DAVID BLACKMON: Worries About ‘Existential Threat’ From Climate Change Suddenly Put On Hold For Paris Olympics

The U.S. Olympic team will be supplied with room air conditioning units, joining other countries like Germany, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada and Italy.

Organizers of the Summer Olympics Games to be held in Paris next month were hoping to force the games to be held sans air conditioning — what a wonderful virtue signal that would send to the climate-alarmed public!

The plan, as USA Today reported, was to force all event venues and athlete housing units to rely on a geothermal cooling system devised by the French. But, you know, it can get hot in Paris in the summer, and participating athletes and countries had some concerns about it.

So, despite the grand, centrally planned net-zero initiatives financed by trillions of debt-funded dollars and euros and pounds, many countries are planning to keep their athletes calm, collected and properly cooled with electricity-hogging room a/c units.

Note that the list of countries above includes some that are led by the world’s most aggressive and notorious climate scolds.

German leaders in this century have succeeded in largely destroying what had been the industrial powerhouse of Europe at the altar of climate alarmism, investing billions of debt-funded euros in a Quixotic attempt to power their society with windmills. That plan has been so successful to date that last winter, in a desperate attempt to avoid power blackouts, the government there resorted to reactivating mothballed coal plants and tore down a wind development to expand a domestic coal mining operation.

In the UK, the Tories — ostensibly the “conservatives” in Britain — now face an electoral wipeout of unprecedented proportions due in part to their buying whole hog into climate alarmist dogma.

In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose public approval rating would make President Joe Biden blush, faces a similar fate for similar reasons in national elections that will take place in 2025.

The governments of Australia and New Zealand, in nominally “conservative” or “liberal” regimes alike, have also embarked well down the net-zero path to deindustrialization.

Yet every one of these countries will be shipping out hundreds of energy consuming, greenhouse-gas-emitting air conditioners to Paris.

No national government has invested more time and more debt-funded dollars in virtue signaling and lecturing the public about climate change in recent years than the Biden regime. To hear President Joe Biden Biden, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Climate Envoy John Podesta, former Climate Envoy John Kerry and Vice President Kamala Harris tell it, a 1.5-degree rise in temperature is in fact an “existential threat,” one that requires us to saddle our great-grandchildren with trillions of more dollars in unsustainable debt to address right now, or — wait for it — we will all die!

But hey, we can’t have our Olympic athletes suffering in rooms where the Paris geothermal cooling system might only get temperatures down to an unbearable 78 degrees Fahrenheit, so it is imperative that the United States join the room a/c caravan across the Pond to gay Paree.

That is basically what USA Today quotes U.S. Olympic and Paralympic CEO Sarah Hirshland as saying: “We have great respect for the work that’s been done by the Paris organizing committee in particular and their focus on sustainability,” Hirshland said. “As you can imagine, this is a period of time in which consistency and predictability is critical for Team USA’s performance. In our conversations with athletes, this was a very high priority and something that the athletes felt was a critical component in their performance capability.”

But wait: If climate change is truly an existential threat to all mankind, shouldn’t the desires of a few thousand Olympics athletes to stay cool in their rooms simply be ignored? For the “greater good” and all that stuff?

After all, that is what the central governments in every one of these countries do whenever public opinion disapproves of their policy choices. Why should this become an exception?

The global religious belief that mankind can control the climate like it has a thermostat we can turn up and down at will is an example of unbridled hubris that is unrivalled in human history. That hubris is only exceeded by the rank hypocrisy practiced by the loudest and most visible of the religion’s adherents.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the 🏢Daily Caller News Foundation

(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/PBS)

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