Aug. 2, 2010
Remember in Casablanca when Claude Rains, the French police chief, watched Humphrey Bogart kill the evil Nazi commander, then told his flunkies to “round up the usual suspects.”
That’s a bit the way I feel these days about the global warming debate. Each side has pretty much had its say. The left, led by former vice president Al Gore and present science advisor to President Obama, John Holdren, rounds ups its supporters. The right led by environmentalist contrarian Bjorn Lomborg and supported by Nobel Prize winner Freeman Dyson, rounds up it supporters. The result is … not much. This, come to think of it may be, as Winnie-the-Pooh used to say, the best thing.
Do we really think we have that much control over the weather and the climate? I doubt it. I don’t believe that God rewards or punishes us with hurricane, tornadoes or floods. Nor do I believe that our paltry human efforts have that much effect on our weather and climate, for good or ill.
I once read that a single thunderstorm has more energy than the total energy produced in the United States by all of our power companies in an average year. During any given minute, there are according to experts, more than a thousand thunderstorms around the Earth that release more energy than thousands of nuclear bombs. Every minute! I also have read that ants, termites and cows produce more methane every year than our automobiles and power plants added together. The truth is I am not rock-bottom sure of my facts here. But neither are some of the global warming folks. See “climate-gate” emails.
Why are Al Gore and his supporters so insistent that we need to do something immediately if not sooner? And if we do need do something so immediately why did Gore recently buy a gargantuan estate on the California coast that will put a thousand times more carbon into the air than the poor folks of Mali or Haiti who live in huts and tents without running water or sewage treatment? And for that matter why does our President spend so much time on Air Force One using gargantuan amounts of fuel and supposedly scarce resources in order to make speeches on-the-scene (and take vacations) in so many far-off places like Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, California, Maine, Hawaii, and 22 or so foreign countries? And not just once a month or so as every president has done, but he seems to be flying off somewhere every few days! We do have television, radio and the Internet that use a lot less oil and require many fewer reporters, body-guards and hangers-on.
For myself I think we should be more concerned to bring housing, running water and better water and sewage treatment to the Haitians and Malians. And to the Chinese and Indians and Cambodians as well as to some poorer Americans who will suffer the most if we let our economy collapse and move to a no-growth, green life style and Jimmy Carter-like malaise.
I’m afraid the answer is that many far-left partisans are so obsessed with potential government blessings that they can’t imagine that free people will ever manage to do the right things. They are supremely confident we don’t know where our own best interests lie. Or even where it hurts. They want to make sure we do the right thing by enacting into law hundreds of 2000-plus pages of intricate regulation and fiats that their “experts” say will be good for us. And then some suggest that the usual suspects who disagree should be put in solitary. A law professor at a San Diego college suggested recently that the government should just plain ban Fox News.
A recent op-ed article in the NY Times by Ross Douthat has relevance here. He points out that back in the 1970s popular scientists like Paul Ehrlich (a supporting role was played then by the now presidential science advisor John Holdren) preached to the choir and to Johnny Carson’s crowd that overpopulation was going to be the ruin of humankind. Actually you would have been hard put to find many contrarian views among scientists or laymen in those days. Certainly I believed him. Along with the doomsday prophecies about population there was a linked prediction of doom that we would soon run out of oil, or land, of food, or as Newsweek put it on a famous cover in 1973 we soon would be “Running out of Everything!”
Now thirty-five years later it turns out that we have a birth deficit in western countries and we are beginning to worry about not having enough young workers to support us old folks. Worse, we have an “under-consumption” recession problem (a bit like in Roosevelt’s depression days) and in addition and in contrast we have according to many green activists a hedonistic glut of oil, land, food, McDonalds and “everything.”
Douthat admits all that in his NY Times article but goes on to claim that “history rarely repeats itself exactly – and conservatives who treat global warming as just another scare story are almost certainly mistaken.” Well, maybe. But the burden of proof this time is on the other side. Environmental doomsayers, like the proverbial shepherd boy who cried wolf too many times, do not have a good record as seers. As J. Scott Armstrong once wrote, “No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers.”
So maybe we should round up the usual suspects … and then pay as little attention to them as the police chief in Casablanca did.
Bill Stonebarger, Hawkhill Owner/President
P.S. See our programs GLOBAL WARMING, RESOURCES, POPULATIONS AND CLIMATE CHANGE and three new DVDs about work and life in the 19th century when worries were the opposite of today—that is, too little wealth, too few resources and a shortage of people. See ROMANCE OF THE LUMBERJACK, IRON MINES AND MEN and THERE SHE BLOWS.