Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Paul Driessen's op-ed in the first Providence Journal of the year is certainly worth a read. Regarding the U.N. Bali meeting on global warming:

Meanwhile, respected climate scientists were barred from panel discussions, censored, silenced and threatened with physical removal by polizei if they tried to hold a press conference to present peer-reviewed evidence that contradicts climate disaster claims, such as:

• Climate change is natural and recurrent. The human factor is small compared to that of the sun and other natural forces. ...
• The best approach is to adapt, as our ancestors did. ...

Other inconvenient arguments:

Even a 25 to 40 percent reduction over the next 12 years would impose huge sacrifices on families, workers and communities, especially poor ones — while leaving no room for population or economic growth.

Fossil fuels provide 85 percent of the energy we use. Slashing emissions by even 25 percent means slashing the use of these fuels, paying vastly more to control and sequester emissions, and radically altering lifestyles and living standards. Families will do so voluntarily, or under mandatory rationing systems, enforced by EPA, courts, climate police and "patriotic" snitches. Getting beyond 25 percent would require a "radical transformation" of life as we know it.

But here's the possibility that glares as the symbolic crux of the debate:

Perhaps newly unemployed workers could find jobs in China and other developing countries, where the tough emission standards won't apply ... China is adding the equivalent of another Germany every year to global greenhouse emissions, says climatologist Roger Pielke.

Whether or not the West's voluntary self-restrictions will ultimately enable global dominance of those oppressive regimes that simply refuse to play by the rules of panic isn't really the point. One gets the impression that the allure of climate-based jeremiadry is that it offers an overarching concern that excuses activists for ignoring all of those complicated considerations that wind up advising the allowance of practices that they dislike, such as consumerism, big business, freedom, and so on.

The point about China's oversized contribution to global warming was made last year by my colleague David S. Bernstein.