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COMMENTARY
June 2, 2007
Bush XV
Every politician eventually enjoys his 15 minutes of media popularity, and this last week President Bush got his. (It's over now.) All he had to do for it was propose that the world’s 15 major producers of industrial pollution -- recently redefined to include carbon dioxide, which is not a pollutant but one of the basic conditions for life -- should meet to decide upon emissions targets. What a brilliant idea. (Irony icon.)This will not happen at Heiligendamm, ye old seaside resort in ye old Duchy of Mecklenburg, Germany, when the G8 leaders assemble on Wednesday. The European politicians wanted to talk about almost nothing else but climate change. For they’ve found talking about the weather a hundred years from now a very welcome distraction from talking about their real problems, of economic stagnation and demographic collapse. The latest of many fashionable distractions. Still, as host Angela Merkel diplomatically admits, the Canadian, American, Japanese, and Russian leaders (Russia left Europe a century ago) won’t have it. What she didn’t quite explain is that they’re tired of European posturing on the issue, and eager to do some grandstanding on their own terms. When I write “posturing” I mean posturing. The U.S. economy is growing fast, but carbon dioxide emissions are actually falling (by 78 million metric tons last year, according to the latest report of the U.S. Energy Information Administration). Whereas, European industry is exhaling CO2 ever faster with no significant economic gains. No wonder that they whine on about a failed Kyoto protocol, which was more about throwing a spanner into the American economy than about cleaning up anything that could be dangerous to someone’s health. But now President Bush, slow as some people think he may be, has found, a little late in his administration, one of the basic principles of political success. You talk about problems, and propose visionary-sounding, other-worldly solutions, that depend entirely on other people to carry out. And at all costs, avoid doing what is necessary, difficult, and long overdue (attack Islamofascism at source in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, for instance). Has he really been won over to the “science” of global warming? From my understanding of the man, this question is poorly phrased. He knows nothing about it himself, but is surrounded by a bureaucracy that wants to buy into it in a big way, and demands from places like France for American "leadership." (People who demand that you lead them in the direction they have already chosen are looking for a fall-guy, not a leader.) Of course Bush “believes” in it, and is willing to put the American taxpayers’ money where his mouth is, on the same wildly generous scale with which he is (or rather, they are) funding the fight against Aids in Africa -- another “good cause” in his earnest estimation. Or picking up the economic and social tab for millions of illegal immigrants, whose loyalty to the U.S. is close to nil. Would that the world worked so, that problems would solve themselves when you threw money at them. Alas, we live on a planet where government “investment” tends invariably to choke off any good that humans could have accomplished. But Mr Bush’s proposal for a kind of W-15 (code W for “warm-mongers”) -- is likely to prove a political success, for perhaps another 15 minutes later on, for the simple reason that no politician can resist the glory of participating in a grand summit on a supposedly “pressing” global issue. Of course they will attend, anything that may promise to be the photo-op of the decade. I have mentioned, above and in the past, that (what I consider to be) the global warming fraud is a convenient way for the politicians to side-step real problems, all the while adding immeasurably to the world’s fund of bureaucratic regulations, and excuses for new taxation. But it is also an environmental disaster in the making. This is because the demonization of CO2 specifically distracts us from the real and consequential problems of global pollution, which are not the less worrying because they are better understood. And the problem here may well require “First World” help, but is not of its nature a first-world problem. Environmental standards in the West have improved continuously over the last couple of generations. Meanwhile, China has become the planet’s emissions queen. And I mean not carbon dioxide, but real soot and poison. Yet China’s rulers in Beijing have no intention whatever of making economic sacrifices. Nor are they under any plausible political pressure to acknowledge, let alone repair, the extraordinary environmental catastrophe that is the postmodern Chinese economy. For in the absence of general elections, the Chinese politburo retains the power of life and death over the 1.3 billion souls trapped under its jurisdiction, and feels free to pursue its own superpower aspirations. The destruction of China’s physical environment is the outward expression of that moral obscenity. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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