Attention Gary Johnson Hipsters: He Is Nuts

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

23 September 16

Let's ignore climate change because the sun will swallow the earth anyway.

ey, you know what? I know a lot of people who enjoy/enjoyed smoking weed, myself among them. There isn't a single one of them that I'd trust with the launch codes. So my problems with Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson are familiar ones to me and they go beyond the fact that the Libertarian ticket should be turned on its head anyway. I also have a problem with the fact that Gary Johnson can look at the existential problem of our time and paraphrase J.M. Keynes, saying, essentially, "In the long run, we're all living on a cinder anyway."

Mother Jones brings us to happy fun time.

Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for president, takes what he calls the "long-term view" of climate change. "In billions of years," he said in 2011, "the sun is going to actually grow and encompass the Earth, right? So global warming is in our future." The former New Mexico governor did acknowledge that humans are making the world warmer in the near term, too—but he doesn't think the government should do much about it. In the same speech, he denounced "cap-and-trade taxation," said we "should be building new coal-fired plants," and argued that the "trillions" of dollars it would cost to combat climate change would be better spent on other priorities.

Between Johnson on climate change, and Jill Stein's conviction that a Republican congress will obstruct a Republican president, the argument for more political parties in this country is not faring well.