Let us begin this exercise with me reiterating my wholehearted and total support of California’s effort to secede from the United States.
They can take their Sanctuary State status, their resulting Third World culture-and-wealth gap, their $1.3 trillion total governments’ debt, their massive government employee pension shortfalls, their wildfire-exacerbating environmental laws and the rest of their Hollywood, Silicon Valley uber-Left nonsense – and get out.
Oh – and don’t forget to take with you your fifty-five Electoral College votes with you. (Which will make our presidential elections going forward a whole lot more American.)
Yet another addition-by-subtraction we will thoroughly enjoy – is the absence of the California Left’s utter hypocrisy and thorough dishonesty when it comes to…everything.
François de La Rochefoucauld (I believe he was French) famously noted: “Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.” What Frenchy Frank didn’t note – was the amount of lying that must be done so as to obfuscate the tribute being paid.
California extrudes annually metric tons of this hypocrisy and dishonesty. Perhaps in nothing more than their climate change nonsense.
We are familiar with the mass cadre of uber-rich Hollywood-Silicon Valley very-mouthy-“environmentalists” – flying their private jets from their 500 foot yachts to their 50,000 square foot homes.
These clowns tell us that climate change is an imminent, existential crisis – and America must commit economic mass suicide to address it.
We must shrink our economy back thirty years. We must continue to waste trillions of government dollars on fake energy sources like wind and solar. We must use awful appliances that don’t do what they’re allegedly manufactured to do. And we have to use awful-light-producing lightbulbs that are toxic HazMat nightmare messes if you break one.
Except they don’t have to do any of these things. Not on their private jets. Or on their massive yachts. Or in their city-block-sized homes.
They won’t dare allow their environmentalism to impinge in even the slightest way on their huge coin and the extravagant lifestyles for which it pays.
That is a whole lot of hypocrisy tribute being paid.
Well, behold the California governments’ version thereof:
California Localities Suing over Climate Change Failed to Mention Alleged Risks to Investors: “The risks posed by human-caused climate change were apparently alarming enough to prompt seven California municipalities last year to sue ExxonMobil, but not serious enough to disclose in full to their investors.”
Get that? These seven California Leftist fiefdoms are suing Exxon (and seventeen other Texas-based energy companies) – alleging the companies’ huge contribution to the alleged, immediately looming disastrous damage resulting from climate change.
Except when these California fiefdoms were looking for investor coin – to continue to augment their debt-riddled, over-government-ing lifestyles – there was no mention of the alleged, immediately looming disastrous damage resulting from climate change for which they are suing these energy companies.
An eminently salient point – which obnoxious-lawsuits-victim Exxon was quick to point out:
“‘Notwithstanding their claims of imminent, allegedly near-certain harm, none of the municipalities disclosed to investors such risks in their respective bond offerings, which collectively netted over $8 billion for these local governments over the last 27 years,’ said ExxonMobil in its petition in Texas District Court. ‘To the contrary, some of the disclosures affirmatively denied any ability to measure those risks; the others virtually ignored them.…’”
These lawsuit-filing municipal yahoos have spent the last three decades successfully borrowing billions of dollars – by outright denying or downplaying any climate change damage was possible, let alone imminent. (Because really – three decades stretches the credulity of “imminent.”)
For these California governments, imminent climate change catastrophes are fantasy when they troll for cash.
But imminent climate change catastrophes are fundamental when they sue these eighteen energy companies….also for cash.
Well – would you look at that?
California governments will deny climate change…when it gets them money.
And will allege climate change…when it gets them money.
That’s a whole lot of hypocrisy. And a whole lot of vice.
With zero virtue at all to be found.
This first appeared in Red State.