By Andrea Widburg
When Democrats think of the endpoint of their green plans to fight climate change, they imagine a pastoral world in which happy, well-fed people frolic in fields of food and flowers, while their wise and benign overlords govern all wisely for the good of people, animals, and Mother Gaia herself. This is because Democrats are completely ignorant.
Once Democrats drain America’s dependence on fossil fuels, we will revert to a Hobbesian world in which, for most, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Fossil fuel is responsible for everything in our world: food, clothing, shelter, medical care, transportation, heat in the winter, air conditioning in the summer, and the end of human chattel labor by substituting machines for slaves. Add in the deliberate breakdown of our transport sector in the form of air and rail strikes, and we Americans are in deep doo-doo.
The latest Democrat disaster to hit America is airline and railway strikes. Delta is America’s second-largest airline. It currently looks as if the pilots—close to 15,000 of them—are about to strike. Add to that the imminent breakdown in America’s diesel supply and a threatened railway strike, and it’s hard to calculate the scope of the disaster about to descend upon America’s airports and stores.
Amid a protracted labor dispute over a new contract, nearly 15,000 Delta Air Lines (NYSE: DAL) pilots have voted to authorize a strike.
The airline’s unionized pilot group, which is part of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), said that 96 percent of the pilot group participated in the vote, and that 99 percent voted in favor of strike authorization. According to the group, it was the first such vote in 16 years, emerging after negotiations for a more lucrative contract stalled.
This shouldn’t surprise us. In response to COVID, the airlines offered early retirements to many pilots to ease the burden on airline payrolls, and a lot of pilots took them up on that offer. With Americans flying again, the airlines can fill their planes but are struggling to find people to staff their cockpits. During a recent trip, my flight was delayed several hours Delta staff desperately hunted for an available pair of pilots.
Not long after, I spoke with a Delta pilot who said he wasn’t at all surprised; being short-staffed is now a common problem. No wonder pilots want better wages and working conditions. They’re currently a valuable commodity, and the airline is driving them hard.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin Rep. Bryan Steil is sounding the alarm about an imminent railway workers’ strike (after Biden got workers to promise to wait until after the mid-terms) which, when combined with the imminent end of available diesel fuelin America, will bring shipping to a halt.
“It’s incredibly concerning,” Steil said Tuesday on the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show. “We got to remember this is just weeks after President Biden told us that he had this all under control, and the trains would be running on time.
“We’re now learning it’s anything but that. It’s another game where the Biden administration has kicked the can down the road and kicked it past this election.”
[snip]
Steil said the impact of the railroad strike could be exacerbated by ongoing shortages of diesel fuel, which power everything from tractor trailers to harvesting tractors.
“The shortages that we’re seeing around the country is concerning,” Steil continued.
Going into 2020, we were an energy-independent, affluent country, with low unemployment, and warehouses and shelves filled with goods for people who had money to buy them. We then got hit with the Democrats’ opportunistic response to COVID.
The Democrats’ policies were designed to drive Trump from the White House, destroy the working- and middle-classes, shut down free speech, end unfettered travel, accustom Americans to shortages, and tighten government control over every aspect of American life. With Biden successfully in the White House, Democrats heightened the effect of their disastrous policies by stifling oil production and refining, along with opening our border to millions of welfare-dependent illegal aliens.
We’re on the precipice of the net result of these policies: A return to the pre-modern era. If events proceed as predicted (airline shutdowns, railway shutdowns, running out of diesel, rapidly increasing fuel prices once Biden finishes draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, etc.), we’re going to experience the wonders of the pre-modern era: A Hobbesian world in which human lives are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Our modern world is built on fossil fuels for comfort, manufacturing, farming, and transport. Take away fossil fuel and add in the chaos from strikes in fundamental, infrastructure industries, and we’re in the fast lane to Hobbes-land.