ABC’s “Earth 2100” [1] tried to tell the story of the future but ended up a documentary about the present. The global warming Armageddon-fest tried to scold and scare Americans into changing habits to prevent the deadly end. Instead, it told a tale of just how far journalism has descended from neutrality to bias to outright propaganda. That’s what host Bob Woodruff called “a different kind of journalism.” [2]
The program focused most on the fictional character “Lucy” who he used to tell his equally fictional tale of the future. Immediately after viewers met Lucy, the first real human they saw other than Woodruff was John Podesta, president and CEO of the lefty-wing think tank Center for American Progress. Podesta also headed up the Obama transition team.
Since Earth 2100 was a two-hour, left-wing, Obama commercial complete with an early talking head appearance by the president, Podesta was an appropriate choice. But not so appropriate that he actually appeared in that part of the transcript, [3] which ABC posted to go with its massive Web effort for the show. ABC had to add him in after the transcripts were completed. Apparently, the Obama connection wasn’t clear enough before that.
Podesta was far from alone. The parade of lefties, eco-scarers and Obama supporters was long indeed – climatologist Heidi Cullen, formerly of the Weather Channel; Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist; Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute; Van Jones, Green Jobs adviser to Obama; E.O. Wilson, a biologist & entomologist at Harvard University; Tom Daschle , former Democratic Senate majority leader and Eileen Claussen, president of the liberal Pew Center on Global Climate Change to name just a few of roughly 50 ABC claimed to interview.
There was no opposition. The show pretended to be fact but only presented two points of view – the world will end and mankind will return to “dark ages” after billions die. Or mankind will wise up, embrace all sorts of left-wing eco-solutions, abandon suburbs, live sustainably, pay much higher taxes and magically flourish.
The timing of the program was obvious and tied to at least one event even Woodruff admitted at the very end of the special – a looming climate conference in Copenhagen this December where America will be bullied to accept major climate regulations. Of course, Democrats have also just proposed a multi-trillion-dollar climate tax to save Americans from themselves [4].
To convince Americans of the need for those solutions, Woodruff painted a horrific picture. Lucy told the viewers that: “My story is everyone's story, the story of the last century.” But it wasn’t just a cartoon pushing that sentiment. It was the journalists. Woodruff explained early on in the program, “As the American life becomes increasingly unsustainable … the rest of the world will be trying to catch up.”
Times columnist Friedman argued for Big Government solutions to climate change with a mix of faux patriotism. “But the thing I would compare it to is World War II. After Pearl Harbor, FDR turned to Detroit, the automakers, and said you will now make tanks. You will now make Jeeps. Just like that, that was like overnight almost. And they did it.”
The progam followed Lucy’s Methuselah-like life from here birth June 2, 2009 to her 91st birthday as the world’s oldest woman. Most of the program went from downbeat to devastating, with only a few highlights in between. By 2015, her Miami summer was “on track to become one of the hottest in history.”
It got worse from there. Epic storms, disease, wars and more – a secular trek through the worst parts of Revelations. The “storm of the century” wiped out Miami and sent our heroine to San Diego for a new life. By 2030, “the new normal,” included the reality that “shortages and higher prices were just a fact of everyday life.”
With each decade, the problems loomed worse – massive population displacement, hordes of illegal immigrants invading the United States only to be shot at the border. After her parents died in a flu during 2050, Lucy and her family trekked across
New York first brings promise and then ruin as mankind succumbs to a rapid global warming setting in motion the end of civilization. By 2084, disease and collapse have plunged the globe into disaster with just 2.7 billion alive and dropping. Naturally, ABC turned to Obama supporter Podesta for his take on this eventuality. “If the world breaks down, if globalization breaks down, then even the capacity of the United State to manage a degraded global environment, I think, will come into question,” he said.
The ultimate in liberal disaster fantasies – even government can’t handle it. By 2100, Lucy lives on a small farm in a newly medieval world. “It is a hard life. The United States has fragmented into a million shards,” Lucy explained. E.O. Wilson summed it up: “Humanity could very well be in hell, where hell is defined as truth realized too late.”
But wait. With enough tax dollars and Big Government solutions, “paradise” can still be ours.
Woodruff introduced the alternate ending with typical lack of subtlety. “The future is not yet written. The ending to our story can still be changed.” That was followed by one final segment devoted to the leftie alternatives – “a wake-up call, a challenge for us to plan a different course,” he said.
Those alternatives included the typical journalistic list of touchy-feely solutions: compact fluorescent bulbs, planting a garden, more mass transit and one item designed just for newly owned General Motors – smaller cars.
But Woodruff and his “experts” weren’t finished. “Governments and industries are going to have to change on a massive scale,” he argued. Van Jones made the pitch for more taxes, which he hid by calling it by another name. “We can't drill and burn our way out of our problems. But we can invent and invest our way out.” Investment, that’s not a tax, after all…
Of course, that all has to be mandated to save ignorant citizens from their own base desires. “It would mean both sacrifice and hard work for the whole country,” Woodruff explained, echoing the left-wing claim that fighting global warming is like fighting World War II.
That huge United States commitment somehow convinces China and India to agree to carbon reductions in a 2015 conference and the world is on a new path. “By 2100, our world could be transformed,” concluded Woodruff.
If only some liberal president, who controlled both houses of Congress and had a devoted, compliant media could make that happen. So much for science fiction.
Editor’s Note: ABC’s report included clips from a few Web submissions of what the future might be like. The network encouraged first-person Web videos. The Business & Media Institute submitted one such video which painted a dark picture of an enviro-police state. Somehow that didn’t fit ABC’s plan for the future and it was not included. Special thanks to Media Research Center staffers Scott Whitlock, Lyndsi Thomas and Nathan Burchfiel for the BMI video included above.