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Saturday, May 10, 2008

Monckton: The cost and futility of trading hot air

Here's a bit from the Foreword – A Political Context of a new paper by Lord Christopher Monckton, The Cost and Futility of Trading Hot Air:

European and American statists, including activist NGOs like the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), assert that the moderate climate warming that is occurring today is a man-made catastrophe, and have embraced the dystopian fantasy that coercive policies for the elimination of fossil fuel production and usage can prevent or turn back the current warming cycle. They have, thus, made the “global warming planetary emergency” into the central plank of their ongoing campaigns for more centralized government.

[...]

For decades environmental activists have insisted that capitalism is not a “sustainable” (sufficient to “save the planet”) economic system. We now hear brazen declarations that democracy is no longer a “sustainable” political process. Al Gore lends a popular, philosophical/theological underpinning to collectivist impulses by casting the root of all environmental evils – real and imagined – in the scientific and industrial/technological revolutions. Put differently, for Gore and the EDF, the planetary environment, not human life, appears the supreme standard of value. Therefore, everything, most importantly Science and Economics, must be pried away from the benefit of man and pressed into total service of the State.

Given just a decade or two of such “sustainable” policies, bolstered by Gore’s religion, the world will be well on its way to a new Dark Ages, and the human misery it breeds.

The American people who owe their long, comfortable and healthy lives to the accomplishments of modern industry, technology, medicine and affordable fossil energy ought to be outraged by activists’ claims and policies.
Monckton says that carbon ‘cap-and-trade’ is an immoral non-solution to a non-problem. And he's exactly right. But of course, a ‘cap-and-trade’ system is exactly what Stéphane Dion, the current leader of the Liberal Party, would like to impose upon Canadians should he ever become Prime Minister.

Read the The cost and futility of trading hot air (pdf)

1 comment:

Layer Seven said...

While Monckton's article has some redeeming features, its premise of current moderate global warming is false.

If there is no problem for the state to solve, it will manufacture one, with great facility.