Sierra Club goes radical, global warming causes asteroids and shootings

From the March 2013 issue of the Capital Research Center publication Green Watch.

The Sierra Club, formerly seen as a mainstream environmental group, is showing more radical colors as controversy over the Keystone XL pipeline escalates. At a protest outside the White House February 13, various left-wing celebrities were arrested, including Robert Kennedy Jr., actress Daryl Hannah, former NAACP president Julian Bond, and, with the approval of his board, Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune, making him the first leader in the group’s 120-year history to be arrested at a protest.

Interviewed on the radical radio program “Democracy Now!” Brune insisted, “If we want to keep our temperature increases below three and a half degrees Fahrenheit, at least two-thirds of the oil, and coal, and gas that we know about all around the world has to stay in the ground.” Again: According to the head of the nation’s oldest environmentalist organization, two-thirds of all the oil, coal, and gas in the world must stay in the ground! Even that draconian limitation, Brune added, would be “reckless”—that is, not strict enough.

Keystone supporters respond that, if that pipeline is not built, Canadian oil will instead be piped to that nation’s west coast and shipped to China, which has few if any environmental standards.

Brune, along with officials from Greenpeace, the Communication Workers of America, and the NAACP, is at the forefront of a new coalition called the Democracy Initiative, which aims to annihilate the free-market movement by eliminating the Senate filibuster and ID checks for voting, and eviscerating the First Amendment. Organizers had their first meeting in December at the D.C. headquarters of the National Education Association, the largest teacher’s union.

The President’s “green energy” program has met with one failure after another—Solyndra ($535 million from taxpayers), Abound Solar ($374 million), UniSolar ($100 million), Ener1 ($118.5 million), and so on. Don’t be too quick to oppose such expenditures, though; you may be a criminal, or worse. Van Jones, the original “green jobs czar” in the Obama administration, declared on Bill Maher’s HBO program that questioning the money for Solyndra is “almost criminal,” adding, “Republicans tried to make the word ‘Solyndra’ this kind of horrible word. . . . [That’s a] war on American technology. . . . This is quasi-treasonous.” The audience cheered.

Why did that asteroid come so close to earth in February? Could it could be—global warming? CNN anchor Deborah Feyerick was interviewing Bill “The Science Guy” Nye about a snowstorm that was supposedly caused by warming. Then she said, “Talk about something else that’s falling from the sky, and that is an asteroid. What’s coming our way? Is this an effect of, perhaps, of global warming, or is this just some meteoric occasion?”

Why has the murder rate skyrocketed in the President’s hometown? Could it could be—global warming? Christie Hefner was CEO of Playboy but left that position because, she said, she was inspired to go into charitable work by the election of President Obama. She is now on the board of the left-wing Center for American Progress Action Fund. On MSNBC, Hefner noted 2012’s record number of gun murders in Chicago, “and this year we are already outpacing last year’s numbers. Now, there are contributing factors that are not under anybody’s control and may seem odd, but it is factually true. One of them is actually the weather. There is a dramatic increase in gun violence when it is warmer. And we are having this climate change effect that is driving that.”

Critics of the U.S. government’s treatment of carbon dioxide as a pollutant point out that, if CO2 were a pollutant due to its role as a “greenhouse gas,” then the #1 greenhouse gas—water—would likewise be a pollutant. And declaring water to be a pollutant would be ridiculous, right? Yes, but that didn’t stop the EPA from trying—not on global warming grounds, but on the grounds that water, such as storm water that feeds into a creek, stirs up sediment, and sediment can pollute a creek, so the water that stirs up the sediment is a pollutant under the Clean Water Act, which protects water. A local government in Virginia would have been forced to spend $200 million replacing homes and businesses with grass and storm ponds, but Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli sued the EPA and won in U.S. district court.