55 years ago, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin initiated the first Earth Day. It was reported at the time that over 20 million people took part in local events. The news saturation was total and for the time it was overwhelming. Once the propaganda machine was directed at other things and the pressures of everyday life started to take their toll, the numbers faded very quickly. But the seed had been planted.
The core of that first event was hardcore leftists. The lead organizer was a Student Body President from Stanford University who dropped out of Harvard post-grad program. How Nelson came to select a 20-something to lead a national event of such magnitude is not well answered. But what is clear is that the framers of Earth Day had an agenda that closely paralleled that of the far-Left Students of a Democratic Society (SDS). It was and continues to this day to be anti-private property, anti-individual, and pro-globalist.
Over the 55 years since that first day, the radical environmentalists have given us the lunacy of man-made Climate Change. Remember, it was global cooling at first, predicting a worldwide freeze and return to the Ice Age, then became global warming that would eventually boil us all in our own sweat. And when the data simply failed to confirm all the dire predictions, it just became climate change, a nice nebulous phrase that can mean a hundred things to a hundred different people, has no hard definition and can allow anyone to define the nature of the so-called “crisis.”
But at long last, the tide is turning (pun intended). Increasingly people of science are speaking up and exposing the lie and the implication that flow from it. The devastation to industry and the millions of jobs and families that have been destroyed by the climate zealots is increasingly on full display. The absolute insanity of deindustrialization and the harmful impact is becoming understood. And now, finally, Americans have a defender in the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Lee Zeldin has been on the job exactly 84 days. In that extremely short period of time, he has moved mountains.
He has released a list of 31 regulations that he and his team are working to undo, undercut and discard. Chief among them is the reconsideration of the 2009 Carbon Endangerment Finding by the Obama EPA that has set the stage for all actions since aimed at forcing Americans into electric cars, attacking power supply providers and led to a myriad of regulations and dictates that have literally touched the lives of every American. They have forced prices for virtually everything higher, led to supply shortages and the outright removal of items from the marketplace for no other reason than a finding that electricity generation and consumption can lead to climate change.
Undoing or aggressively rewriting the Obama finding would be an important first step. But Zeldin signaled he wants more.
The 2009 Finding came as a result of a 2007 Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts v. EPA, that found carbon dioxide to be a pollutant and therefore an element that was to be regulated by the EPA under the authority of the Clean Air Act. The dubious 5 to 4 decision was written by the late Justice John Paul Stevens. Stevens’ record was horrifying. He could always be counted on to defend the Deep State. It was Stevens that wrote the 2005 Kelo v. New London decision that allows cities and counties to take private property for economic gain. It was Stevens who wrote the now overturned 1984 Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council decision — the so-called Chevron doctrine — that had given government bureaucrats more power than elected representatives of the people. There are other examples, but the Stevens opinion in the Massachusetts v. EPA decision was the most far-reaching and harmful of all of them.
So, with Zeldin looking to move against the 2009 EPA Carbon Endangerment Finding and thereby put a stake in the heart of the climate zealots sucking the life blood out of our economy, he is declaring a new Earth Day.
55 years after the original Earth Day took us down a path to government control, destructive anti-American policies and warped views of “environmentalism”, Lee Zeldin is declaring a new day, a true Earth Day that will seek to eradicate the distortions that have come to define the original. The worm has turned and the radical Greens are heading to the dustbin of history where they belong.
Bill Wilson is the former president of Americans for Limited Government.
Reproduced with permission. Original here: The First Real Earth Day