Englehart’s View by Bob Englehart

Predictably, the storm has been blamed on climate change, that is, human destruction of the earth’s atmosphere. Opinion alert: Yes, the earth is warming. It’s a natural phenomenon that has gone on for millions of years. The Earth was tropical during the time of the dinosaur and it wasn’t because tyrannosaurus rex had bad farts. And later, it was an ice box when mastodons roamed lower Manhattan and a one mile thick ice sheet covered Foxwoods. In the 1970s, scientists were warning us about the next ice age.

Has human existence changed the climate? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. If we stopped burning greenhouse gases right now, today, would the Earth go back to a medium temperature we can all agree on any time soon? If we lived the life vegans wanted us to, would the bad storms moderate by next week? Of course not. All that has happened in this current conversation is that more fear has seeped into the human psyche.

My attitude is simple. Nobody has the right to pollute another person’s environment. Study what the New England manufacturers did to the region’s rivers back in the 18th, 19th and well into the 20th centuries if you want to see gross human hubris in action.

Look, if you own a pond on your property and it doesn’t leak into ground water or a stream, you can pollute it to death if you like, but you have no right to pollute your neighbor’s pond. This is the central issue in smoking bans. Nobody has the right to pollute another person’s air, whether it’s cigarette smoke, that hideous perfume that gives me a headache, or the steel mill next door. Stop polluting the atmosphere, rivers, streams and oceans and we’ll see soon enough what happens to the planet.

Earthlings, if you want to save the planet, stop being such slobs.