Climate Change: The Truth
Once the left gets confident, they tend to let the mask slip. Nowhere is this clearer than in this little piece in the Guardian by Nicholas Stern.
His prescription for the West - pay, pay, and then pay again. Pay by taking an economic hit and bearing the lion's share of reductions. Pay for poor nations to reduce their emissions. Then pay again, to aid the Third World.
That's the real scheme here. That's the fundamental assumption of Kyoto and everything else.
Interestingly, Stern also admits - albiet without thinking through the implications - something which I've touched on in the past.
"Our starting point," he writes, "is deeply inequitable with poor countries certain to be hit earliest and hardest by climate change."
Indeed, that's the fundamental truth here. Even if the predictions of the climate fear-mongers turn out to be the truth, the other truth is that the facts of life in this planet mean that not only will Global Warming barely effect most of us in the upper reaches of the Northern Hemisphere but, in a lot of cases, it would be actually be a positive thing.
I point you to this facinating article from the Atlantic Monthly earlier this year. "Global Warming - Who Loses and Who Wins?" This is a vital point. There are few games where everyone loses. If the Earth gets a few degrees warmer over the next century, who wins?
The likely answer - The West wins. Indeed, a climate shift might well prove to be the West's salvation, for all of its folly. For God's sake, people, I live in British Columbia - an area roughtly the size of the whole West Coast of the United States - which has fewer than five million people living in it because the climate of large regions of the province is fairly immoderate.
Come on people - we're living in Canada here. Is there any Earthly reason why the idea of the world getting slightly warmer ought to concern us? At least three-fourths of the country is frozen right now.
A moderate warming could make all sorts of land open to development and exploitation. It would send crop yields in various areas through the roof.
This is an important point to remember in this climate debate because, in essence, we are being asked to actively harm ourselves to stop something which might not even exist and which, if it actually does come to pass, will probably be to our benefit.
His prescription for the West - pay, pay, and then pay again. Pay by taking an economic hit and bearing the lion's share of reductions. Pay for poor nations to reduce their emissions. Then pay again, to aid the Third World.
That's the real scheme here. That's the fundamental assumption of Kyoto and everything else.
Interestingly, Stern also admits - albiet without thinking through the implications - something which I've touched on in the past.
"Our starting point," he writes, "is deeply inequitable with poor countries certain to be hit earliest and hardest by climate change."
Indeed, that's the fundamental truth here. Even if the predictions of the climate fear-mongers turn out to be the truth, the other truth is that the facts of life in this planet mean that not only will Global Warming barely effect most of us in the upper reaches of the Northern Hemisphere but, in a lot of cases, it would be actually be a positive thing.
I point you to this facinating article from the Atlantic Monthly earlier this year. "Global Warming - Who Loses and Who Wins?" This is a vital point. There are few games where everyone loses. If the Earth gets a few degrees warmer over the next century, who wins?
The likely answer - The West wins. Indeed, a climate shift might well prove to be the West's salvation, for all of its folly. For God's sake, people, I live in British Columbia - an area roughtly the size of the whole West Coast of the United States - which has fewer than five million people living in it because the climate of large regions of the province is fairly immoderate.
Come on people - we're living in Canada here. Is there any Earthly reason why the idea of the world getting slightly warmer ought to concern us? At least three-fourths of the country is frozen right now.
A moderate warming could make all sorts of land open to development and exploitation. It would send crop yields in various areas through the roof.
This is an important point to remember in this climate debate because, in essence, we are being asked to actively harm ourselves to stop something which might not even exist and which, if it actually does come to pass, will probably be to our benefit.
posted by Adam Yoshida at
11:46 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home