'When will people learn? Democracy doesn't work.'
Do you remember when Homer Simpson said this in an episode of The Simpsons a few years back? Yeah, I thought it was funny, too.What's not so funny is that more and more members of the climate-change-alarmist crowd are actually starting to adopt this line of thinking.
Bjorn Lomborg reports:
In March, Al Gore's science adviser and prominent climate researcher Jim Hansen proclaimed that when it comes to dealing with global warming, the "democratic process isn't working". Although science has demonstrated that CO2 from fossil fuels is heating the planet, politicians are unwilling to follow his advice and stop building coal-fired power plants.Boy, democracy just never seems to work out well for Al Gore, does it?
Hansen argues that "the first action that people should take is to use the democratic process. What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections, but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash."
Although he doesn't tell us what the second or third action is, he has turned up in a British court to defend six activists who damaged a coal-fired power station. He argues that we need "more people chaining themselves to coal plants", a point repeated by Gore.
In any event, Lomborg also notes that even if Gore and his cohorts get the legislation they want, the impact on climate change would be negligible:
At a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars annually, [the Waxman-Markey bill] will have virtually no impact on climate change. If all of the bill's many provisions were entirely fulfilled, economic models show that it would reduce the temperature by the end of the century by 0.11C, reducing warming by less than 4 per cent.
Even if every Kyoto-obligated country passed its own, duplicate Waxman-Markey bills - which is implausible and would incur significantly higher costs - the global reduction would amount to just 0.22C by the end of this century. The reduction in global temperature would not be measurable in 100 years, yet the cost would be significant and payable now.
This gets to the most important lesson to take away from the climate-change debate. The fact that the policy isn't going to produce any significant impact shows that the policy isn't a means to an end. The policy is the end. This isn't about saving us from climate change. It's about giving the government more control over our lives. Period.
The good thing is it's not too late to stop it - yet.
