Conservatives’ new enemy? Fresh air.
According to a guest on Newsmax, breathing clean air that isn’t riddled with pollutants would make us “extremely vulnerable” as a species.
Do me a favor and take a deep breath. Now take another one. And another. Feel that refreshing, cool air enter your lungs, flooding your blood with much-needed oxygen, and then release it back into the atmosphere as CO2 to make room for your next inhalation of that sweet, sweet lung fuel.
It’s nice, right? WRONG. According to Newsmax guest and petroleum enthusiast Alex Epstein, it’s actually a very good thing to have pollutants in our air supply, because breathing clean, non-toxic oxygen would make us “vulnerable” as a species.
Imagine living in a world where we don’t have a nice thick cloud of fossil fuel particulates ricocheting around in our lungs like the world’s filthiest pinball machine. It’s almost too terrible to consider!
“I think there are gonna be some pros, some cons,” Epstein continued, making his valiant case for climate change as a net positive for human beings, despite the overwhelming scientific consensus that, uh, it’s actually cataclysmically bad to the point of being a potential extinction-level event. But hey, comme ci comme ça, right?
Epstein, you might remember, is the same person who testified at an environmental hearing in the Senate during the waning days of the Obama administration, where he admitted that he wasn’t actually a scientist, but just a guy with a B.A. in philosophy, prompting then-California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer to admonish him by snapping, “I don’t appreciate being lectured by a philosopher and not a scientist.”
Epstein has long been a favorite of right-wing climate change deniers and/or embracers, who have cited him in their effort to continue burning fossil fuels despite the immediate and catastrophic effects of doing so. His work was even circulated by Texas officials during the 2021 blizzard and power outage that left hundreds of people dead as “proof” that Texas’s catastrophic electrical grid failure was simply the result of that state’s pivot toward solar and wind energy.
Still, even by the shamelessly pro-pollution standards he’s set for himself, suggesting to easily influenced Newsmax viewers that breathing in toxic chemicals is a net positive represents a new low in anti-environmental virtue signaling for Epstein. Will sucking on tailpipes and inhaling melted plastic become the newest conservative trend to own the libs? At this rate, it’s only a matter of time.
