Re: PETITION TO STOP AL GORE AND LEFT-WING ENVIRONMENTAL WACKOS !
- From: Kyle Schwitters <slipuvalad@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 11:52:05 -0700 (PDT)
More Gorey stuff ...
"Carbon Chastity"
"The First Commandment of the Church of the Environment"
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 30, 2008; A13
I'm not a global warming believer. I'm not a global warming denier.
I'm a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can't
be very good to pump lots of CO2into the atmosphere but is equally
convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are
talking through their hats.
Predictions of catastrophe depend on models. Models depend on
assumptions about complex planetary systems -- from ocean currents to
cloud formation -- that no one fully understands. Which is why the
models are inherently flawed and forever changing. The doomsday
scenarios posit a cascade of events, each with a certain probability.
The multiple improbability of their simultaneous occurrence renders
all such predictions entirely speculative.
Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists,
attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are
advocating radical economic and social regulation. "The largest threat
to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity," warns Czech
President Vaclav Klaus, "is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the
ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism."
If you doubt the arrogance, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story
that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's
laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and
experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor
to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex
and speculative -- is a closed issue.
But declaring it closed has its rewards. It not only dismisses
skeptics as the running dogs of reaction, i.e., of Exxon, Cheney and
now Klaus. By fiat, it also hugely re-empowers the intellectual left.
For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class --
social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-
wing political allies -- arrogated to themselves the right to rule
either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in
its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in
achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning
(socialism).
Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then
were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority
of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's
China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more
people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.
Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was
handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will
regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian
socialism but -- even better -- in the name of Earth itself.
Environmentalists are Gaia's priests, instructing us in her proper
service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect. (See Newsweek
above.) And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment -- carbon
chastity -- they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation
that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you
will read by, and at what temperature you may set your bedroom
thermostat.
Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every
citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented,
under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or
using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be
drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.
There's no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other
than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control
than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does
and uses in an advanced society.
So what does the global warming agnostic propose as an alternative?
First, more research -- untainted and reliable -- to determine (a)
whether the carbon footprint of man is or is not lost among the
massive natural forces (from sunspot activity to ocean currents) that
affect climate, and (b) if the human effect is indeed significant,
whether the planetary climate system has the homeostatic mechanisms
(like the feedback loops in the human body, for example) with which to
compensate.
Second, reduce our carbon footprint in the interim by doing the
doable, rather than the economically ruinous and socially destructive.
The most obvious step is a major move to nuclear power, which to the
atmosphere is the cleanest of the clean.
But your would-be masters have foreseen this contingency. The Church
of the Environment promulgates secondary dogmas as well. One of these
is a strict nuclear taboo.
Rather convenient, is it not? Take this major coal-substituting fix
off the table, and we will be rationing all the more. Guess who does
the rationing.
letters@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/29/AR2008052903266.html
.
- References:
- PETITION TO STOP AL GORE AND LEFT-WING ENVIRONMENTAL WACKOS !
- From: Dwight D. Eisenhower
- PETITION TO STOP AL GORE AND LEFT-WING ENVIRONMENTAL WACKOS !
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