As I approach age 60, I can’t remember a single year when the government didn’t attempt to frighten the citizenry over some imaginary problem.
President Johnson told us that the North Vietnamese were going to invade the US, after taking over Asia and the Pacific. He felt that stopping this was worth the lives of 60,000 American young men.
Shortly thereafter, the government saved us from global cooling.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a growing scientific consensus held that the Earth was entering a period of global cooling. The CIA announced that the “Western world’s leading climatologists have confirmed recent reports of detrimental global climatic change” akin to the Little Ice Age of the 17th and 18th centuries, “an era of drought, famine and political unrest in the western world.” President Jimmy Carter signed the National Climate Program Act to deal with the coming global cooling crisis.
Lawrence Solomon: A global cooling consensus | Financial Post
President Obama believes that making the US less competitive through higher energy prices, will reduce the record low number of hurricanes the US has been experiencing in recent years.