It’s an “unprecedented breakthrough,” said President Obama of a global warming agreement that commits no nation to anything or even to a time when commitments must be made. With more breakthroughs like that, we can all start breathing more easily, hoping that our lives won’t be ruined by climate change fanaticism, after all.
The agreement does pretty much nothing. Some nations are going to go ahead and set their own goals on emission controls, and these will be internationally “codified,” it’s reported, which is to say — well, you tell me. I think what we have here is ducking and dodging amid lots of bold, brave buncombe.
Has there ever been an international farce quite like this one that produced more posturing than enlightenment at the recently concluded Copenhagen summit? The most basic logic seemed lost on those attending.
Their great concern is a future calamity among a number of equally possible or far more likely calamities of similar magnitude. The most dangerous and real of these — massive loss of life at the hands of terrorists — is not getting nearly the attention it deserves on the home front.
The threat of biological weapons of mass destruction is far more immediate and likely than warming catastrophe. What’s most certain about warming, in fact, is that some of the most ballyhooed emission control solutions could easily do trillions of dollars more harm than the warming itself.
Seriously undertaken, these anti-warming measures could condemn developed nations to sluggish economies for generations and undeveloped countries to lasting impoverishment. Absent something close to universal cooperation, there is no hope of temperature control, and there is no hope of universal cooperation.
Leaders of the developed countries are nevertheless trying to woo the undeveloped countries with promises of massive transfusions of cash, hundreds of billions to better help them endure the misery, while likely hoping their own constituents don’t catch on to what’s going on.
So far, the public may not quite get what all this means — a recent poll by the Associated Press and Stanford University shows, for instance, that very nearly twice as many Americans think action to contain warming would produce more jobs as those who understand it would reduce jobs.
The actual consequence would be a worse standard of living, and Americans will quickly catch on to that if Congress passes a cap-and-trade bill or the Environmental Protection Agency goes around finding ways to reduce the energy needed to run our industry.
To me, nothing better summed up the Copenhagen craziness than two events. One of them was a speech by the world’s foremost political clown, the despotic, lying Hugo Chavez.
Chavez, who has destroyed freedom and prosperity for his own nation and its poor, stood up and denounced capitalism. When he did so, he was expressing the true agenda of many who attended this conference, ostensibly about the environment.
Another highly illuminating moment came when former Vice President Al Gore raced down a hallway while reporters pursued him, asking him how he happened to misquote a study on melting ice in the Arctic and how he got it wrong when he said e-mails embarrassing to alarmists were all at least 10 years old when one was sent as recently as a month ago.
That’s Gore and much of this movement, for you; first he hits with mistakes, like the nine major ones in his Academy Award-winning movie on warming, and then he runs, though never quite fast enough to outrace the truth.
The ultimate answer to warming if more settled science bears out some present worries is new technology, not the drastic emission controls that would be the equivalent of 18th-century bloodletting by misguided, patient-killing physicians.
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
