The Most Persistent Hobgoblin of the Last Quarter Century Has Been Global Warming

This is great.

At IBD, "Another Climate Alarmist Lets It Slip: Why They Want to Scare You":

World savers are anything but. They always have an unspoken motive. H.L. Mencken saw the self-appointed saviors for what they were almost a century ago, when he said the "whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

The most persistent hobgoblin of the last quarter-century has been global warming, now called climate change but eventually to be known as extreme weather, or some such other fright-inducing name. The climate activists are constantly bombarding us with warnings, hectoring, hysteria, pleading and threats. Apocalyptic books have been written and shrill movies made, all in an effort to slow man's combustion of fossil fuels.

Included among these is a new documentary "inspired" by Naomi Klein's book "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate." If the title isn't enough to give away Klein's motives for attacking the climate "crisis," then a comment she makes in the trailer — please forgive: watching the entire documentary would be as agonizing as any medieval torture — should.

"So here's the big question," says Klein. "What if global warming isn't only a crisis? What if it's the best chance we're ever going to get to build a better world?"

Then comes the threat:

"Change, or be changed."

Klein says she "spent six years wandering through the wreckage caused by the carbon in the air and the economic system that put it there." Clearly, it is her goal to shatter the free-market system. The climate? It's just a vehicle, a pretext for uprooting the only economic system in history that has brought prosperity and good health.

Klein's statement is perfectly in line with Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of United Nation's Framework Convention on Climate Change, and in fact is almost an echo. Figueres acknowledged earlier this year that the environmental activists' goal is not to spare the world an ecological disaster, but to destroy capitalism...

Keep reading.

Klein's also the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She's got a little fear-mongering industry going there.