In Poland recently, representatives of the European Union
were discussing ways to look like soldiers in the war against
global warming while once more dodging the draft, and outside
there were the usual sorts of doomsday-prognosticating protesters.
Some were dressed as penguins, devils and polar bears, it's
reported.
The uniforms strike me as about right, although I also think
clown clothes and makeup would be appropriate for many of
the loudest worriers about climate change, such as Al Gore
and Arnold Schwarzenegger. That's not to say they will fail
to get their way as a new president takes office amidst whoppers
about how Europe is all progress on this issue while dumb,
selfish America is lagging.
The truth that the United States did more to control carbon
emissions than Europe during one recently measured period
as President Bush took some modest, common-sense precautions
and European nations took bows for signing a Kyoto treaty
most of the signatories then ignored. The all-show-no-go European
Union's recent conference in Poland produced some tough, new
goals along with a plentitude of escape hatches, rendering
these goals meaningless from the start.
It's a clever strategy, and one that President-elect Barack
Obama ought to emulate, given that virtually any program to
make energy more costly at this time of economic peril would
be catastrophic while achieving something on the order of
nothing. A voice of wisdom on the issue is that of William
Nordhaus, a Yale economics professor who says the best means
to avoid throwing trillions of dollars away to little avail
is a coordinated, phased-in program of carbon taxes for the
whole world.
But even the Nordhaus analysis rests on assumptions about
warming that may not hold up, just as Obama's dire forecasts
are not so clearly factual as he said in a video message to
a governors climate session in California. He spoke of rising
sea levels, shrinking coastlines, record droughts, spreading
famines and "storms that are growing with each passing
hurricane season."
Hooey, says Bjorn Lomborg, a Copenhagen statistician who
has written that sea levels were rising long before the recent
warming, that many coastlines in the world have been getting
larger, that soil moisture has been increasing in the world,
that recent famines have much to do with land taken to produce
corn for ethanol and that total hurricane force has been on
the decrease since 2005.
