|
Business of Global Warming Feels
a Lot Like Inquisition
William F. Buckley
Real
Clear Politics
Wednesday April 4, 2007
The heavy condemnatory breathing on the subject of global warming
outdoes anything since high moments of the Inquisition. A respectable
columnist (Thomas Friedman of The New York Times) opened his essay
last week by writing, "Sometimes you read something about this
administration that's just so shameful it takes your breath away."
What asphyxiated this critic was the discovery that a White House
official had edited "government climate reports to play up
uncertainty of a human role in global warming." The correspondent
advises that the culprit had been an oil-industry lobbyist before
joining the administration, and on leaving it he took a job with
Exxon Mobil.
For those with addled reflexes, here is the story compressed: (1)
Anyone who speaks discriminatingly about global warming is conspiring
to belittle the threat. Such people end up (2) working for Exxon
Mobil, a perpetrator of the great threat the malefactor sought to
distract us from.
I'd guess that, in the current mood, I should enter the datum that
my father was in the oil business. But having done that, I think
it fair to ask: Are we invited to assume that anyone who works in
a business that generates greenhouse gases (a) is complicit in the
global-warming problem, and (b) should resign and seek work elsewhere?
One recalls the plant in Nazi Germany that manufactured the toxic
gas Zyklon B. The primary use of this gas was in the extermination
camps, whose masters were looking for efficient ways to destroy
human beings. Is the community engaged in oil production the contemporary
equivalent of the makers of Zyklon B?
Critics are correct in insisting that human enterprises have an
effect on climate. What they cannot at this point do is specify
exactly how great the damage is, nor how much relief would be effected
by specific acts of natural propitiation.
The whole business is eerily religious in feel. Back in the 15th
century, the question was: Do you believe in Christ? It was required
in Spain by the Inquisition that the answer should be affirmative,
leaving to one side subsidiary specifications.
It is required today to believe that carbon-dioxide emissions threaten
the basic ecological balance. The assumption then is that inasmuch
as a large proportion of the damage is man-made, man-made solutions
are necessary. But it is easy to see, right away, that there is
a problem in devising appropriate solutions, and in allocating responsibility
for them.
To speak in very general terms, the United States is easily the
principal offender, given the size of our country and the intensity
of our use of fossil-fuel energy. But even accepting the high per-capita
rate of consumption in the United States, we face the terrible inadequacy
of ameliorative resources. If the United States were (we are dealing
in hypotheses) to eliminate the use of oil or gas for power, would
that forfeiture be decisive?
Well, no. It would produce about 23 percent global relief, and
at a devastating cost to our economy.
As a practical matter, what have modern states undertaken with
a view to diminishing greenhouse gases? The answer is: Not very
much. What is being done gives off a kind of satisfaction, of the
kind felt back then when prayers were recited as apostates were
led to the stake to be burned. If you levied a 100 percent surtax
on gasoline in the United States, you would certainly reduce the
use of it, but the arbiter is there to say: What is a complementary
sacrifice we can then expect from India and China? China will soon
overtake the United States in the production of greenhouse gases.
At Kyoto, an effort was made 10 years ago to allocate proportional
reductions nation by nation. The United States almost uniquely declined
to subscribe to the Kyoto protocols. Canada, Japan and the countries
of Western Europe subscribed, but some have already fallen short
of their goals, and all of them are skeptical about the prospect
of making future scheduled reductions. It is estimated that if the
United States had subscribed to Kyoto, it would have cost us $100
billion to $400 billion per year.
There is, now and then, offsetting good news. The next report from
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we have learned,
will be less pessimistic than earlier reports. It will predict,
e.g., a sea-level increase of up to 23 inches by the end of the
century, substantially better than earlier IPCC predictions of 29
inches — and light-years away from the 20 feet predicted by
former Vice President Al Gore.
Meanwhile, the Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg said something
outside the hearing of the outraged columnist. He noted solemnly
that any increase in heat-related deaths should be balanced against
the corresponding decrease in cold-related deaths. ... We need hope,
and self-confidence.
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
|
