The Green New Deal is wrong for America

First they came for your wallet. Now Democrats want your car and your hamburgers – making summer cookouts a thing of the past.

But those aren't the only liberties the left wants to abolish in the name of fighting climate change. Radical liberals led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., also want to minimize air travel. It's all outlined in their Green New Deal, a proposal to fend off a supposed climate apocalypse.

Never mind that China, the world's largest polluter, emits more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the U.S. and the EU combined or that the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and China are dumping more plastic waste and debris into the ocean than the rest of the planet is. Far-left lawmakers pushing the utopian Green New Deal don't want to talk about that or the fact that China opens a new coal plant every week on average, illustrating that the Green New Deal isn't really about protecting Mother Earth from the effects of climate change; it's about giving Democrats and big-government socialists control over the entire U.S. economy – and our lives.

It's a massive power grab under the guise of curtailing the alleged "cataclysmic" effects of climate change – a pseudoscience that is far from settled.

Many esteemed climatologists and meteorologists, including MIT professor emeritus Richard Lindzen, have opposed the hysteria surrounding climate change. They say the earth is entering a cooling phase and warn that enviro-alarmists shouldn't overestimate carbon dioxide's effects on the atmosphere. In a 2015 interview on my Boston Herald Radio show, Lindzen told me, "Not only has there been a hiatus in temperature increase, but we have fewer hurricanes than we traditionally have."

When I asked about reports that sea levels were rising, he explained that they've "been rising since the end of the last ice age, at a fairly slow rate. That's normal. And it was going on long before industrialization." And when it comes to alarmist proclamations that we must reduce our carbon footprint or risk seeing the world come to an end, Lindzen said, "Climate scientists, until this latest hysteria, used to refer to warm periods, which was most of the earth's history, as being climate optima. It has nothing to do with decarbonizing. We need carbon dioxide; it is essential to life on earth. And we don't have any known replacement at the moment."

Given that there are conflicting data on climate change, it's unfathomable that any rational human, much less a lawmaker, would want to destroy the U.S. economy and the millions of jobs that go with it by supporting the infantile Green New Deal.

It's also worth noting that even if there is catastrophic man-made climate change happening and America reduced its carbon footprint to zero – an impossible task in a modern industrialized economy – radical lawmakers still wouldn't eliminate climate change, with China and the rest of the world polluting the atmosphere and oceans ad nauseam.

That's all the more reason Americans should refuse to hand their cars, barbecues and airplane tickets – our entire way of life – over to a 29-year-old congresswoman with "big ideas."

Just because an idea is "big" doesn't make it good.