Climate reparations? I already paid them

Our modern life has a way of embracing the absurd. Just imagine if you could travel back 15 years and tell your younger self about today — that calling the police to report a crime is now viewed as an act of violence, that the brazenly anti-Catholic Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are now honored for their “lifesaving work,” or that it is now considered “shaming” to talk about obesity as a bad thing for human health. 

You would, of course, be met with disbelief if you were able to have such a conversation. 

“So wait,” your younger self might say. “You’re telling me that, in 2023, even if what I say to or about you isn’t offensive, we could still both get in trouble if somebody else overhears it and pretends to get offended on behalf of others?” 

“Yeah, it’s called a ‘microaggression.’”

“What are you going to tell me next? Do people in 2023 also eat bugs?”

“Uh, well, let’s not get into that…”

But our society is actually far beyond even what the grievance industry is equipped for. They have to make things up to be offended about because we have run out of problems that they are actually willing to confront. 

On the issue of reparations, they are trying very hard. But they have a long way to go. Polls indicate that most Americans still oppose the idea of reparations for descendants of slaves, despite its newfound popularity in some quarters. The idea of making people who have personally done nothing wrong pay people who were never personally wronged, just because of long-ago injustices by and against people whose resemblance to them is skin-deep, is as profoundly unpopular as it is absurd.

But the latest trend puts a new twist on this bad idea. The journal One Earth wants to make oil companies pay “climate reparations” — hundreds of billions of dollars for the alleged damage caused by other people using their product in a lawful manner. But mind you, oil companies from developing counties are to be exempt from the penalties because … well, just because. 

First of all, either we are in a climate crisis or we aren’t. If so, then why let any oil company off the hook? And if not, then why should any of them feel guilty about keeping the world’s population alive by producing the cheap and abundant energy that people need to survive and thrive?

Set aside the fact that this will do just as little to slow the increase in atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide as all the carbon-related treaties since Kyoto — which is to say, it will do nothing at all. The truth is that oil and gas companies don’t release much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They merely help the rest of us do it.

If you need someone to blame, find a reflective surface. We are the ones demanding these companies’ products every time we pull up to a gas station or pay our electrical bills. We use what they produce every time we access a news website, watch the Stanley Cup Playoffs and pretty much everything in between. All the oil and gas companies have ever done is provide exactly what you and I have demanded, every day, for decades. 

We are the ones driving the cars, heating and cooling our homes, mowing our lawns and cooking our meals. And if Europeans need to heat their homes during the colder months amid the disruptions caused by war in Ukraine, should Western oil and gas companies be punished for providing the product that saves hundreds of thousands of lives in winter?

Of course, if there is a climate crisis, then every inhabitant of Earth suffers from it. And we are also all guilty of causing it.

So take out your wallet out of your pocket. Put it back into your other pocket. Congratulations! You have just paid yourself climate reparations.

America still has problems — real problems. But the opioid epidemic caused by our open border, the rise in violent crime, the national debt and the military threat of communist China don’t create enough extra victim points to be useful to anyone in the grievance industry. 

So if they ever ask you for climate reparations, just explain that you already paid them — and you are grateful to yourself for doing it.

Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).