WASHINGTON — Did you see the look on Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton’s face when during her visit to India she visited with
that country’s Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh? It was that
frozen smile we have seen from her before when the smiling lady
is, as a matter of fact, mad as hell. You saw it during her
husband’s impeachment. Bill has seen it practically every day of
their married life. Now we have seen it during her three-day
visit to India, where, among other things, she hoped to have
India at least show some respect for the Obama Administration’s
proposed carbon limits.
Instead of respect she got rebuff. As Minister Ramesh
asseverated, “There is simply no case for the pressure that we,
who have among the lowest emissions per capita, face to actually
reduce emissions.” The pressure he alludes to has been coming
from the United States to adopt some monstrous emissions
regulation like our cap-and-trade bill now blessedly being
euthanized in the Senate. “And as if this pressure was not
enough,” he went on, “we also face the threat of carbon tariffs
on our exports to countries such as yours.” So our cap-and-trade
bill will not only impose economic costs (for Americans, $7.4
trillion in taxes, our largest tax increase ever) but it may
start an international trade war by excluding imported goods from
countries like India that reject our environmental diktats. China
and Brazil do too.
Secretary Clinton ought not to be surprised by the Indians’
recalcitrance. Ramesh has expressed doubt before that global
warming is the grave problem that trendy liberal Democrats insist
it is. Late last week he even expressed doubt that Himalayan
glaciers have been damaged by climate change, despite
environmentalists’ insistence that the glaciers are melting.
Frankly Ramesh sounded very much like what Al Gore calls a
global-warming denier. Yet the Indian is in good company. There
is a growing number of scientists and political leaders who doubt
the significance of carbon in the atmosphere. In fact, they doubt
the existence of global warming period, and with good reason.
Contrary to the environmentalists’ computer projections, there
has been no global warming since 1998. Instead we now have global
cooling. Actually, the last two years of global cooling have
eliminated the last thirty years of global warming.
Possibly Ramesh has read the latest scientific debunking of the
global-warming position supplied by an important book, Heaven
and Earth, by Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology as
Adelaide University. In an interview with London’s
Spectator, the professor summed the book’s findings
thus: “The hypothesis that human activity can create global
warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated
knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology,
and geology.” Being a geologist, Professor Plimer has had to
study climate conditions going back to the origins of the planet,
over 4 billion years ago. He chides the global-warming hysterics
for only studying the last 150 years. Other skeptics whom I have
noted in this column are the scientist Bjorn Lomborg and former
British Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State for
Energy Nigel Lawson.
Nonetheless, hysterics rattle on, locked in to the view
established by their guru, Secretary Clinton’s friend Gore.
“Global warming is real,” he said in 2006. “We human beings are
responsible for the vast majority of it. The results are bad,
headed toward catastrophic.” In July he attributed brush fires in
Australia to global warming. “Cyclones are getting stronger,” he
added. “…the fires are getting bigger,…the sea level is
rising….” Then he warned that “refugees are beginning to move
from places they have long called home.”
Well, the Indians are not alarmed, nor are the Chinese and the
Brazilians. Professor Plimer explains: “When I try explaining
‘global warming’ to people in Iran or Turkey they have no idea
what I’m talking about.” The prof claims that alarmists like Gore
and Clinton, and, for that mater, President Barack Obama, are a
self-centered minority out of touch with human needs and with
atmospheric conditions. “Eco-guilt is a first-world luxury,” he
told Spectator. “It’s the new religion for urban
populations which have lost their faith in Christianity.”
A timely explanation for their self-centered hysteria now comes
from an unlikely source, Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard
Law School and recently appointed to be Administrator of the
Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Office of
Management and Budget, by President Obama. In Going to
Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide, he deposits his
finding that “like-minded people tend to move to a more extreme
version of what they thought” the more they talk with each other.
The liberal Democrats who now dominate the Obama Administration
have pretty much sealed themselves off from criticism. They have
been talking with each other for years, reaffirming their
prejudices and getting ever more extreme. Now on the environment
they would impose on the whole world taxes and regulations that
will suppress economic growth and conduce to trade wars.
Fortunately they are running up against the enlightened Indians
and Chinese, ex-socialists who have learned the benefits of
growth. The surprise is on us.
