Weather warfare II
I recently blogged here, here and here about my increasingly strong belief that we’re engaged in weather warfare. Noel Sheppard gives lucid life to my incoherent attempt to grasp at a core truth in the increasingly hysterical global warming debate:
Don’t you love it when these sanctimonious socialists claim to be smarter than everyone else as they advocate taking away our money for our own good? If they’d only learn how to insult us in a fashion that wasn’t so obvious, we’d gladly turn over all our worldly possessions for the causes they hold so dear.
In the end, that indeed is what this is all about: Global warming represents the Democrats’ weapons of mass destruction. With it, they hope to scare enough Americans into sacrificing their own financial well-being all for the noble goal of saving the planet.
As a coda, let me say again what I’ve said so many times before here: I’m not proposing that we abandon attempts to clean up our act and wallow in pollution. I infinitely prefer living in a clean world to a dirty one and there is no doubt that certain pollutants have immediate and deleterious effects on those unlucky enough to be forced into contact with them. I would also love, love, love to break away from our oil dependence, because doing so would instantly bankrupt the most horrible, corrupt, and invariably anti-Semitic, anti-American, anti-democratic regimes in the Middle East and Latin America. I can’t think of anything more wonderful than pulling the economic rug out from under these slobs.
However, we’re not achieving either of those goals — cleaning up our environment or defunding dictatorships — if we do as those in the grip of climate change hysteria demand. Upending our economy and giving a free pass to China and other non-Western nations will not resolve either pollution or funding the mullahs. Instead, it will ensure a steady flow of toxic dirt into the environment and money into the mullah’s pocket. The only difference will be that the dirt and money will come from the East and Africa, and not from the West.
The sensible solution, and one that we’ve been working on steadily since the early 1970s, is to continue our rational search for affordable oil alternatives. Right now, there are alternatives, but they’re neither affordable nor reliable. The exception, of course, is nuclear energy, but the mad Left, while demanding clean fuel, refuses even to consider this alternative.
So let’s by all means clean up our act. But let’s do it to benefit ourselves and the world at large, and not to destroy ourselves so that we can sit on the sidelines as China, the rest of Asia and Africa create pollution nightmares the likes of which we never imagined, all the while funding some of the most vile totalitarian states the world has ever known.
UPDATE: Here’s a story about a particularly poignant bit of pollution.
UPDATE II: Paragraph Farmer finds a clear-speaking man who gives an alternative (and quite possibly correct) explanation for what’s going on.
UPDATE III: Penn & Teller give a great example of a “scientific/environmental” myth: the virtues of recycling. I had my own epiphany on this subject a few years ago, when I realized how much water I was using to wash all the little containers that I used to pack the kids’ lunches in lieu of “environmentally wasteful,” non-recyclable plastic sandwich bags. I was washing away oceans of water, and it made me wonder about how virtuous my actions really were. As it is, I still assiduously separate my recyclables but, with the exception of valuable aluminum, I feel more and more foolish doing so.
UPDATE IV:
