It’s that time again.  Time to celebrate, or is it ridicule, another Earth Day.  Yes, it’s that annual bacchanal, when the climate crazies, treehuggers, Green radicals, Eco-terrorists, No Kings idiots who are through soaking their feet after the last protest, Marxists and Communists of all stripes, get together in an open field to denounce capitalism and howl at the moon.

And it’s a big Earth Day this year.  The participants in this folly will have the chance to mourn the passing of Paul Erlich, one of the founders of this nonsense.  Erlich died last month.  The second founder, Ira Einhorn, died in prison, having been convicted of murdering his girlfriend and hiding her body in a trunk.

I’ve long maintained that the whole environmental movement that spawned Earth Day is less about saving the planet, and more about global elites finding a better way to control the masses than through the spread of Communism.  It’s simply a fact that, when the Berlin Wall came down over 25 years ago, many of the proponents of Communism turned from Red to Green.  But, then again, for Leftists, facts don’t matter.

If facts mattered to the Left, they would have abandoned the Earth Day/Dooms Day charade long ago.  The whole canard stems from Paul Erlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb.  In it, Erlich, who had traveled to India, predicted that “the battle to feed humanity is over.”  He predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve, and recommended cutting the world’s population in half.

Erlich favored forced sterilization, food rationing, and other limits on reproduction, warning that, between 1980 and 1989, famine would kill 65 million Americans.  Erlich prophesied that, “America’s economic joyride is coming to an end, no more cheap and abundant food and energy.”

Unless I missed it, Erlich was dead wrong about everything he predicted. (I guess now that he’s dead, it sort of evens out).  The population of India has doubled since 1970.  During that time, Indians not only have not starved, but India is a net exporter of wheat.  In fact, worldwide population has increased 400% since 1900, while average crop yields are also up 400%, and total crop harvests have increased 600%.

More to the point, not only did 65 million Americans not starve to death by 1989, but as our population rose by 130 million since 1970, more than 40% of Americans are obese, and 12% of the population is on GLP-1 weight loss medication.

So, if the reasons for starting Earth Day were false, and have been proven to be false, why do leftists keep it going?  It’s very simple.  It’s a convenient way for  leftists to control people and stay in power.  TV and radio host Chris Plante says it best.  “Leftists don’t care what you do, as long as it’s mandatory.”  They know best what’s good for you and they’re determined to impose it on you whether you like it or not.

This is a principle they learned from none other than the late Paul Erlich.  When he was spreading his false prediction of widespread famine in India and elsewhere, Erlich’s solution was iron-fisted totalitarian repression, designed to forcibly reduce the population by half.  In his own words, “The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions, and the pain may be intense.”  But it would be “coercion in a good cause.”

Remember those words.  “Coercion in a good cause” could be the motto of today’s Democrat Party.  The trouble is that, by “good cause,” Democrats mean what’s good for them, not what’s good for you.  If they truly were interested in the public good, why would they ignore the truth, to continue pushing extreme climate change restrictions that do nothing other than cost jobs and make life harder and more expensive for their constituents?

The Climate Change alarmist, “The World Ends in Twelve Years” claims are pure bullshit.  Consider the opinion of Dr. Ivar Giaever, a Nobel laureate in physics.  He’s not buying the man-made global warming claims. In 2015, Dr. Giaever announced, “I would say that basically global warming is a non-problem.” “The facts are that in the last 100 years we have measured the temperatures it has gone up .8 degrees and everything in the world has gotten better.  So how can they say it’s going to get worse when we have the evidence? It must be politics.”

He’s not the only one.  At the same time that Il Duce Obama was telling the uninformed that global warming was “settled science,” thousands of climatologists were refusing to buy into the notion of man-made climate change.  The authors of the British study, that famously, or infamously relied on the “hockey stick” graph that predicted rises in temperature, have confessed that their data was false.

Yet our leftist elected officials persist in pushing the climate change hysteria.  Why?  Dr. Giaever said it.  “It must be politics.”  The U.S. leads the world in the production of cheap and abundant, clean burning natural gas.  Yet politicians like the Governors of New York and New Jersey persist in imposing the so called REGI mandates to abandon fossil fuels in favor of so-called renewable energy.

The fact that we can’t run our power grids on wind, solar and pond scum is lost on these morons.  Because New Jersey is just a pale replica of the leftist craziness of New York, the REGI nonsense has only resulted in a needless 20% increase in our electric rates, while New York rates are predicted to double.  And all in the name of what?  Not cleaner air or water.  Just politics.

If you doubt me, just consider the craziest of all crazy places, California.  When gasoline was $2.50 a gallon in America, it was $5.00 in California, due to ruinous environmental regulations, and confiscatory taxes that have resulted in 2 million people leaving the State.  California has oil and gas that it won’t allow to be exploited.  California has a man-made drought because it dumps fresh water into the ocean to save a supposedly endangered fish.  And California is nearly bankrupt.  No surprise.

California also has a wildfire problem.  Its Governor, Gavin Newsome, predictably blames the fires on climate change, reciting the now familiar, and long debunked notion that climate change’s role “cannot be denied,” the science is “absolute,” and the data “self-evident.”

As we have learned, climate change can be denied, the science is flawed, and the data was admittedly falsified.  But no matter.  Newsome knows a good lie when he hears one.  Hoover Institute Fellow Bjorn Lomborg recently reported in The Wall Street Journal that, while heat-related deaths from increased temperatures rose by nearly 100 a year, corresponding cold-related deaths are down by 5,000 a year.  But I guess Democrats think those 4,900 people who remain alive should be sacrificed on the altar of their climate change hoax.

Moreover, while Newsome blames climate change for more wildfires, the fact is that worldwide statistics show that, in the past 20 years, annual acreage consumed by fires has been reduced more than 25%, resulting in 400,000 fewer deaths from fire-related pollution.

More damaging fires in California are due to poor government management, not climate change.  Oh yes, and the claim that wildfires are increasing CO2 in the atmosphere also is false.  A hundred years ago, wildfires burned 4% of the world’s acreage per year.  Now, it’s 2%.  And the reduction in fire damage has reduced CO2 emissions into the atmosphere by 3 billion tons.

Even the UN admits that, if the world adopted the ruinous restrictions used in California, temperatures might be reduced by 0.2 degrees, at a cost of untold millions of lives from the poverty and starvation that Paul Erlich so long ago predicted.

So we’ve come full circle.  If the world did what Erlich demanded, his prophecies might have been self-fulfilling.  The fault lay not in the population, but in the politics.  Luckily we ignored Erlich, and he’s now been consigned to the dustbin of history.