Global Warming on Its Last Legs as an Excuse for Wealth Redistribution

Phil Driessen at Intellectual Conservative has as article entitled "The Cancun Wealth Redistribution Conference" in which he surveys reaction to Cancun:

It's become a predictable annual rite. Several weeks prior to each global warming gabfest, breathless news stories, editorials, op-eds and pontifications begin hitting the airwaves and print pages, reaching a crescendo as the conference opens. So it was with Copenhagen; so it is with Cancun.

Actually, it may be worse this year. ClimateGate, bogus IPCC "studies" about disappearing Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforests, the global economic recession, the Copenhagen disaster, soaring EU and UK energy prices, Spain's collapsing green energy industry, and eroding public belief in manmade Climate Armageddon have ushered in growing unease within the alarmist camp.

Now unease has turned into desperation. US midterm elections all but ensure a wholesale congressional reexamination of climate science and renewable energy claims . . . and budgets. The Chicago Climate Exchange has gone belly-up, as carbon prices plunged from $7 a ton to 5 cents. China, India and other emerging markets continue to build hydrocarbon energy facilities, offering promises of "reduced carbon intensity" (slowly improved energy efficiency), but no binding CO2 reduction targets. In response . . .

Michael Mann whined to Fortune magazine that he and climate science are under attack, and he is getting rude emails. Al Gore again wailed that planetary demise is nigh (but was forced to admit he voted for ethanol solely to bolster his chances in the 2000 Iowa primaries). Bjorn Lomborg energetically promoted shifting countless billions of former global warming prevention dollars to reducing wind and solar energy costs -- to ward off dangerous global warming that he insists is happening, despite stable global temperatures since 1995, in the face of steadily rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

The Economist offered articles on "how to live with climate change." We should make renewables so cheap that burning coal and oil "will seem perverse," it suggested. We should even evaluate geo-engineering schemes "to cool, rather than warm," our planet. (Meanwhile, Wales and Northern Ireland recorded the coldest November night since recordkeeping began -- and one-third of households in Wales and Scotland are living in "fuel poverty," because of soaring energy prices.)

Read it all here.

All this huffing and puffing and yet in the entire history of the global warming alarmist movement over the past few decades not one solid measure has been taken that significantly lowers the rate of carbon emissions. Carbon emissions continue to go up and everybody clamors about shifting taxpayers' money around from one industry to another, from one interest group to another and from one country to another. But emissions never go down. All this talk of planetary disaster is just smoke and mirrors; it is a distraction from the real game, which is making money without working for it.

As Driessen points out, when people are honest they say things like this:

The only way to reduce global emissions enough, while allowing poor nations to continue to grow, is to halt economic growth in the rich world over the next twenty years. To achieve this, politicians should consider a rationing system similar to the one introduced during Britain's last "time of crisis," during the 1930s and 1940s.

This is the only proposal worth discussing. If the danger is so certain, so imminent and so devestating that the above proposal is preferable, then we have something to talk about. And if we do actually know, technologically, how to stop it, then it makes sense to do it. But if not - and I would submit to you that not one government in the world actually believes these propositions - then we are wasting our time and money on gimmicks, schemes and boondoogles.

Global warming is just a convenient excuse to do something that people wanted to do on other grounds altogether. It is just a scare tactic designed to get the gullible public to go along with the wealth redistribution schemes of the socialists in the political class.

Marxists, Progressives, Fascists, and many other ideologically-motivated groups who which to expand the power of a minority over the majority know that the way to effect social change is to create a crisis. If no real one exists, one must be manufactured. People will not surrender their liberty and wealth to a minority's schemes unless they are afraid. Fear is a kind of coercion and the Global Warming Alarmists use it to extract money just like Medieval indulgence-peddlers. Get out of purgatory becomes prevent global warming; it's all the same thing.

As Driessen says, if we are absolutely certain that global warming is going to produce effects in the next few decades worse than the Great Depression and World War II, then why hasn't something been done already? The answer is because we are not sure. We are not even close to being sure. And so much damage to the credibility of science has already been done by this point that if tomorrow we suddenly became sure it is by no means a sure bet that scientists would be believed by the majority of the population. And that is serious damage to democracy and popular government, not to mention science.

The most beneficial thing that could happen to our planet is for the fear-mongers to run out of steam and for the public to give a giant, collective shrug and turn away. There are already signs this is happening.

If there really is such a thing as anthropgenic global warming, I suspect that the most effective way to combat it that has thus far been proposed would be to stop having conferences like the ones at Cancun, Copenhagen and Kyoto. The amount of hot air that would thereby be prevented from being emitted into the atmosphere might actually be significant in preventing planetary temperature rise!