If there is one thing that typifies those in power generally and liberal celebrities specifically, it is rank hypocrisy — “do as I say, not as I do.”

For Earth Day (which was cofounded, or so he claimed, by Ira Einhorn, whose idea of environmental responsibility was killing his girlfriend, stuffing her body in a trunk in his apartment, and running off to France), a Facebook Friend passes on this photo of the current Obama vacation (on David Geffen’s yacht) and quote:

“No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change… and the best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate…
… except for vacations on board super-yachts… those are OK”

— Barack Obama

Glenn Harlan Reynolds says of global warming that he will believe it’s a crisis when people in authority start acting like it’s a crisis. That means no more large-scale carbon use by envirowackos like Al “Earth in the Balance” Gore (who has made quite the fortune by lying), Leonardo DiCaprio (who reportedly was also on the yacht), etc. Those people are playing those who are environmentally responsible for suckers.

The environmentalist movement needs to realize and admit that Gore-like dire predictions of environmental doom do not improve one’s credibility. Mark J. Perry writes:

In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day in the 1970, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article. Well, it’s now the 47th anniversary of  Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 17 years ago: How accurate were the predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970? The answer: “The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong,” according to Bailey. Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started:

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”

10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).

14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”

15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

Let’s keep those spectacularly wrong predictions from the first Earth Day 1970 in mind when we’re bombarded in the next few days with media hype, and claims like this from the 2017 Earth Day website:

Global sea levels are rising at an alarmingly fast rate — 6.7 inches in the last century alone and going higher. Surface temperatures are setting new heat records about each year. The ice sheets continue to decline, glaciers are in retreat globally, and our oceans are more acidic than ever. We could go on…which is a whole other problem.

The majority of scientists are in agreement that human contributions to the greenhouse effect are the root cause. Essentially, gases in the atmosphere – such as methane and CO2 – trap heat and block it from escaping our planet.

So what happens next? More droughts and heat waves, which can have devastating effects on the poorest countries and communities. Hurricanes will intensify and occur more frequently. Sea levels could rise up to four feet by 2100 – and that’s a conservative estimate among experts.

Reality Check/Inconvenient Facts:

1. From the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Annual Report for 2016, we’re actually in the longest major hurricane drought in US history of 11 years (and counting):

The last major hurricane (Category 3 or stronger) to make landfall in the US was Wilma on November 24, 2005. This major hurricane drought [of 11 years] surpassed the previous record of eight years from 1861-1868 when no major hurricane struck the coast of the United States. On average, a major hurricane makes landfall in the U.S. about once every three years.

2. The frequency of hurricanes in the US has been declining … in the first seven years of each decade back to the 1850s, based on NOAA data here. In the seven years between 2010 and 2016, there were only eight hurricanes (all Category 1 and 2), which is the lowest number of hurricanes during the first seven years of any decade in the history of NOAA’s data back to 1850. It’s also far lower than the previous low of 14 hurricanes during the period from 1900 to 1906.

3. What you probably won’t hear about from the Earth Day supporters is the amazing “decarbonization” of the United States over the last decade or so, as the falling CO2 emissions in the bottom chart above illustrate, even as CO2 emissions from energy consumption have been rising throughout most of the rest of the world. Energy-related carbon emissions in the US have been falling since the 2007 peak, and were at their lowest level last year in nearly a quarter century, going back to 1992. And the environmentalists and the “Earth Day” movement really had very little to do with this amazing “greening” of America. Rather, it’s mostly because of hydraulic fracturing and the increasing substitution of natural gas for coal as a fuel source for electric power …

Finally, think about this question, posed by Ronald Bailey in 2000: What will Earth look like when Earth Day 60 rolls around in 2030? Bailey predicts a much cleaner, and much richer future world, with less hunger and malnutrition, less poverty, and longer life expectancy, and with lower mineral and metal prices. But he makes one final prediction about Earth Day 2030: “There will be a disproportionately influential group of doomsters predicting that the future–and the present–never looked so bleak.” In other words, the hype, hysteria and spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions will continue, promoted by the “environmental grievance hustlers.”

Facebook Friend Michael Smith:

There are now books being written, reviewed and discussed about why Hillary Clinton lost. She has publicly blamed educated white women, the Russians, James Comey in specific and males in general. The books blame her campaign organization and the fact she was simply a flawed candidate, one so flawed that she lost to an even more flawed candidate with a better strategy.

It’s actually very simple. Here are my 5 Reasons I Don’t Have to Wake Up to a President Hillary:

1. She lost because she expected to simply be anointed as victor. She was next in line and had lost in the 2008 primaries to a popular Democrat who was popular due to his race. She expected to ride the same wave of identity politics that popularized the idea that having a black president was somehow cathartic for America and evidence of America’s remorse over slavery. She expected that simply being a woman would give her the same or even greater advantage because there are even more women in America than guilty white liberals and blacks.

2. She lost because she was told she was a lock. That Hillary would be the First Woman President was a foregone conclusion in all the mass media. Before she announced, the MSM was begging her to run – just as they are begging Fauxcohantas Warren now. From the start, she was the anointed successor to Obama. The media sought to apologize for their tawdry, slavering love affair with Obama in 2008 that cost her the nomination by covering her with soft focused cameras and softball interviews. After all, in the world of a race obsessed media, while being black doesn’t trump being a woman, it trumps being a WHITE woman, so the media sought to elevate her as their apology for supporting Obama. In the Democrat party, racism always defeats feminism. Since even before the first vote was counted on election night she was considered the winner, instead of working for votes, her campaign simply took key battleground states for granted — and they lost them, albeit with narrow margins but close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, not the Electoral College.

3. She lost because she is a Clinton. Being a Clinton means that she is a lying, parsing, corrupt and self-absorbed political creature, one so self-absorbed and lacking such self-awareness as to believe everything bad that happens is someone else’s fault and all good things are direct results of her actions. More than that, the Clinton political stance is known to be more moderate than left wing — actually it is more political opportunistic than ideological — this was a death sentence in a Democrat Party that has moved so far left that it it now chaired and co-chaired by a committed socialist (Tom Perez) and a Muslim congressman with ties to radical Islamic groups and the unindicted co-conspirator organization, CAIR (Keith Ellison) and whose current “stars” are a Vermont socialist who isn’t even a Democrat and a raving lunatic communist, who lies about being Native American for purposes of personal advancement. I don’t think the party of Mondale ever forgave Billy Jeff for pausing the Democrat lurch to the left in 1992.

4. She lost because even rank and file, dirt under their fingernails Democrats thought she was a reprehensible human being. The private email server/national security breach/wipe it with a cloth thing mattered to them. The evasion, outright lies and misrepresentations mattered. Huma Abedin’s connections with the MoBros bothered them. The thought of two women running the White House who had such bad judgement to marry philandering sleazeballs like Bill Clinton and Carlos Danger bothered them. To a surprising majority of Democrats, character actually mattered.Beyond a small and dedicated group of Democrat insiders (including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Donna Brazille and the Superdelegates), Hillary is despised — the more she appeared in public, the lower her poll numbers dropped.

5. She lost because she ran a “Prevent Defense” campaign. In the words of legendary football coach John Madden, the only thing a prevent defense does is prevent you from winning. Her opponent didn’t expect to win but campaigned to win. Trump targeted key states where he could move the needle with his populist message and win electoral votes and ignored those states that were lost (like California). They counted on her national “popularity” (as shown in the national polls) to carry the day when in actuality, Trump won narrow victories in enough battleground states to win a decisive Electoral College victory even as she won the popular vote by about 3 million votes (primarily from California and New York).

None of these 5 reasons should come as a surprise, they all have been known for years. These were just the things that had to be overlooked to assume another Clinton presidency.

One of those books is reviewed by John Podhoretz:

So guess what? In the last weeks before the election, the Hillary Clinton campaign did no polling. No. Polling. Whatsoever. Oh, it had data. Lots and lots of data. Analytics, even. Data analytics! But it had no independent information on the overall field of battle in states like Florida, Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

So when the election began to turn Donald Trump’s way, the Clinton campaign had no idea.

This is one of the thousand revelations in Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, the new book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes that, for political junkies, redefines the word “juicy” for our time.

Campaign honcho Robby Mook “was worried about overspending . . . so he declined to use pollsters to track voter preferences in the final three weeks of the campaign.” Mook had learned from his time on the Obama 2012 campaign, Allen and Parnes write, that “old-school polling should be used for testing messages and gauging the sentiments of the electorate and that analytics were just as good for tracking which candidate was ahead and by how much in each state.”

Guess not.

Allen and Parnes report that the Republican National Committee did know — but just couldn’t accept it. The RNC didn’t brief reporters on early November polling data it had developed in Michigan and Pennsylvania “because the upticks there were so rosy that party officials didn’t believe their own data.”

The day after the election, Hillary asked Mook “which decisions had been misguided, where they had erred in strategy and tactics. ‘Our data was wrong,’ he said . . . ‘OK,’ she replied.”

It is true that, but for 100,000 votes in three states, Hillary Clinton would be president today. It is also true that she ended the election with 3 million more votes than Trump. But it is also true, as “Shattered” makes indisputably clear, that she was unquestionably the worst major presidential candidate in our lifetime.

Others (like Bob Dole) did far worse. But they likely never really had a shot. Hillary had no business losing an election to Donald Trump — but Allen and Parnes pile up headshaking detail after headshaking detail from the very beginning of her campaign to its end showing that she and her people were incapable of making a good call.

About anything.

David French adds:

Over at New York magazine, Andrew Sullivan is appalled at the Clinton family’s continued relevance:

It simply amazes me the hold this family still has on the Democratic Party — and on liberals in general. The most popular question that came from interviewer Nick Kristof’s social-media outreach, for example, was: “Are you doing okay?” Here’s Michelle Goldberg: “I find myself wondering at odd times of the day and night: How is Hillary? Is she going to be all right?” Seriously, can you imagine anyone wondering the same after Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis or John Kerry blew elections?

And everywhere you see not an excoriation of one of the worst campaigns in recent history, leading to the Trump nightmare, but an attempt to blame anyone or anything but Clinton herself for the epic fail. It wasn’t Clinton’s fault, we’re told. It never is. It was the voters’ — those ungrateful, deplorable know-nothings! Their sexism defeated her (despite a majority of white women voting for Trump). A wave of misogyny defeated her (ditto). James Comey is to blame. Bernie Sanders’s campaign — because it highlighted her enmeshment with Wall Street, her brain-dead interventionism and her rapacious money-grubbing since she left the State Department — was the problem. Millennial feminists were guilty as well, for not seeing what an amazing crusader for their cause this candidate was.

I must admit that I’ve been amazed as well. I thought the Democrats would drop the Clintons like a hot potato, but now we’re seeing Chelsea receive fawning treatment, and Hillary still gets glowing coverage from multiple partisan outlets. Why? If you’ll indulge some dime store theorizing, let me suggest that this is a simple function of human nature. We all tend to hate self-reflection. Since the #Resistance casts the political battle in such stark, moralistic terms, how can its members possibly face what they did when they nominated Hillary? Can they truly, humbly grapple with the consequences of nominating a corrupt machine politician for the presidency? Can they truly grapple with the full extent of her deceptions and evasions? No, a clear look in the mirror means acknowledging that 2016 wasn’t a battle of good versus evil but rather a battle between two of America’s most dishonest public figures. A clear look at 2016 means dismounting from the high horse, and no one likes to dismount from the high horse. So they rehabilitate Hillary. They embrace Chelsea. And they keep believing they were on the side of the angels all along.

If you’ll indulge some dime store theorizing, let me suggest that this is a simple function of human nature. We all tend to hate self-reflection. Since the #Resistance casts the political battle in such stark, moralistic terms, how can its members possibly face what they did when they nominated Hillary? Can they truly, humbly grapple with the consequences of nominating a corrupt machine politician for the presidency? Can they truly grapple with the full extent of her deceptions and evasions? No, a clear look in the mirror means acknowledging that 2016 wasn’t a battle of good versus evil but rather a battle between two of America’s most dishonest public figures. A clear look at 2016 means dismounting from the high horse, and no one likes to dismount from the high horse. So they rehabilitate Hillary. They embrace Chelsea. And they keep believing they were on the side of the angels all along.

No, a clear look in the mirror means acknowledging that 2016 wasn’t a battle of good versus evil but rather a battle between two of America’s most dishonest public figures. A clear look at 2016 means dismounting from the high horse, and no one likes to dismount from the high horse. So they rehabilitate Hillary. They embrace Chelsea. And they keep believing they were on the side of the angels all along.

They weren’t. But feel free to persist in your illusions, Democrats. They prevent you from finding someone to run against The Donald in 2020.