George Will weighs in on the climate change debate and observes that it is passing strange that there is such terror about the threat to our environment posed by a warming earth when, in fact, the earth's mean temperature hasn't changed in over eleven years. Such details, however, are mere nuisances to climate change true believers who, when they rise in the morning and go to bed at night, reverently recite their mantra: "Al Gore said it, I believe it, that settles it."
Will, however, holds to the peculiar view that our policy should be based on data and there simply is no data to support the eco-alarmists. To get a sense of the sheer weirdness of the Democrats' determination to save us from an environmental catastrophe for which there is scarcely any unambiguous evidence think about what Will says here:
[Unfortunately], the crusade against warming will brook no interference from information. With the Waxman-Markey bill, the House of Representatives has endorsed reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 83 per-cent below 2005 levels by 2050. This is surely the most preposterous legislation ever hatched in the House. Using Energy Department historical statistics, Kenneth P. Green and Steven F. Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute have calculated this:
Waxman-Markey's goal is just slightly more than 1 billion tons of greenhouse-gas emissions in 2050. The last time this nation had that small an amount was 1910, when there were only 92 million Americans, 328 million fewer than the 420 million projected for 2050. To meet the 83 percent reduction target in a nation of 420 million, per capita carbon-dioxide emissions would have to be no more than 2.4 tons per person, which is one quarter the per capita emissions of 1910, a level probably last seen when the population was 45 million-in 1875.
If you're young it might be a good idea to buy stock in bicycle manufacturers. It's hard to imagine how we could meet such draconian emission standards and still maintain anything approximating a modern life-style. This is not to say that we couldn't use energy more efficiently, but to reduce our carbon footprint to the level Waxman-Markey requires would require us to abandon most of modern technology and become a third-world nation.
Who votes for these people?
RLC