Having repeatedly violated science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein’s maxim, "Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig," I’ll begin this with a compassionate warning to my rapidly dwindling number of left-leaning friends to please avoid reading this article.
I likewise also caution the rest of you to avoid hopelessly discussing certain facts among liberals which can be expected to elicit similar inharmonious grunts and squeals.
For starters, stay away from pointing out that both for better and worse, climate change is indeed very real and has been going on without our help or blame for millions of years.
As for oft-cited "record" global temperatures, although they were far colder during the previous 90,000-year-long ice age about 12,000 years ago, they were also as warm or warmer during the Roman Warm Period 2,000 years ago and Medieval Warm Period a thousand years ago prior to smokestacks and SUVs.
Our planet is still warming its way out of the 350-year-long "Little Ice Age" that ended in the mid-1800s soon after Washington’s troops suffered a brutally cold 1777 winter at Valley Forge, and Napoleon’s made a frigid Moscow retreat in 1812.
Contrary to public claims by Joe Biden, according to readily verifiable records, extreme U.S. weather events haven’t become either more frequent or severe over the past century . . . ditto for forest fires.
And regarding hysterical predictions of climate doom, as NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies Director Gavin Schmidt told the renowned journal Science in 2021,
"It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this admission" that the models can’t be trusted as a policy instrument because "You end up with numbers for even the near‐term that are insanely scary — and wrong."
Which brings us to another polarized topic to avoid. . . rapidly transitioning away from reliable and abundant "climate-altering" fossil fuel (about 80% of global energy) to so-called "green" alternatives . . . namely wind and solar (about 3% combined).
That liberal plan somehow envisions adding tens of thousands of electric vehicles which depend upon rare earth materials imported from China and South Africa we aren’t allowed to mine or process to already overstressed power grids.
Mountain Pass in California is the sole U.S. remaining operating rare earth mine that lost two years of production due to a 2016 bankruptcy, and it continues to send its mined ore to China for processing.
On top of that, China somehow gets a United Nations pass to build an equivalent of about two new coal-fired plants every week.
Which brings up another particularly precarious political topic to avoid in liberal company . . . Biden family foreign influence profiteering with special reference to shady oil and gas energy companies.
Having pledged to kill American fossil industries, how does this square with Hunter receiving an annual salary from the less than savory Ukraine oil and gas company Burisma during the time Joe served as vice president in charge of U.S. policy towards that country?
Then how can it further be explained why father and son later each reportedly received $5 million from the company’s president shortly after Joe bragged about withholding a $billion dollars in aid to get their government’s Burisma prosecutor fired?
Recall that President Trump was impeached for merely asking incoming Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to look into that obvious national security matter.
There’s similar legitimate wonderment regarding Hunter’s murky business relationship with CEFC, a now-defunct oil and gas company reportedly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) which famously earmarked a 10% cut of a multi-million deal for "the big guy."
A July 30, 2017 WhatsApp shakedown message Hunter sent to Henry Zhao known to be connected with the family of the former Chinese Minister of Security stated, "I am sitting here with my father, and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.
"Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight."
Hadn’t Joe Biden pleaded ignorance of Hunter’s foreign business deals on numerous occasions, presumably including a $1.5 billion deal from a CCP-controlled bank shortly after joining him on a 2013 trip to Beijing aboard Air Force Two?
While they’re at it, do you suppose they will also explain why, according to the New York Post, the Biden family has done five deals in China totaling some $31 million?
And that $3.5 million wire transfer to a Hunter Biden firm from the billionaire widow of a Moscow mayor . . . what was that for?
And why has the White House cover story changed from Joe not knowing about Hunter’s deals to his not being tied to them?
The biggest question of all is what business are they in and what services have they provided to warrant the Biden family opening more than 20 convoluted foreign shell company LLC accounts and being subject to more than 150 Treasury Department Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs)?
While you’re at it, remember that two-tier justice claims are regarded as a right-wing conspiracy.
It was purportedly just a simple oversight that the FBI sat on demons hiding in Hunter’s laptop from hell throughout the 2020 elections which 51 intel officials "mistakenly" dismissed as Russian disinformation.
The armed raid on Trump’s personal residence at Mar-a-Lago for classified documents he was legally entitled to retain was justified, but those discovered stashed next to Joe’s car are considered no big deal.
Meanwhile, the DOJ lets the statute of limitations on Hunter’s felony tax charges expire, and offers a get-out-of- jail free pass on a sweetheart deal made in heaven for offenses that would land you and me in the slammer.
After all, isn’t Donald Trump supposed to be the truly bad guy who was wrecking the climate, enlisting the Russians and Chinese to rig elections, playing fast and loose with classified documents, and hiding taxable business profits?
But don’t mention any of these contradictions to your liberal friends and expect a reasoned and polite outcome.
Perhaps one day I’ll learn to take my own sage advice.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.