With Captain Kirk, Fancy Nancy Pelosi, and John McCain trying to
save it, what chance has the planet got?
By now most folks who keep up with such things have heard that
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced to an astonished world that
she’s “trying to save the planet.” Hardly a modest mission, even
for the self-styled most powerful woman on earth.
Fewer heard the announcement that William Shatner, Captain
Tiberius Kirk in the fanciful but popular Sixties TV series
Star Trek, has signed on with the Sierra Club to help
promote that apocalyptic outfit’s “2% Solution Campaign.” This
fool’s errand calls on Americans to cut carbon emissions two
percent each year by such string-saving measures as changing out
our homes’ windows, using compact fluorescent light bulbs, and not
exhaling.
Soon we will see television “public service announcements” where
an older, plumper Captain Kirk, in civilian clothes, will nag us to
live as Al Gore would have us live (as opposed to how Al Gore in
fact lives). Somebody please beam this guy somewhere.
If we do all these things, plus badger our government officials
to adopt Soviet-style restrictions on the use of carbon-based
fuels, we could cut our carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. This,
according to global warming co-religionists, would make life on
Earth safe, at least until the next apocalyptic threat to our very
existence that environmentalists invent.
Who can keep up with all the world-ending threats? There was the
so-called population explosion, death by pesticides, acid rain, the
hole in the ozone layer, nuclear winter, global cooling, and now,
the most audacious and successful hustle of all, global
warming.
GLOBAL WARMING, a calamity-based belief system supported by
sweeping speculations based on computer projections having to do
with the entire Earth’s climate, one of the most complex subjects
on Earth, has been so successfully marketed in the West that even
the Republican candidate for President has bought into it, hook,
line, and thermometer. We’ve all heard of John McCain’s calamitous
cap and trade system for carbon emissions that would oblige
Americans to cut way back on the use of fossil fuels before
replacements for carbon-based energy are available.
“Climate change, my friend, I have to tell you with all due
respect, is real,” McCain said at a town hall meeting in Sparks,
Nevada, earlier this week.
Well, yes, climate change is indeed real. The climate is
always changing. We’ve had alternating cool and warm
periods for the life of the planet (surely people who see a photo
of present day Greenland must wonder how it got that name). So
McCain’s statement would be unremarkable except that what he means
by it is that global warming is a threat to the planet, which it
almost certainly is not.
It’s time people who have bothered to compare the apocalyptic
claims of the global warming fanatics with the evidence for these
fantasies to say, “No, Senator, with all due respect back at you,
global warming is not real.”
In Sparks, McCain went on to say:
“Suppose I’m wrong and there’s no such thing as climate change,
all we’ve done is give our kids a cleaner planet. But suppose I’m
right and we do nothing. Then what kind of planet do we hand off to
our kids and our grandkids?”
This is profoundly foolish on two counts. If the global warming
hysterics are wrong and carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, then no
matter how badly we damage the economy to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions, the planet will not be a bit cleaner. What we will hand
off to our kids and grandkids is a Third World economy and a planet
that will almost certainly be dirtier than it is now. Rich nations
always deal with real pollutants better than poor ones.
IF ON THE SLIM CHANCE greenhouse gasses are a problem, we can
hardly be said to be doing nothing now. We’re proceeding apace with
research to develop alternative energy sources that don’t produce
greenhouse gasses, along with taking another look at nuclear power
that environmentalists shouted down in the seventies. One day we’ll
be far less dependent on fossil fuels, even without the foolishly
accelerated schedule of ridding the planet of carbon-based fuels
that the Sierra Clubs and the Al Gores of the world are insisting
on.
Pelosi and Shatner have good excuses for their foolishness on
this issue. Pelosi is a Democratic politician and is therefore
obliged to kiss up to environmentalists and other “progressive”
groups. As for Shatner/Kirk, it’s probably not too much time in
space that’s caused his problem, rather too much time in the
weightlessness of Hollywood.
McCain, on the other hand, has no excuse. There are no
conservative interest groups pushing to hand day-to-day power over
the economy to government, as the enviro groups constantly agitate
for. In fact, polls and focus groups show that while many Americans
say they’re concerned about global warming, it’s not at the top of
most people’s agendas. And most are not interested in taking
draconian measures to deal with a problem that may or may not be
real. What can McCain possibly be thinking?
McCain has an opportunity to lead on this issue and make an
important distinction between himself and Barack Obama at the same
time. (It’s been my observation that in elections, contemporary
Republicans rarely miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.) To
do this he would have to frame a real energy policy that’s not
centered on avoiding a phony threat manufactured by the political
Left to advance its collectivist purposes.
FROM TIME TO TIME I get a fund-raising letter from McCain, which
starts out with the sentence, “The choice America will face in
November is very clear.” It could be damn site clearer if McCain
would quit chasing after left-wing fantasies like global
warming.
In his letter, McCain goes on to whoop up “long-held
conservative principles of limited government, strong national
defense, and individual freedom.”
McCain certainly has conservative principles correctly and
economically described. But the principle of limited government is
out the window if we turn over energy decisions to politicians and
government bureaucrats, as McCain’s cap and trade program would do.
This would be the biggest increase in government power in our
history.
As to the other two principles, an energy-poor country cannot
defend itself at all. And where’s individual freedom if government
document-stampers tell us all when (if) we can use the air
conditioner or the toaster?
