One advantage of taking a hiatus from daily scrutiny of world events, environmental ideology and policy implementation, is that one realizes the virtue of patience. Eventually this too shall pass. The world may be largely an insane entity with only pockets of sanity, but eventually those pockets of sanity are revealed both to those who seek them, and by the excesses of those who prosper from the perpetuation of global insanity: common sense is humanity's saving grace in its quest for sustainability.
Some recent examples of emerging sanity:
- What America has today is government by lawyers, ideologues, social engineers and rent seekers. Congress has nary a real engineer, and precious few members with any business background or ability to figure out basic cradle-to-grave energy, resource, economic and pollution equations. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thinks natural gas is an "alternative to fossil fuels.
- The sad truth is that global warming scare was nothing less than a hoax. Much like the "ice age" scares of the 70's, it was a ginned up "crisis" that socialists in the environmental movement used in an effort to destroy capitalism. Fortunately, the world is watching their theories fall apart due to the current cooling trend.
- Three cheers for Jairam Ramesh! India at last has an environment minister who is willing and able to denounce the hypocrisy and immorality of the West in twisting the arms of India and China to curb their carbon emissions. He is right to make it clear that India has no intention of signing the new 'climate change' treaty in Copenhagen in December, which would put curbs on the carbon emissions of the Third World.
- Those development economists and sundry celebrities, who on the one hand, want to see the end of world poverty and on the other, to curb Third World carbon emissions, should be ashamed of themselves for advocating the latter path which will make the former goal impossible to achieve.
In the coming months we are set to be inundated with a full-court press of hype ahead of the next climate conference in Copenhagen. One fact remains indisputable, what the developed economies of the world do or don't do no longer determines the fate of the world by themselves:
- ...each year the increase in Chinese CO2 emissions alone is greater than those produced by the entire British economy. On the fashionable assumption that climate change is entirely driven by CO2 emissions, the effect on global temperatures of Britain closing every fossil fuel power station would be much smaller than the statistical margin of error: in effect, zero.
So when you are exhorted to panic and run around like a chicken with its head cut off because the end of the world is nigh, as doubtless the rhetoric of the coming months will imply, resist the urge, reflect quietly and serenely on your world this past year or so and commit to doing your part to being a little happier, a little more tolerant and a little more involved: be empowered, be engaged but don't be dictated by dogma into irrelevance, poverty and serfdom.
Remember, "the greatest story teller ever" spun fairy tales from Denmark. Good place for a climate conference.
