In Praise of Freedom – and Diesel Fuel

Early this past summer, my wife and I spent two weeks traveling America by train. This is the best way to see our beautiful country. No worries about the next rest stop, meal, or hotel or camping spot. Just relaxing travel – seeing, eating, sleeping, meeting new people as the U. S. of A. passes steadily along outside. It enables you to see what you cannot from 30,000 feet: our countrymen, how  and where they live, what they do. Along with, of course, the purple mountain majesty and amber waves of grain.

Trains, it must be noted, are beloved by the climate crowd, who are always bellyaching about how much better they are for Mother Earth than cars. But how do these trains run? Massive diesel generators generating electricity for the electric motors, enabling them to drive America’s diesel-electric locomotives that haul millions of tons of freight and thousands of passengers across this country every day.

And our getting to the train required taking a Greyhound bus from Phoenix to Flagstaff, and another to get home from Tucson two weeks later? More Diesel.

Fill 'er up.

Later in the summer my brother and I backpacked for a week through California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, something we have done every year since high school. How did we get there? I drove more than 300 miles to Southern California, then he and I drove 350 miles to Lake Edison – one part of one of the major hydro-electric projects in California – parked the gas-powered car for a week of backpacking, and then drove 680 miles home.

Could we have done this in a E.V.? No. Even if the batteries made it up the mountains to Lake Edison, no charging station – or power to feed one – exists there. These – let’s call them what they are: toys for the elite – cannot make it up and back to the Sierras.

Thinking back on these treks on the way home, it occurred to me that if the Climate Cultists had their way, they would have been impossible. No bus, no train, no car, and thus no backpacking. These are the things they want to take from us: Our outdoors. Our freedom. And ultimately our country.

On the basis of a dubious hypothetical, the supposedly "environmentalist" elites are seeking to destroy our odious (in their mind) ability to open the gate and leave our 15-minute corral, instead having our insect feed delivered for us to eat from our electric stoves that won’t work when the grid goes down because there is no sun or wind.

These elites and their useful idiots know that lithium vehicles can blow up and burn down your house. They don’t care. They know hardly anyone wants or can afford these vehicles. They don’t care. They know that switching to battery powered cars will destroy jobs across the entire automotive industry, the aftermarket as well as the manufacturers and dealers, an employee base of almost a million people and jobs. They don’t care.

Zzzzzzz...

They know these vehicles will hugely limit our freedom to travel. Not only do they not care, this is the entire point of battery powered cars: to curtail our freedoms. They want to end the freedoms of the purportedly “racist” suburbs and exurbs. They'd prefer to see us all packed into tiny boxes in major metros next to a mass-transit station and walk to the a nearby market for our allotment of government-provided food, transportation, and clothing at government-specified prices.

In fact, their vision for America's future is oddly (or perhaps not so oddly) reminiscent of the Soviet Union. Their plan is to take away our freedom so that they can take away our country. They can't be allowed to succeed. It's not theirs to take.