Intellectual activism in defense of the American way of life.
Archive for 12/4/2006
Earth 2020: three outcomes to global warming
Dec 4th
Let’s assume that “global warming” is the hoax that I think it is. What happens when, sometime around 2020, no evidence of global warming (as a historically unique trend) is found? The following scenarios are three plausible outcomes to the “global warming” crisis.
A) The Fraud Discredited
Politicians and the scientific community admit their error. Environmentalist regulations and environmental agencies are cut back or eliminated. The hundreds of think-tanks, non-profits, and lobbying agencies that survive on the profits from the environmentalist hysteria voluntarily disband.
B) A disaster narrowly averted
Continual improvements in solar power or another renewable technology make it more cost efficient than fossil-fuel based power. The market gradually changes until solar power is dominant.
Politicians proclaim victory, and praise the regulatory state and state-coerced green energy. They stress the need for continual vigilance as they look around for a new crisis to bankroll their campaigns.
C) A self-fulfilling prophecy
Faced with a lack of evidence for global warming, environmentalists focus instead on random climate variation and natural disasters under the banner of “climate change,” which can conveniently be blamed for heat waves, cold fronts, hurricanes, and even tsunamis. The draconian regulatory state gradually erodes the wealth producing capacity of industry, thus destroying the only tool man has to deal with nature’s fury. The EPA/ /DOJ wrecks the economy, FDA causes plagues, and the FCC makes sure the party line gets coverage. The Son of Kyoto shifts energy production and industry from relatively clean, developed nations to environmentally irresponsible developing ones. Innovations in energy production/consumption become prohibitively expensive to get past the regulatory state.
By 2020, nature is unpredictable as ever, but our ability to deal with it is crippled by the state. Politicians seize upon the global havoc they unleashed as proof of the need for further regulation.
Which outcome is most likely? Very likely, it will be a combination of all three. Which one is pre-eminent depends on your estimate of the world’s sanity.
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