A recent editorial in our local newspaper, the Durham Herald-Sun, titled Rocking For the Earth, has pushed me to the tipping point, which is the fancy way of saying “I’m fed up,” fed up with editorials, politicians, government, pundits, the U.N. and assorted global warmists haranguing me to change my carbon emitting ways.

Get off my back, please.

While the editorial rightly, but only lightly, observed the preposterous irony of the excessive energy output of Al Gore’s Live Earth concerts as pleas to reduce carbon emissions, it concluded by saying that “everyday people [need] to make adjustments in their personal lives and demand action from their governments.”

You’ll notice that this oft-heard piece of editorial pap places the energy reducing onus on you, me and our neighbors. We’re the ones being urged to mend our energy ways and demand action.

Well, no. A battleship changes course by order of the captain, not the actions of the crew. The captains of government and media are the ones with the bully pulpit. It’s their job to demand action that will start turning the ship, not mine.

I’ve yet to see these hand wringing worrywarts consistently badgering the government to do something substantial about alternative energies. I’ve not been reading a top down drumbeat to create policies that lead by action and example. It’s easier for them to jump on the global warming bandwagon and send copies of An Inconvenient Truth to schools to scare the hell out of kindergartners by telling them we’re killing polar bears and butterflies.

Where the hell are we, re-education camps in Cuba? Indoctrination classes in China? Sure seems like it.

Where are the comparable, incessant, editorial calls for a total, national commitment to nuclear energy, to wind or solar power? Not a drib here or a field of corn there, but a concerted push to actually create a significant approach to energy that demonstrates to us that the bigwigs of climate fright really mean business.

How about editorial calls for a Manhattan Project to develop a hydrogen car? I can’t do it in my garage, but our current Keystone Kongress could, if pushed hard enough. How about movements to seriously upgrade train travel or to install a modern, state-of-the art traffic control system that would reduce jet fuel emissions of waiting or stacked-up planes?

Scream about that fifty times a week, why don’t you, instead of nagging the rest of us.

I’m tired of being hectored to embrace the latest “green” brainchild like compact flourescent light bulbs or hybrid cars. I’m fed up with the guilt Al Gore and his ilk lay on me for filling my tank for the frivolous purpose of driving to work, getting my kids to school or running errands.

I’ve had it with attacks on SUV’s, when a family of five or six needs a vehicle that large to accommodate them. I resent working men and women being accused of having a gas-guzzling truck when it’s a necessity to carry tools and equipment to service homes and businesses with their expertise.

The next time you greenies want your lawn sprinklers fixed, provide the tools and parts, because they won’t fit in Volkswagon.

I want to throw a pie in the face of someone like Cameron Diaz when she tells women to turn off shower water while shaving their legs. Or Cheryl Crow, who’d limit us to one piece of toilet paper for each potty visit. Like THEY do it?

Shut up, please!

This environmental fatigue doesn’t suggest a belief in man-made global warming, or even that Earth’s current temperature is alarming. Personally, I think most global warmists are misguided cultists eager to swallow the religion of environmentalism. Jonestown, here we come.

To all the various people and agencies who’re trying to force their faith down my throat, do something significant or shut up. Write some energy legislation that doesn’t punish us by raising taxes on oil, or force automakers to reduce auto emissions, which will raise automobile manufacturing cost, which will then be handed down to us, essentially another tax.

I am not even railing about the hypocrisy of the wealthy celebrity warmists whose lifestyle makes a daily carbon footprint as large as one of China’s coal-fired plants. I’m not going to tsk-tsk about the well-off residents of Martha’s Vinyard like Walter Cronkite or the Robert F. Kennedy, JR, who have rejected a wind farm in Nantucket bay because it will spoil their view. I could care less that Al Gore has made a bigger mess of the environment with his nine concerts than years of single toilet paper use by the entire population could compensate for.

I am tired of hearing that it’s my responsibility to reduce this myth of global warming. I’m tired of being told I’m “addicted to oil,” when the country’s entire infrastructure is built on the automobile. I drive to and from work, to school and the grocery store, maybe a trip to the beach now and then, none of which I can do with public transportation while dragging along two or three kids, so what exactly is my addiction?

If the stench of global warming is too much for environmental politicians and editorialists to bear, take a lesson from The Godfather – the fish stinks from the head.