Liberals’ Climate Agenda Brings Out The Gaslighting

Written by Robert Knight

“What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart,” Jesus told his disciples.

Yes, a few words can reveal all you need to know about someone’s character or motives.

A case in point is Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. In a column on Wednesday for The Wall Street Journal, she told at least two easily rebutted whoppers.

Here’s the first: “With the Inflation Reduction Act, we are delivering on what I call ‘modern supply-side economics,’” she wrote.

Equating the Biden administration’s trillions in new government spending mostly on climate hysteria with President Ronald Reagan’s “supply side” tax cuts and deregulation agenda is gaslighting at its worst.

Well, maybe not the worst. Democrats’ “gender-affirming” child abuse agenda to poison sex-confused children and permanently alter their bodies is worse.

Later, Ms. Yellen, still wielding her gaslighting pen, writes, “Building a clean-energy economy means reducing U.S. dependence on fossil fuels and exposure to the autocratic regimes that control them, providing greater certainty for families and businesses on their energy costs.”

Her statements reveal two things. First, she must think we are idiots. Second, she really must think we are idiots.

Under then-President Donald Trump, the U.S. ramped up its energy production. Families and businesses had great certainty about the reliability of our sources of gasoline, electricity and energy overall. Gas was around $2 a gallon. Inflation in 2020 was 1.4%. Remember that?

By contrast, on his first day in office, President Biden began his ongoing war on America’s energy sector and the free market economy. He canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and drilling leases on federal land. He threw roadblocks in front of domestic production of coal, natural gas and oil, triggering the worst inflation in 40 years.

In the past year, he’s put us on a fast track toward total reliance on the world’s most dangerous and most polluting autocratic regime. China controls most of the lithium and other rare earth minerals needed for the batteries required by the millions of electric cars that the Biden administration is forcing Detroit to produce.

While the Environmental Protection Agency issues more draconian rules to weaken our own electric grid, China is adding new coal-burning plants at the rate of one a day.

Ms. Yellen, who seems quite happy to put us in economic bondage under the Chinese, ends her column with a Pollyanna assurance that this “is a turning point in the national effort to preserve the planet and to shape a prosperous, inclusive and resilient economic future.”

So far, that means $4-a-gallon gas, soaring grocery prices, double-digit inflation over the past two years, and a slew of “woke” bureaucratic, corporate and military policies. Meanwhile, green energy oligarchs who donate to Democrats are making billions from federal subsidies thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act.

Gaslighting abounds. Every day, the media tell us that wildfires are worse than ever before. They would blame Republicans for the disastrous Maui wildfire if they could, except that Democrats run Hawaii.

In 2021, The New York Times devoted 40 staff members to producing “Postcards From a World on Fire,” an animated feature designed to scare everyone into giving up our way of life.

But as author Bjorn Lomborg recently wrote in the Journal, “Last year, U.S. fires burned less than one-fifth of the average burn in the 1930s and likely only one-tenth of what caught fire in the early 20th century.”

Wildfires globally were “slightly below the average between 2012 and 2022, a period that already saw some of the lowest rates of burned area.”

The Washington Post ran a piece on Friday highlighting a PLOS Climate study blaming “the richest 10 percent of U.S. households” for “40 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.” The article quickly veered into a discussion of racial income inequality, fingering “White, non-Hispanic homes.”

In July, the Post cited a climate study in the journal Science. “Greenland once lost a tremendous amount of ice under climate conditions very much like the ones humans have created and are currently living in,” environment writer Sarah Kaplan wrote.

The authors tell us that this happened around 416,000 years ago, when humans weren’t driving Jeeps, barbecuing ribs or even rubbing sticks together.

According to Ms. Kaplan, the scientists determined (read: guessed) that, instead of “planet-warming pollution from burning fossil fuels,” the big heat was caused by “slight changes in the earth’s orbit.”

Well, who can prove otherwise? Unlike computerized models that keep getting discredited by actual temperatures, we can’t use a wayback machine to check out the wild ride our Earth supposedly took back then.

This past March, Ms. Kaplan schooled us on “the link between climate change and racial equity” in an essay. Citing a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she wrote: “White Americans experience better air quality than the national average, even though their activities are the source of most pollutants.”

Those White Americans again. Have they ever done anything right?

Robert Knight is a former Los Angeles Times news editor and writer and was a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This column was originally published by The Washington Times.

He has been published by the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Christian Post, AmericanThinker.com, DailyCaller.com, Townhall.com, OneNewsNow.com and many others.  He has co-authored three books and written 10, including “Liberty on the Brink: How the Left Plans to Steal Your Vote” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) and “The Coming Communist Wave: What Happens If the Left Captures All Three Branches of Government” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) . 

You can follow him on Twitter at @RobertKnight17, and his website is roberthknight.com.