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Burned up by self-righteous environmentalists

Participants in the People's Climate March walk south on Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan on Sunday, Sept. 21, 2014.
Participants in the People’s Climate March walk south on Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan on Sunday, Sept. 21, 2014. Photo Credit: NBC photo

These crisp autumn days are sublime, but I’m burning up inside. Ever since the People’s Climate March Sunday, beads of perspiration have been running down my neck. I can’t figure out why.

It could be the name “People’s Climate March” itself. Sounds like a forced walk on hot coals at the Hanoi Hilton. Or maybe it’s the 400,000 people who traveled to and throughout the city for the march, burning enough fossil fuel to power Wyoming for days. Could they have driven up the mercury a degree or two?

Maybe it’s the rhetoric going around. Bobby Kennedy Jr. says he wishes there were laws to punish people who disagree with his view on environmental armageddon. Google just announced that it stopped contributing to the American Legislative Exchange Council, which shapes policy at the state level, for questioning environmental orthodoxy. “They’re just, they’re just literally lying,” Google chief executive Eric Schmidt sniffed. Evidently, Google succumbed to a year-long pressure campaign subtly titled, “Don’t Fund Evil.”

At least Schmidt was more magnanimous than Kennedy, who called people who question his conclusions “contemptible human beings.” He jetted to and from the march from his new home in California, of course, creating about two to three tons of carbon dioxide for his airline seat alone.

So did the rest of the do-gooders who came to the UN to howl about global warming. I’m not sure how Al Gore got there, but I hope he turned out the lights in his 20-room mansion before leaving. His home reportedly uses more electricity in a month than the average U.S. household goes through in a year.

I’m for helping the environment, but why are environmentalists so falsely self-righteous? I was raised with the premise that you leave a campsite cleaner than you found it. I turn off lights when I leave rooms and I drive a fuel-efficient car. But five minutes into one of the UN speeches, and I want to burn car tires on First Avenue and 44th Street.

Kennedy wants to outlaw speech that contradicts him. How about this instead: Make it illegal for anyone to blow hot air about the environment until he moves into a yurt, ceases motor travel and paints his roof white.

That guy I’ll listen to.

William F. B. O’Reilly is a Republican consultant who is working on the Rob Astorino campaign for governor.