Climate change conceit

Wednesday, 9th December 2009

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

The south rightly suspects, once again, a lot of talk about wealth transfers, but not much action. And in developed countries, behind the posturing, hard economic realities are at issue, with competitive advantage in international markets at stake for years to come under the guise of seemingly innocuous issues of environmentalism.

A far better way to proceed, rather than simply bulling ahead as the global warming crowd normally does, is to ask whether the objections being raised perhaps reveal fundamental weaknesses in their entire strategy for dealing with climate change. The US failure to enact cap-and-trade legislation, now and in the foreseeable future, is not due to special-interest conspiracies, Kevin Rudd’s paranoia notwithstanding, but to the fact that a large segment of the American public believe that the proposed policies are job killers with little chance of profoundly affecting climate change.

Similarly, India and China are simply not willing, now or for a long time to come, to downshift their economic growth to satisfy European scientific theorists. And no one, north or south, really thinks that the huge proposed resource transfers are ever actually going to happen. Increasingly, many worry justifiably about their national sovereignty, such as when new EU President Herman Van Rompuy proclaims that ‘the climate conference in Copenhagen is another step toward the global management of our planet’.

Confronted with this massive political gridlock, the climate change activists would be politically best advised to find an entirely different approach. American Enterprise Institute scholars, for example, have called for ‘resilience strategies’ to deal with the massive uncertainties involved in both assessing the causes of climate change and the consequence of proposed remedies. These strategies do not involve the command-and-control model of Kyoto and its would-be successors, but they offer better prospects for accomplishing something worthwhile, rather than international agreements likely to be honoured more in the breach than the observance. Tony Abbott, take note.

Those professing concern for global warming should want to consider the fullest range of alternative solutions. If not, then we are at least entitled to ask if what really motivates them is less the risks of global warming and more their ceaseless efforts to increase the power and intrusiveness of government in the economic and personal affairs of our citizens. That, Mr Rudd, is really ‘the greatest long-term threat to us all’.