Climate change conceit

12 December 2009

Kevin Rudd is more interested in regulating the economy than reducing carbon emissions, says John Bolton

This article appears in the latest issue of Spectator Australia:

Kevin Rudd has pledged allegiance to the near-theological belief that climate change is ‘the greatest long-term threat to us all’. He has, moreover, single-handedly transformed Hillary Clinton’s ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ into a climate change demon, warning darkly that his opponents are ‘alive in every major country, including Australia, constitute a powerful global force for inaction, and… are particularly entrenched in a range of conservative parties around the world’. The Prime Minister concludes it is ‘time to remove any polite veneer from this debate’. Speaking for his own conduct, he at least got the last point right.

In fact, those arguing most vociferously that climate change requires greater government regulation of the economy, higher taxation, and more ‘global governance’ are precisely the people who argued for these policies before global warming was even a theory. Climate change has thus become the banner under which these statists argue for precisely the same positions they argued for without any evidence of climate change. Indeed, they would likely argue for exactly the same policies even if we were confronted with global cooling (the scientific fad of the Sixties and Seventies) rather than its opposite.

Australia, at least for now, has rejected Mr Rudd’s tax-and-regulate approach, and put in place a new Liberal party leader who actually supports classical liberalism. Moreover, the prospects of a legally binding global climate change agreement at Copenhagen, as long predicted, are now virtually zero. We had a foretaste of the unfolding debacle at last month’s Apec meeting in Singapore, at which summit leaders said as much. Instead, UN members will only ‘agree to agree’ to reach a full-up treaty in 2010, thus avoiding having to admit complete failure.

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