Bill McGibben, the leftie environmentalist, has had it with compromising on the issue of global warming. Since no American bill has been signed, it’s time to take off the gloves. From his opinion piece in the ever accommodating LA Times:
So now we know what we didn’t before: Making nice doesn’t work. It was worth a try, but it didn’t work. So we’d better try something else. Step 1 involves actually talking about global warming. For years now, the accepted wisdom was: talk about anything else — energy independence, oil security, beating the Chinese to renewable technology.
Is McGibben kidding? Consider: Al Gore’s propagandistic movie wins an Oscar and garners a Nobel Peace Prize. The media have pounded the drum unceasingly. The advocacy is found at bus stops, in TV commercials, movies, sit coms, books. The UN used its megaphone to shriek that we are all going to die. The fact that people don’t want to dismantle their economies and redistribute their wealth to pay destitute countries to remain in destitution over global warming, doesn’t mean they haven’t heard the message. Back to McGibben:
Step 2, we have to ask for what we actually need, not what we calculate we might be able to get. If we’re going to slow global warming in the very short time available to us, we don’t actually need an incredibly complicated legislative scheme that gives door prizes to every interested industry. We need a stiff price on carbon, set by the scientific understanding that we can’t still be burning black rocks a couple of decades hence.
Ask all you want. The answer is no. People don’t want a recession to turn even worse from higher energy prices, higher food prices, and greater costs for everything that has to be shipped. And that is going to make the third proposal very hard to effectuate:
Which leads to the third step in this process. If we’re going to get any of this done, we’re going to need a movement. For 20 years, environmentalists have operated on the notion that we’d get action if we simply had scientists explain to politicians and chief executives that our current ways are unsustainable. That turns out, quite conclusively, not to work. We need to be able to explain to them that continuing in their current ways will end something they actually care about: their careers. And because we’ll never have the cash to compete with Exxon, we better work in the currencies we can muster: bodies, spirit, passion.
People support transitioning to a greener way of being. I know I do and support things like tax incentives to move in that direction. But you are not going to have millions marching in the streets demanding to be made poorer and less free. They are not going to demand that national sovereignty be abdicated in order that we be governed by an elite, unelected UN technocracy.
Exxon’s money isn’t what has stopped the global warming hysterics from having their way. Indeed, the warming believers continue to dominate the public discourse. But people are hysteria exhausted. They don’t think that destroying our economies now–in the possibly vain and entirely theoretical hope that thirty years from now it may reduce warming–makes much sense.
August 4th, 2010 | 1:00 pm
Minus step 1, which is just as stupid as you point out, his steps are the “right” ones if you support his agenda. The right way to do politics is to propose honest legislation that accomplishes the goal one is after and then build a movement of people to democratically push it through.
So he’s going through the right steps… it just won’t work because he’s both wrong and won’t get support.
But how much better would our politics be if people were as forthright as he is? Imagine if the euthenasia (or pro-marijuana) crowd was more focused on saying what they actually want instead of coming up with deceptive policies to meet their goals without making it seem that why while simultaneously trying to redefine words and use ridiculous euphemisms like “death with dignity” to obscure the truth.
In fact, speaking frankly, you’d be out of a job Wesley if everyone was as honest as this guy as 90% of what you do, and you do it exceptionally, is cut through all the deception and lies to expose the truth for what it is.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
August 4th, 2010 at 1:09 pm
I would love to be out of a job because it was no longer necessary. I could retake up golf.
August 4th, 2010 | 1:26 pm
The hysteria that is Global warming is to be hyped by people who are definitely pushing a Capitalist agenda but it is from the left ,in the hopes of making socialists wealthy while destroying free market capitalists.
August 4th, 2010 | 6:23 pm
Here’s Mr. McKibben’s, the leftist Methodist Sunday school teacher, conclusion:
“Mostly, we need to tell the truth, resolutely and constantly.”
The temperature of the Earth is increasing because of our carbon dioxide emissions. It’s really simple and true. We need to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions to slow the temperature increase. Again, simple and true. If we do not reduce our carbon emissions we will induce human catastrophe. Simple and true.
On the other hand, your statement that carbon dioxide reductions will “dismantle… economies and redistribute… wealth to pay destitute countries to remain in destitution over global warming” is a blatant lie. Not a mere exaggeration, not simply misleading… a bald-faced lie. Mr. McKibben insists on telling the truth. You respond with a lie.
Fortunately, few read your blog, and more fortunately other right-wing radical bloggers have stopped talking about global warming.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
August 4th, 2010 at 6:31 pm
It can’t be a lie if I think it is true, Jeffrey. There is a reason why even a 60 member Democratic majority in the senate couldn’t pass a carbon tax. It will further destroy the economy. You may not agree, which is fine. But that doesn’t make you a liar. The UK reported that their global warming policies will increase personal energy costs by 1/3. If we tax carbon, gas may go up above $6 a gallon. You may not need to drive much, but a lot of people do. And that will crescendo down to increased costs for everything, from food, to televisions, to riding the bus.
But I am heartened? IF the coming projections are true for November, there will be even less of a chance of a carbon tax. People. Do. Not. Want. It. And that is why McGibben’s yearning for a mass movement to push this through is a pipe dream.
August 5th, 2010 | 7:39 am
Here in Finland, the price of petrol is 1.45€/l which translates to about 7.2$/gallon. The price of diesel has also risen, now it is about 5.8$/gallon.
This (5-7$/gallon) has been a reality for years now. The tax on gas is justified by the government upkeep of roads, but money is fungible. For some it’s also necessary to own a car and drive to work, so there’s no going out of it.
http://polttoaine.net/
(in finnish, but a sample of prices on the front page)
August 5th, 2010 | 5:28 pm
Far right? LOL.
August 5th, 2010 | 7:20 pm
It’s not a lie if you believe it to be true? You believe, with no supporting evidence, that a carbon cap and trade system will “destroy our economies”. Fair enough. You’re entitled to your opinion, even when not backed by evidence. I apologize for saying you lied. Rather, you are ignorant of the truth.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
August 5th, 2010 at 7:27 pm
Jeffrey: Apology accepted. That’s an important distinction. I disagree with your conclusion, but it is not out of bounds to say that I am ignorant–although I pointed out some of the consequences of a carbon tax of the size sufficient to squelch carbon emissions. I pointed out that in the UK, analysis shows that a carbon tax and other global warming policies would increase energy prices by 1/3. I have had posts that illustrated the kind of economy wounding consequences of these policies.
If you think such an increase in energy prices wouldn’t depress the economy, you’re the one who is ignorant. In fact, Jeffey, one point of the tax is to depress the economy so that less carbon is emitted. (Another is to stimulate the growth of energy sources that don’t emit so much. But that is a much longer term outcome. You can’t just snap your fingers and get them into the grid.)
August 6th, 2010 | 10:10 am
Jeffrey is wrong and Wesley is right. There are already studies in Spain, Italy Denmark and Germany about the desastrous consequences brought by AGW policies to theses countries economies: unemployment growth, increase of energy tariffs, huge public debt, etc. Just go to http://www.ecotretas.com (in portuguese, from Portugal) to check it all right from Europe. Most original documents are written in English.
August 6th, 2010 | 10:52 am
With record temperatures in Russia and everything on fire it wouldn’t surprise me if some global warming liberal will say “This proves that global warming is a fact”
So it wasn’t big news when I read some panic doomsdayer say:
“Practically everything is burning. The weather is anomalously hot. What’s happening with the planet’s climate right now needs to be a wake-up call to all of us, meaning all heads of state, all heads of social organizations, in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate.”
Another stupid misguided climate change advocate, right?
Wrong. The speaker turned out to be non other than number one climate change skeptic and Russian leader Medvedev
That’s right. The same guy that, up till last month, has resisted the idea of climate change as nothing more than a western plot to slow it’s development.
Last winter Medvedev called the global-warming debate “some kind of tricky campaign made up by some commercial structures to promote their business projects.”
Medvedev announced that Russia would be spewing 30% more planet-warming gases into the atmosphere by 2020. “We will not cut our development potential,” he said during the summer of 2009.
Suddenly, with Russia on fire and the hottest temperatures on record across the country the same man who mocked Global warming has become a convert.
I can see that Climate change skeptics are beginning to sweating too.
August 9th, 2010 | 6:58 am
“you are not going to have millions marching in the streets demanding to be made poorer and less free”
The problem is that the environmentalist movement is dominated by people who have never had to do without. You can’t brag haning your clothes on a line or growing your own vegetables when you’re talking to people who can’t afford a dyer or the prices at the supermarkets. Those are the people that march in the streets.
August 10th, 2010 | 2:45 pm
I live in south of Brazil. Past week we had the coldest temperature in fourteen years! It snowed in Catarinense Mountains and in Gaúcha Mountains. Anthropogenical Global Warmimg? Its a joke, because we, who live in Southern Hemisphere, are freezing.
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