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Carbon Chastity
Charles Krauthammer
[COMMENT: Well, the discussion will go on, and I may be
proven wrong, but my perception is that the global warmers are gradually being
shown to be either dishonest or ignorant. The problem is that they have
convinced so many persons in places of authority that it will take decades to
dislodge the idea from the public mind. I believe that we are watching, as
Krauthammer says below, another attempt to create fear and chaos in order to
centralize power.
Globalist thugs control the media, so that they can parade a
Nazi-type propaganda -- tell any big lie long enough, and people will come to
believe it. There is no reason to trust the media on any subject at all
without independent verification. That is where we have come because we
have fed our children to a
government-controlled education system for the last 50 years, and are paying
the price of a dumbed-down public.
When truth is systematically subverted, we are not in an
honest discussion, we are in
spiritual warfare.
E. Fox]
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, [see also
Czech President Klaus ready to debate Gore on climate change]
"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@charleskrauthammer.com
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Date Posted - 06/01/20008 - Date
Last Edited -
06/01/2008