More thoughts from Walter Russell Mead:
The global green strategy was a comprehensive, unified and coordinated one. Green activists around the world, in some countries empowered because proportional representation gives fringe groups disproportionate political influence, would unite around the push for a single global solution to climate change. The global solution involved a treaty to be negotiated under UN auspices that would be “legally binding” and subject the emission of greenhouse gasses to strict global controls. Developing countries would receive massive transfers of official aid ($100 billion or more a year) to compensate them for the costs they would incur in meeting carbon targets; developed countries like the United States would face stricter targets still. The target for the treaty was to cap global emissions at levels believed to keep the global temperature rise this century to two degrees centigrade.
To reach this Valhalla, a political strategy was put in place; it is the strategy that the former vice president is still gamely trying to push in his Rolling Stone article. It has failed.
Good. As with Obama, his failure is success for the rest of us.
[Update a few minutes later]
Well, a success for the rest of us who don’t live in California. Here, he succeeded, because the voters are idiots, and the ruinous law that the Democrats and Scharzenegger pushed (thanks, Maria!) will be just one more factor that irretrievably sinks the state’s economic prospects.
[Late morning update]
Al Gore — idiot Malthusian.
As bad as Bush was, we really dodged a bullet in 2000.
What the global warming boneheads don’t get is that, if it were to be real, global warming is good for both mankind and the planet. Historical periods of global warmth included Ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire, both periods were warming than today. Also, global warmth means increased energy in the atmosphere. This means more evaporation that, in turn, leads to more rainfall. Deserts would shrink and growing seasons in the temperate and polar regions would be longer.
The global warming boneheads are trying to prevent what would actually be a good thing for us.
This paragraph from the linked article really nails it:
The global green treaty movement to outlaw climate change is the most egregious folly to seize the world’s imagination since the Kellog-Briand Pact outlawed war in the late 1920s. The idea that the nations of the earth could agree on an enforceable treaty mandating deep cuts in their output of all greenhouse gasses is absurd. A global treaty to meet Mr. Gore’s policy goals isn’t a treaty: the changes such a treaty requires are so broad and so sweeping that a GGCT is less a treaty than a constitution for global government. Worse, it is a constitution for a global welfare state with trillions of dollars ultimately sent by the taxpayers of rich countries to governments (however feckless, inept, corrupt or tyrannical) in poor ones.
Indeed, the developed world’s problem is the opposite of overpopulation. Twenty countries, all European but for Japan, now have negative population growth. It’s not just Russia and the countries of the old East Bloc, but also Germany, Austria, Italy and Greece — where they’re rioting in the streets over the demise of the welfare state. As for Japan, its population is expected to be fully 21 percent lower than its current 127.5 million by 2050.
And as more developing countries become developed, that trend will continue.
I’m not sure how much Gore has changed. He’s always had an intolerant, authoritarian streak as was evident when he persecuted politically-incorrect scientists as a Senator back in the 1980s. But now either he really has become worse or the media no longer protect him.
They had a great show on one of the history channels the other night about the Cold War and how Ronald Reagan won it. They showed some clips of worried Beautiful People scoffing that the USSR was here to stay, and Reagan was an idiot who was just making things worse.
One of those prominently featured was none other than a very young and exasperated Albert Gore, Jr. Plus ca change…
I see no slowdown or relenting in the agitprop for AGW. A massive literature of articles has been and continues to be produced, the main points of which are to refer to the “so-called” Climategate scandal as having been “thoroughly debunked,” and each and every tired, shopworn argument of the “so-called” skeptics having been equally thoroughly debunked. Always in the past-tense, mind you, no need to restate or repeat anything here. No, it’s just sufficient to say that it was done, and that will build up the impression that there has been some thorough debunking going on, and the weak-minded will eventually start to believe it. Thus issue isn’t dead. But if we keep the resistance going, eventually reality will have its say — one way or the other.
Too true, MfK.
Never turn your back on it until you’ve crushed it in an industrial vise, or melted it in a pool of molten iron.
not so sure I would categorize growth in personal wealth by 100 million plus in a decade to be a failure.