I would wager a chunk of my bank account that a youthfully crafted op-ed in last Friday’s Los Angeles Times was lifted out of a high school or middle school publication, the weakest defense of global warming the newspaper ever has published. Unless it was intended as an early April Fools joke.
The kid-author is an environmentalist’s dream. A cinch sell. Not a skeptical bone.
Were I the Sierra Club, I would stash him in a vault overnights with three armed guards so he is ready to be paraded before a shallow public every morning.
When the kid heard “climate change” for the first time, he swooned as if Angelina had just asked him out Friday night.
Under the headline “Climate change doubters need not woo me in 2016,” one “Johnny Crudelic” identified as a “twentysomething” independent filmmaker, talked about his version of puppy love without going deeper than “My gosh, I love climate change more than God, my parents and my favorite video game.”
Johnny tells us that “hey, man, climate change is awesome.”
But never why?
If this kid was born in the 20th century, I will be shocked. If he is more than 12, I will demand a recount. Did the Times snooker us?
He never tells us why he believes. Just that he is in love with global warming. Who needs reasons? Not our Johnny.
The premise of the essay was that here was a young fella with credentials, “an entrepreneur, writer and independent filmmaker living in New York City,” saying he will not vote next year for anyone “who allows for doubt” on climate change.
An absolutely fair position that is not unique to Johnny.
But, bro, we want to know why you feel as you do? Convince me? Instead, he repeats “I love,” “I love.”
I presume our Johnny has been to the sun, eyewitnessed evidence of global warming and flown back to share this bank of unique knowledge with his lessers.
His sentence construction, not to mention abbreviated thought processes, are those of a fourth- or fifth-grader who just has fallen in love for the first time. Short declarative sentences with a sock.
My favorite Johnny line: “Evidence of this inexorable march toward planetary collapse is overwhelming…”
So overwhelming that our Johnny could not give a syllable of evidence. He sounded like one of the left-wing scientists who was pushing global warming before it married climate change and switched its name.
Our Johnny was so sure of himself that he compared global warming skeptics to a person diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Really? Same strength of evidence?
Johnny can come back in a decade when he is eligible to vote. Meanwhile, the Times showed us a sense of humor – and larceny.
