First They Came for the Light Bulbs

When she arrived in St. Paul as a state senator, Bachmann brought those views with her. In a committee hearing in 2003 to discuss a clean energy bill, Bachmann broached the subject of Agenda 21. The term “sustainability” can have radical connotations, she warned, in the “brave new world of energy conservation,” and voted for an amendment to remove the language.

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.’”

I bet she wears contacts to conceal the spinning spirals that are her True Eyes.