theMattSmith

motherjones:

Michele Bachmann’s light bulb paranoia goes much, much deeper than you think:

As Bachmann explained to a perplexed chamber, sustainability, as defined by UN agreements like Agenda 21 and the UN Biodiversity treaty, would mean an end to resource extraction as we know it. “Last year in one of our committees, we had a guy come in and talk about the sustainable way of life,” she said. “And he gave the definition of sustainable and it struck me as kind of odd. He said that what sustainable means is that we’ve already taken everything out of the earth that we’re going to take out.”

And then Bachmann brought up a now familiar topic. “We already have all of the light bulbs that we need to have in the earth,” she recalled the expert saying. “We don’t need to make any more light bulbs. And so I’m thinking, ‘You mean for all time? And that’s part of sustainability, is for all time we already have the light bulbs that we need and apparently we’ll change filaments as they go out.’”

Read the full story, on the fringe conspiracy theory behind the presidential candidate’s anti-sustainability crusade, here.

“But to some conservatives, Agenda 21 became something far more nefarious—a gateway to a global government built on a radical doctrine of secular environmentalism.

As these conservatives saw it, the agreement paved the way for the entire planet to be controlled by a central bureaucracy: Humans would be cleared out of vast swaths of settled areas—like the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, for example—and instructed to live in “hobbit homes” in designated “human habitation zones” (two terms embraced by tea party activists). Public transportation would be the only kind of transportation, and governments would force contraception on their citizens to control the population level. A human life would be considered no more significant than, say, that of a manatee. “Sustainability,” the idea at the heart of the agreement, became a gateway to dystopia.”