A global-warming crisis may be headed our way, one that could leave endless fatalities in its wake and impoverish masses of people.
But the crisis I am talking about will not be brought about by greenhouse gases.
If it happens, it will be by way of a warming remedy concocted by politicians and urged on by their left-wing cheerleaders — the coercive, governmental imposition of limits on the burning of fossil fuels.
The pretense is that such a system of controls could be implemented more or less painlessly, which is akin to saying you can starve people to death more or less painlessly. To reduce emissions to the levels suggested by the calculations of alarmists and in a manner that would make them happy — no additional nuclear plants — you would likely have to wreck economies. The unintended result would be to kill thousands upon thousands of human beings.
Perhaps that sounds like a wild exaggeration, itself the product of alarmism, but we have convincing economic theory about how wasteful regulations cost lives through rendering people and communities poorer and less able to secure protective needs, such as more police and firefighter services. And we have stomach-churning examples of how environmental extremists have ended up with blood on their hands in other instances of pursuing supposedly noble ends.
The press has been largely, if not completely, negligent in reporting how the resistance of environmentalists to spraying the walls of homes with DDT in Africa has deprived people there of what is often the single most effective means of repelling mosquitoes and preventing malaria. Not just thousands, but millions of children have consequently died from the disease, even though the spraying would have no endangering consequences for wildlife.
In this country, the congressional requirement in 1975 for fuel-limit standards ushered many Americans into smaller, less crash-worthy cars than they would otherwise have purchased, causing something on the order of 50,000 more highway fatalities than would have been experienced in the legislation’s absence.
Somewhere in Washington, a monument should go up in the name of these victims, and then when we have leftist pundits and hand-wringing politicians urging insistently that we act in a massive, liberty-denying way to forestall a global warming catastrophe, we can take themthere to show how misguided legislative efforts can cause far worse catastrophe.
As the dozens of alarmists now making such a ruckus in America are guided to the spot, perhaps someone can whisper in their ears that fossil fuels have made industrialized society possible, and that hundreds of millions more people have lived than would have if we had not used them. The whisperer can note, too, that while there are means of gradually converting to other energy sources and making the burning of coal less dirty, Kyoto-style accords on emissions are far surer to reduce health and safety than to reduce warming.
To all of this, the alarmists have three standard responses, one of which is that there’s a scientific consensus that the Earth is warming, and indeed there is — but there is no consensus that disaster is therefore swooping down on us.
Another response is to personally attack those scientists who challenge dire predictions, as if name-calling were a legitimate form of climatological analysis.
The third response is that the scientific skeptics of cataclysmic, preventable warming have a lot to answer for if governments fail to act because of them and the worst imaginings are proven true. It doesn’t seem to occur to the alarmists that they will have a lot to answer for if they wreak havoc in the name of unsupportable fears.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies.
