Stephanie
Diamond Member
- Jul 11, 2004
- 70,230
- 10,872
- 2,040
Sums it up fairly nicely. some of them are trying to RELIVE the 60's but of all dumb things to pick, our CLIMATE. good lord save us from these idiots
SNIP:
Manhattan hosts a symbolic protest against a complex phenomenon we don’t control.
By Rich Lowry
Everywhere a sign. (Andrew Burton/Getty Images)
Comments
57
Rich Lowry 
Anti-climate-change marchers took to the streets of Manhattan in the hundreds of thousands over the weekend to demand international action to fight global warming.
The throng would have better advised to parade in downtown Beijing, assuming the Politburo wouldn’t have called out the infantry.
China is the locus of the alleged crime against the planet that is carbon emissions, yet the marchers staged their event in the United States, where prior to last year emissions had been declining (thanks, in part, to the natural-gas revolution, which oddly didn’t get much love from the climate marchers).
China is responsible for 27 percent of carbon emissions, more than any other country, and uses as much coal as the rest of the world. Since 1990, it has matched the U.S. in cumulative carbon emissions. China is representative of a developing world that is taking the global lead on emissions, at nearly 60 percent of the total.
There are many things we should be attempting to persuade China to stop doing: Arbitrarily ruling over its own people. Imprisoning and torturing dissidents. Occupying Tibet. Making aggressive territorial claims in its region.
Compared with all of these, availing itself of the wonders of the industrial economy is welcome. And if we can’t stop China from doing these other things — self-evidently violations of human rights or international norms — how are we going to keep it from continuing to ramp up its economic growth, as any rational society would?
The unpredicted pause in the rise in global temperature since the late 1990s is so embarrassing to climate activists, who are filled with a fiery certitude about the “science,” that it goes unmentioned (the climate marchers could have chanted, “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Where did climate change go?”). In their fevered urgency, they give off the sense that they are desperate to save the planet before it might become evident that it doesn’t need saving.
Our direct influence on global warming is highly limited, even if you assume the science is completely settled. As a country, we could end our emissions entirely, and it would barely cause a blip in the cumulative carbon buildup in the atmosphere.
There are causes to which the climate marchers could devote themselves that would have an immediate positive effect on human welfare: from promoting clean water in the Third World to agitating for cures to all manner of diseases. None of this, though, is as alluring as anti-industrial apocalypticism.
As writer Oren Cass has noted, today’s climate activists resemble the unilateral nuclear-disarmament movement of the 1980s, which also cloaked “plainly ineffectual policies in the language of moral necessity.” We could have eliminated all of our nuclear weapons — as we were urged to do by protesters who insisted it was necessary to saving the planet — and it wouldn’t have moved the Soviets to do the same; in fact, it would have delighted them.
ALL of it here:
The Climate March to Nowhere National Review Online
SNIP:
Manhattan hosts a symbolic protest against a complex phenomenon we don’t control.
By Rich Lowry
Everywhere a sign. (Andrew Burton/Getty Images)
Comments
57
Anti-climate-change marchers took to the streets of Manhattan in the hundreds of thousands over the weekend to demand international action to fight global warming.
The throng would have better advised to parade in downtown Beijing, assuming the Politburo wouldn’t have called out the infantry.
China is the locus of the alleged crime against the planet that is carbon emissions, yet the marchers staged their event in the United States, where prior to last year emissions had been declining (thanks, in part, to the natural-gas revolution, which oddly didn’t get much love from the climate marchers).
China is responsible for 27 percent of carbon emissions, more than any other country, and uses as much coal as the rest of the world. Since 1990, it has matched the U.S. in cumulative carbon emissions. China is representative of a developing world that is taking the global lead on emissions, at nearly 60 percent of the total.
There are many things we should be attempting to persuade China to stop doing: Arbitrarily ruling over its own people. Imprisoning and torturing dissidents. Occupying Tibet. Making aggressive territorial claims in its region.
Compared with all of these, availing itself of the wonders of the industrial economy is welcome. And if we can’t stop China from doing these other things — self-evidently violations of human rights or international norms — how are we going to keep it from continuing to ramp up its economic growth, as any rational society would?
The unpredicted pause in the rise in global temperature since the late 1990s is so embarrassing to climate activists, who are filled with a fiery certitude about the “science,” that it goes unmentioned (the climate marchers could have chanted, “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Where did climate change go?”). In their fevered urgency, they give off the sense that they are desperate to save the planet before it might become evident that it doesn’t need saving.
Our direct influence on global warming is highly limited, even if you assume the science is completely settled. As a country, we could end our emissions entirely, and it would barely cause a blip in the cumulative carbon buildup in the atmosphere.
There are causes to which the climate marchers could devote themselves that would have an immediate positive effect on human welfare: from promoting clean water in the Third World to agitating for cures to all manner of diseases. None of this, though, is as alluring as anti-industrial apocalypticism.
As writer Oren Cass has noted, today’s climate activists resemble the unilateral nuclear-disarmament movement of the 1980s, which also cloaked “plainly ineffectual policies in the language of moral necessity.” We could have eliminated all of our nuclear weapons — as we were urged to do by protesters who insisted it was necessary to saving the planet — and it wouldn’t have moved the Soviets to do the same; in fact, it would have delighted them.
ALL of it here:
The Climate March to Nowhere National Review Online
