The farce in Copenhagen continues. As I have intimated before, I am not without hope for this “earth summit.” I see more and more evidence that people—“electorates” in all the western countries, where we do have elections, and can throw the bums out, which is about the only pleasure we have as “electors”—have seen through this imposture completely. My column today cannot be the best one on this subject. For that, I must refer the same reader to the London Telegraph, and Gerald Warner’s column from yesterday. Rather than trying to improve upon it, let me quote his own “lead graf”:
“When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more phoney, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just keep increasing and multiplying—what do you do?”
He goes on to examine a farce-within-the-farce, an attempt to “leak”—through Greenpeace, no less—an already much-circulated “secret document” from the usual UN press-releasers, suggesting global temperatures may rise “even higher” than the delegates are already shouting from under Copenhagen’s blanket of snow. As Warner says, it was a crass trick, but, “the climate alarmists are no longer in a position to pick and choose their tactics.”
But as I say, this gives me reason for hope. The environmentalists have taken the “global warming” imposture so far, have pushed it with claims so ridiculous, and are by now so well exposed, that some real good is being achieved.
The participants in Copenhagen may or may not succeed in burning through another trillion or five in borrowed money, to fuel new environmentalist bureaucracies. At the moment of writing, it appears even this accomplishment will be denied to them, for they are falling out among themselves, and Barack Obama’s big galvanizing speech has impressed nobody.
But even if they are able to stitch up a plastic-surgical agreement, we may well be experiencing, in Copenhagen, the event that puts an end to environmental scare-mongering for a generation. The perpetrators of this scare-mongering (and I have listed so many earlier examples in previous columns) have finally overplayed their hand.
Strange to say, my delight in this is mixed. For the planet has real “environmental issues” that have gone unaddressed at Copenhagen, and will now be harder to address in light of the fallout.
The creation of new “carbon credit” schemes to reduce “greenhouse gas emissions” was not going to alleviate any of these problems. It was only going to line the pockets of some of the world’s most corrupt bureaucrats and businessmen. Their pockets were already well-lined, and if they can’t profit from Copenhagen deals, they will find other ways to be paid for useless services, and continue living like Al Gore. We needn’t pray for them too earnestly.
But we do need to think about ways to reduce our actual “environmental footprints,” strange as this must sound coming from me. We do have major pollution problems, coming out of China and through all the “third world” as massive populations are raised out of abject poverty, wherever old-fashioned capitalism is permitted.
For the most part, even the most primitive of “third world” dictators saw through the Copenhaggling immediately, and joined in only as a way to board the latest gravy train of western guilt money. This is by now a venerable suckering operation, that began the morning after each backward country became nominally independent. It has kept their politicians rich and their peoples poor.
We can’t do anything about that, unless we are prepared to invade and occupy these countries. And given our reluctance to continue even in Afghanistan and Iraq against terrorists, I see no prospect of restoring the old imperialist order.
But we can, in more than principle, move ahead of our imitators again, by setting a better example of how to live, one man and one woman at a time. We could—I know this sounds a little idealistic, but bear with me—try to export the best of our old Christian civilization, instead of the worst of our post-Christian one. For my reader may recall that civilization had nothing to do with conspicuous consumption, and put more of its money in cathedrals than into personal and corporate display. To say this would be “good for the environment” is an understatement: there is so much joyful life we could recover, by simply discarding what is not genuinely useful, and getting on with the root human task of salvation, through the advancement of the good, the beautiful, and the true.
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