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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 18, 2007
Abstract
Hardly for the first time, I touched this last week on the strange conceit of the environmentalists, who are making an international campaign of “global warming.” (Have you heard?)The puzzle is why they put almost all their effort into pushing a case that is so abstract and speculative, and which, as they ought to know from common sense, is as likely as the last few environmentalist scares to prove a crock. (Nuclear winter, the population bomb, global famine, etc.) Why do they dwell on the unproven long-term climatic effects of the atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide -- which is not itself a pollutant, but a necessary condition for life? Why not turn their rhetorical spears on what is tangible, material, demonstrable? On what is blowing out of the smokestacks and draining through the spillways of the filthiest and most poisonous industrial operations on the planet? The answer should be obvious. We are dealing with an ideological crusade, that has nothing to do with environment, per se. The object of the exercise, is to find ways to demonize, and then harm, the United States and the West. This requires an abstract case, because a tangible case would only exonerate the West -- where environmental standards have been constantly improving -- and instead convict China, India, and other “developing” countries where environmental standards are much lower, and the volume of industrial production is growing fast. Very fast. As Martin Wolf wrote in the Financial Times last Tuesday: "The increase in China's energy demand between 2002 and 2005 was equivalent to Japan's current annual energy use. This nugget of information, buried in the International Energy Agency's latest World Energy Outlook, tells one almost all one needs to know about what is happening to the world's energy economy. This is the world of abundance that China and India are now joining. Nothing short of a catastrophe will stop them.” That is the reality. Now, compare it with an international regulatory scheme, that would largely ignore China, but cripple Japan by forcing her to reduce her far more efficient use of energy supplies by some significant fraction. Worse: force the relatively efficient and cleanly Japanese to surrender huge quantities of cash in “carbon credits” to China's dictatorial regime, while also surrendering advanced technology. It is only by a very abstract argument -- one abstraction piled on another, as one assumption has been piled on another in the computer modelling of the world's climate -- that such a perverse result can be obtained. An honest argument would go right to the source of the problem. Abstraction piled upon abstraction: for in addition to the scientific “reasoning,” we have moral “reasoning” of a like quality: not merely shoddy, but inverted. The argument is, that the West was able to benefit from industrialization first, and thus from the imagined advantages of profligate consumption. It is “only fair” that the East should “catch up.” Japan, for those unfamiliar with maps, is to the east even of China. Yet for ideological purposes it now counts -- along with South Korea, Taiwan, and any other technologically-advanced, free Asian countries -- as part of the West. Largely bereft of natural resources, these countries built what they have by their own inventive efforts, paying all the way. Mainland China, by comparison, has enjoyed the latecomer's advantage of massive foreign investment and technology transfer, under the direction of a heavily militarized system of central command. We do not even have the measure of the Chinese economy, for published Chinese statistics are stage-managed. Yet we can know, by direct observation, about ecological disasters caused by showy megaprojects such as the Three Gorges Dam; and find the same syndrome wherever we look. We can observe the waste of a ruling elite, whether we are looking at the skyline of a Shanghai, or Dubai -- different in kind from the steady, dense accretion of skyscrapers in a Chicago or New York or even Hong Kong. Conspicuous consumption in all cases, no doubt, but in the former, the kind of wild show only possible where wealth and political power are absolutely conjoined. More deeply, we confront the absurd moral argument that makes A responsible for the behaviour of B -- via some heavily ideologized history of “imperialism.” The West must now be punished and the East rewarded, regardless of who the living payers and receivers may be. And towards the end of “equality” -- that messiest of all abstractions, far removed from any hard notion of equality before God, or before the law. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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