To the editor:

The April 17 edition of the Call included a letter encouraging us to get involved and act on climate change, which, until recently, used to be called global warming.

And before that in the ’70s and ’80s, global cooling — or the ice age.

The letter writer would have been a child in the 1970s.

But I was an adult and parent of three and was certainly taken up with the environmental movement, belonging to the Sierra Club, Coalition for the Environment, donating to Greenpeace, et cetera. I was a true believer that we were doomed if we did not change. And like the letter writer, I was doing it for our children’s future.

But I no longer trust the Environmental Protection Agency or its “facts” and “stats,” as I now believe they are ideologically driven zealots with an agenda that has nothing to do with “saving the planet” and everything to do with complete control of our lives.

These are the central planners and they will plan how we are to live and how much energy we each use, how we travel, and where we are to live.

The April 17 letter writer suggests that in order to put solar, wind, geothermal, et cetera, on a level playing field with the traditional, plentiful, much-cheaper energy sources, that taxes should be imposed — carbon fees — on oil, coal and natural gas, which would then drive up the prices on traditional energy.

Then we would turn to the alternative energy. And that is in line with the president’s plan that he spoke of in January 2008: “Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” And his goal of increased energy prices are being realized.

Throughout the 1970s, there were hundreds of statements in the press — in The New York Times in 1974: “The facts of the present climate change (cooling) are such that most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure in a decade … mass deaths by starvation …”

And scientific magazines such as New Scientist stated in 1975: “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.”

This is what the scientific community was saying at that time about global cooling.

However, by the late 1980s, this was switched from cooling to warming. And in 1990, The New York Times published an open letter from Al Gore “To Skeptics of Global Warming.”

Imagine that — a mere 16 to 17 years passed and a complete flip-flop occurred in what scientists were saying and the stenos in the press were regurgitating for the public. Of course, no questions were asked or explanations given for this flip-flop.

And that is exactly when I became a science skeptic on this issue.

I trusted completely once, but my experience tells me to look deeper into what is driving this — oppressive taxes on energy plus freedom-destroying EPA/government mandates on industry and us can be accomplished through doomsday forecasts and pure scare-mongering.

There was a time when I never would have believed that scientists could be ideologically driven and thus corrupted.

But I lived to see it.