Text 28092, 99 rader
Skriven 2007-04-04 05:25:00 av Jeff Binkley (1:226/600)
Ärende: Global Warming
======================
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/04/business_of_global_war
ming_fee.html

April 03, 2007 
Business of Global Warming Feels a Lot Like Inquisition
By William F. Buckley

The heavy condemnatory breathing on the subject of global warming 
outdoes anything since high moments of the Inquisition. A respectable 
columnist (Thomas Friedman of The New York Times) opened his essay last 
week by writing, "Sometimes you read something about this administration 
that's just so shameful it takes your breath away."

What asphyxiated this critic was the discovery that a White House 
official had edited "government climate reports to play up uncertainty 
of a human role in global warming." The correspondent advises that the 
culprit had been an oil-industry lobbyist before joining the 
administration, and on leaving it he took a job with Exxon Mobil.

For those with addled reflexes, here is the story compressed: (1) Anyone 
who speaks discriminatingly about global warming is conspiring to 
belittle the threat. Such people end up (2) working for Exxon Mobil, a 
perpetrator of the great threat the malefactor sought to distract us 
from.

I'd guess that, in the current mood, I should enter the datum that my 
father was in the oil business. But having done that, I think it fair to 
ask: Are we invited to assume that anyone who works in a business that 
generates greenhouse gases (a) is complicit in the global-warming 
problem, and (b) should resign and seek work elsewhere? One recalls the 
plant in Nazi Germany that manufactured the toxic gas Zyklon B. The 
primary use of this gas was in the extermination camps, whose masters 
were looking for efficient ways to destroy human beings. Is the 
community engaged in oil production the contemporary equivalent of the 
makers of Zyklon B?

Critics are correct in insisting that human enterprises have an effect 
on climate. What they cannot at this point do is specify exactly how 
great the damage is, nor how much relief would be effected by specific 
acts of natural propitiation.

The whole business is eerily religious in feel. Back in the 15th 
century, the question was: Do you believe in Christ? It was required in 
Spain by the Inquisition that the answer should be affirmative, leaving 
to one side subsidiary specifications.

It is required today to believe that carbon-dioxide emissions threaten 
the basic ecological balance. The assumption then is that inasmuch as a 
large proportion of the damage is man-made, man-made solutions are 
necessary. But it is easy to see, right away, that there is a problem in 
devising appropriate solutions, and in allocating responsibility for 
them.

To speak in very general terms, the United States is easily the 
principal offender, given the size of our country and the intensity of 
our use of fossil-fuel energy. But even accepting the high per-capita 
rate of consumption in the United States, we face the terrible 
inadequacy of ameliorative resources. If the United States were (we are 
dealing in hypotheses) to eliminate the use of oil or gas for power, 
would that forfeiture be decisive?

Well, no. It would produce about 23 percent global relief, and at a 
devastating cost to our economy.

As a practical matter, what have modern states undertaken with a view to 
diminishing greenhouse gases? The answer is: Not very much. What is 
being done gives off a kind of satisfaction, of the kind felt back then 
when prayers were recited as apostates were led to the stake to be 
burned. If you levied a 100 percent surtax on gasoline in the United 
States, you would certainly reduce the use of it, but the arbiter is 
there to say: What is a complementary sacrifice we can then expect from 
India and China? China will soon overtake the United States in the 
production of greenhouse gases.

At Kyoto, an effort was made 10 years ago to allocate proportional 
reductions nation by nation. The United States almost uniquely declined 
to subscribe to the Kyoto protocols. Canada, Japan and the countries of 
Western Europe subscribed, but some have already fallen short of their 
goals, and all of them are skeptical about the prospect of making future 
scheduled reductions. It is estimated that if the United States had 
subscribed to Kyoto, it would have cost us $100 billion to $400 billion 
per year.

There is, now and then, offsetting good news. The next report from the 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we have learned, will 
be less pessimistic than earlier reports. It will predict, e.g., a sea-
level increase of up to 23 inches by the end of the century, 
substantially better than earlier IPCC predictions of 29 inches — and 
light-years away from the 20 feet predicted by former Vice President Al 
Gore.

Meanwhile, the Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg said something outside 
the hearing of the outraged columnist. He noted solemnly that any 
increase in heat-related deaths should be balanced against the 
corresponding decrease in cold-related deaths. ... We need hope, and 
self-confidence.

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