Giveaways Dept.: Asthmatics, You’re Next!

     The contemporary Left is all about targeting: what groups it can enlist in its Cause, and what groups it can indict as enemies to be annihilated. At irregular intervals it will release a trial balloon, intended to test whether a particular group is seducible with the right offer, or vulnerable enough to be targeted. The latest such balloon appeared in Time magazine:

     According to a new study published in BMJ Open, the familiar lightweight, pocket-sized aerosolized inhalers that make breathing easier for so many of the 235 million people worldwide who suffer from asthma may be choking the planet on a powerful greenhouse gas they release in the process...

     The researcher compared the greenhouse gas emissions of aerosol pumps—known as metered dose inhalers (MDI)—with dry powder inhalers (DPI), which are shaped something like a hockey puck and are activated simply by inhaling...

     The problem with MDIs is not carbon dioxide (the most common greenhouse gas), but rather methane, which represents a far smaller share of greenhouse emissions, but a much more powerful one, with up to 84 times the heat-trapping power of CO2. Even the least polluting inhaler was found to emit methane at levels equal to up to 10 kg (22 lbs.) of carbon dioxide into the air over the course of its 200-puff lifetime.

     Well, that settles that! We can’t have asthmatics breathing freely if the price is the death of the planet! As Jim Treacher puts it:

     Oxygen is just like any other natural resource. You should use as little of it as possible. For asthmatics, this is easy: Just throw away your inhalers. Before you know it, the problem will solve itself.

     Time admitted many years ago that when it came to environmentalism, it had abandoned objective journalism in favor of issue advocacy. So the tenor of the cited article comes as no real surprise. What might be a wee bit disconcerting is the implication that inhalers are a public-policy “problem:” i.e., that “we” can’t afford to allow asthmatics the inhalers that keep them alive.

     Somehow, environmentalists always wind up exhorting “us” to kill off those who offend their goddess.

     Remember these two “environmentalists?”

     "Every one of you who gets to survive has to bury nine," Eric Pianka cautioned students and guests at St. Edward's University on Friday. Pianka's words are part of what he calls his "doomsday talk" -- a 45-minute presentation outlining humanity's ecological misdeeds and Pianka's predictions about how nature, or perhaps humans themselves, will exterminate all but a fraction of civilization.

     Though his statements are admittedly bold, he's not without abundant advocates. But what may set this revered biologist apart from other doomsday soothsayers is this: Humanity's collapse is a notion he embraces.

     Indeed, his words deal, very literally, on a life-and-death scale, yet he smiles and jokes candidly throughout the lecture. Disseminating a message many would call morbid, Pianka's warnings are centered upon awareness rather than fear.

     "This is really an exciting time," he said Friday amid warnings of apocalypse, destruction and disease. Only minutes earlier he declared, "Death. This is what awaits us all. Death." Reflecting on the so-called Ancient Chinese Curse, "May you live in interesting times," he wore, surprisingly, a smile.

     So what's at the heart of Pianka's claim?

     6.5 billion humans is too many.

     In his estimation, "We've grown fat, apathetic and miserable," all the while leaving the planet parched.

     The solution?

     A 90 percent reduction.

     That's 5.8 billion lives -- lives he says are turning the planet into "fat, human biomass." He points to an 85 percent swell in the population during the last 25 years and insists civilization is on the brink of its downfall -- likely at the hand of widespread disease.

     "[Disease] will control the scourge of humanity," Pianka said. "We're looking forward to a huge collapse."

     And:

     This is Finnish writer Pentti Linkola — a man who demands that the human population reduce its size to around 500 million and abandon modern technology and the pursuit of economic growth — in his own words.

     He likens Earth today to an overflowing lifeboat:

     What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides....

     The United States symbolises the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom....

     Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent a dictator that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. The best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and where government would prevent any economical growth.

     We will have to learn from the history of revolutionary movements — the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades — and forget our narcissistic selves. A fundamental, devastating error is to set up a political system based on desire. Society and life have been organized on the basis of what an individual wants, not on what is good for him or her....

     Just as only one out of 100,000 has the talent to be an engineer or an acrobat, only a few are those truly capable of managing the matters of a nation or mankind as a whole. In this time and this part of the World we are heedlessly hanging on democracy and the parliamentary system, even though these are the most mindless and desperate experiments of mankind. In democratic countries the destruction of nature and sum of ecological disasters has accumulated most. Our only hope lies in strong central government and uncompromising control of the individual citizen.

     Eric Pianka and Pentti Linkola are not “extremists.” They are the endpoint of all “environmentalist” cant: the assertion that something – anything! – is of a higher priority than human life and well-being, and that human lives and freedoms must be sacrificed to it.

     Of course, if you dare to ask them “Why?” you’ll be shouted down, denounced, possibly assaulted or murdered. Asking “Why?” is forbidden. The titans of environmentalism are gods. One does not ask “Why?” of a god. One does not question his decrees or inquire into their bases. One certainly does not ask them why we always find them deep in bed with the central planners, the socialists, and other assorted advocates of totalitarianism.

     I can’t help recalling this dead giveaway by one of the villains from Atlas Shrugged:

     “It’s a great responsibility,” said Eugene Lawson, “to hold the decision of life or death over thousands of people and to sacrifice them when necessary, but we must have the courage to do it.” His soft lips seemed to twist into a smile.

     Today: asthmatics. Tomorrow: who can say? It might be cardboard-box makers, or Internet service providers, or Catholics. If the life of the planet is at stake, no one is permanently exempt.

     Really, Gentle Reader: Isn’t it lock and load time yet?