Looking at global warming as the world burns: James Varney
By James Varney, NOLA.com|The Times-PicayuneThe Times-Picayune
on November 17, 2012 at 4:06 PM, updated November 17, 2012 at 4:18 PM
And so, with the Middle East flaring left and right, his administrations dissembling on what happened in Libya more obvious every day, Iran shooting at our aircraft in international skies and his top spy and a general ensnared in scandal, President Obama held his first post re-election press conference last week. However, there were other pressing matters.
Perhaps it's the ancient, pre-election timeline of some of those events that allowed one of the eight questions Obama deigned to address to concern global warming. Where does global warming rank among the problems outlined above?
Global warming is a luxury issue in the same way the Volt is a luxury vehicle. If foreign nations and the U.S. economy were not in flames, then it might make sense to delve into questions about more esoteric heat.
In the face of roaring fires, however, Obama may want to redirect his laser-like focus. Sen. David Vitter is right to announce that, in his new guise as the ranking Republican on the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, he'll seek to downplay the whole global warming debate. Not ignore it, for global warming ideas sensible and foolish will arise, but get the topic slotted in the less prominent spot on the agenda it warrants.
That common sense goal won't be easily achieved. The closer one looks at the language of the most outspoken global warming enthusiasts, the more it seems they should be on the corner with a sandwich board and a cowbell. For the end of the world is coming, perhaps not as quickly as some flaky ministers would have us believe, but within several decades or so, according to the high priests of the modern global warming religion.
To be fair, the question The New York Times put to Obama in his press conference wasn't completely irrelevant. As Louisianians know all too well, digging out from a mammoth storm is an immediate problem that dwarfs all others. And thus a softball on global warming, because global warming caused Hurricane Sandy, according to all who claim that save those who don't.
This sort of confusion is sure to arise when the true aim of policy makers and advocates is masked. Such is the case with climate change, because at its root the matter isn't really about climate or change. Rather, it's about global wealth redistribution.
An anonymous lefty friend in the newsroom recently stuck a copy of ' The Global Warming Reader' in my in-box. One of the great unintended insights of the book is its subtitle, "A Century of Writing About Climate Change," which suggests the coming apocalypse has as flexible a start date as those predicted by the cranky representatives of more traditional religious sects.
Still, it's the entries that give the game away. Editor Bill McKibben has a jolly essay entitled "This Is F----d Up -- It's Time to Get Mad, and Then Busy," in which he proselytizes for "a shift towards more militant civil disobedience" among global warming warriors.
As McKibben's work makes clear, global warming has a pronounced punitive bent, and it's not hard to guess who must be sentenced. Delivering that verdict is Naomi Klein, whose "Climate Rage" is an ode to global warming's "reparations movement."
The United States, in particular, should lead a group of Western nations that gives $600 billion a year to underdeveloped countries, Klein baldly states, echoing the stirring calls of various activists and politicians who populate these environmentally impoverished lands and United Nations committees. What's more, Klein warns, these staggering sums must be "grants, not loans," and may not "simply be diverted from existing aid programs.
"Activists point to a huge range of other green initiatives that would become possible if wealthy countries paid their climate debts," Klein enthused.
As it happened, Klein, McKibben and their ilk were flabbergasted and outraged when Obama's own representatives dismissed such insanity during his first term. Todd Stern, the administration's chief climate negotiator, quite properly labeled such talk "wildly unrealistic" and "untethered to reality," Klein reports, sniffing that Stern supposedly "pretend[s] that 200 years of over-emissions never happened."
Well. No doubt the U.S. carbon footprint in 1812 provided the tape bulb at one end of the hockey stick, even though another century would pass before more comfortably suited folks started writing and warning about it.
nola.com |
