead out of gasoline. We want no more smog causing respiratory illness in Los Angeles and New York. We want the Great Lakes clean that we can catch fish there again. We don’t want rivers like the Cuyahoga of Ohio or the Rouge in Michigan on fire.” It was the people demanding it.
Until the public talks about climate change as being the issue — we had a midterm election and it’s ranked number five or something — until we’re demanding it of our public servants, we’re going to be in these kind of weird climate events one after the other, wondering what to do, and kicking the can down the road.
The hero, Jake, right now in my mind is California, under Gavin Newsom and others. By 2035, they’re not going to be selling, you know, vehicles that are run on fossil fuels, and our post office is starting to go to electric vehicles. So the movement’s there, but we’ve got to have a Rachel Carson-like figure, somebody who leads us into the promised land of a cleaner and safer, healthier tomorrow, and make sure we don’t have species vanishing willy-nilly on our life watch.
Erica Carlin is an independent journalist, opinion writer and contributor to several news and opinion sources. She is based in Georgia.