Thursday, June 23, 2011

Prescient quote

After learning of Al Gore's complaint that Obama has been lagging in efforts to combat global warming, I was moved to exhume the following prescient paragraphs written by Walter Mead Russell in The American Prospect last year.


"For better or worse, the global political system isn’t capable of producing the kind of result the global warming activists want. It’s like asking a jellyfish to climb a flight of stairs; you can poke and prod all you want, you can cajole and you can threaten. But you are asking for something that you just can’t get — and at the end of the day, you won’t get it."

[snip]


"The death of global warming (the movement, not the phenomenon) has some important political and cultural consequences in the United States that I’ll be blogging on down the road. . . . The global warming meltdown confirms all the populist suspicions out there about an arrogantly clueless establishment invoking faked ‘science’ to impose cockamamie social mandates on the long-suffering American people, backed by a mainstream media that is totally in the tank. Don’t think this won’t have consequences; we’ll be exploring them together as the days go by."

Russell doesn't doubt that global warming is occurring. Nor do I. But the likelihood that any real steps will be taken to curb it has drastically declined. This debacle has happened for two reasons: 1) overhyping by the green faction; 2) lack of political will.

So it is time to close that chapter, and take up Bjorn Lomborg's advice that we learn to manage global warming, instead of flailing about with futile schemes based delusional prospects of reversing it.

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4 Comments:

Blogger Burk said...

Oh, right.. back in the day, the political system just wasn't capable of countering the rights of property holders to fight for the rights of blacks. So I guess the Civil War was a mistake and shouldn't have been fought. Tragedies of myopia and greed should just be let play out in their tragic ways. Sounds like a great, inspiring philosophy indeed.

9:13 AM  
Blogger Dyneslines said...

We can't be expected to offer an inspiring philosophy all the time: I do my best. In the meantime, I have this observation --

Just out of curiosity: have the oafish Al Gore and the oafish Alec Baldwin ever been seen together in the same room? Or were they just twins separated at birth? : - )

Well, we all deserve a mental-health break from time to time.

9:33 AM  
Blogger Stephen said...

The refusal to recognize reality in Republican faith-based policy-making also means that the US is making no plans to deal with the results of the global warming it denies,

And if Al Gore is an "oaf," what would you call Mitch McConnell? or Newt Gingrich? or Dr. Bachman?

12:36 PM  
Blogger Dyneslines said...

If you forget about Republican-bashing for a minute, the question is this? What are the prospects of the anti-global warming movement? A "reality-based" observer would have to say that they are poor.

The term oaf is somatically descriptive. Thus Governor Christie of New Jersey is an oaf, McConnell an Bachmann are not. Gingrich is marginal.

1:06 PM  

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