I Feel Good

So Dubya actually refused to sign onto the Kyoto Boondoggle, huh? And now the usual suspects from the envirosocialist left – the pea brained do-gooders, the pandering politicians, the green special interests and the lapdog national media – are all aflutter. The Washington Post says America has been "left out." The NY Times describes a signing at which the "US only looks on." And they say it like it is a bad thing. Then why do I feel so good?

Do you remember when you were a kid and you went into that old boarded up house with the rest of the gang even though they had told at home that you should stay out? And when your mother found out she asked you if you would jump off a bridge too just because "everyone else was doing it?" (This is Routine 6 in the Mother’s Handbook of Handed Down Wisdom and Practical Guilt. You could look it up.) Didn’t anyone at the Times have a mother? Or were they all raised by a village? Listen up, just because "everyone else is doing it" that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

What they never tell you is that Kyoto is so much hot air. (That pun is so obvious that even I am too proud to claim it.) It always gets lost in the repetition of the theological litany of the environmental movement but no one has yet proven that global warming even exists beyond normal climate cycles. And IF (BIG IF) it does exist, no has proven that we have any real impact on it. Sometimes I think these people saw too many bad sci-fi movies as kids. They all imagine themselves as either the wise old scientist, his pert young daughter or her handsome test pilot boyfriend who all see the truth but just can’t get a complacent world to listen. The only problem is that everybody saw the same movie and people are listening when they should just send them all back to their lab at the Chicken Little Institute for Overreaction and Doomsaying.

About a month back, Jude Wanniski wrote a really good piece on this subject at his Polyconomics web site. I know enough about math to know that Mr. Wanniski is a lot better at it than I am. His numbers indicate that if all greenhouse gases were said to be equivalent to one mile that all of mankind’s combined activity (factories, automobiles, mines, oil wells, breathing, network news anchors, eating Mexican food, everything) added together would amount to 5/8’s of an inch out of that mile. That is equivalent to one thousandth of one percent of the total amount. Emergency! Emergency! Everybody please to get off street! (If you understood that lastreference, let me know. You might be even more peculiar than I am.)

Now, I’m human too. I can be set off by little things just like anybody else. My wife and daughter leave shoes all over the house. Makes me nuts. Sometime the person behind me in church will cough into his hand seconds before I’m supposed to shake it. I hate that. There was a kid in high school who started 50% of his sentences with the word "actually." I wanted to kill that kid. But one thousandth of one percent? Get over it. Man, if there was ever a case where the proper response was, don’t just do something – stand there, this is it.

You know, it just occurred to me that greenhouse gases might not be such a bad thing. CO2 is certainly a good thing if you favor activities like photosynthesis and breathing. I do. And while I have not given it a lot of thought, I guess that if the earth’s temperature is not staying the same, which sounds unlikely physical processes and natural variation being what they are. So it stands to reason that at any given moment it must be getting either warmer or colder. Makes sense, right? I’m fairly certain that I’d choose global warming over another Ice Age if given the opportunity to name my own epoch.

Now Jimmy Carter has emerged from wherever it is he goes when he is not hammering nails or pontificating in that holier than thou tone that we all learned to love in those dear departed days of the late 70’s. No wonder Billy drank all that cheap beer. You’d drink too if you’d had to listen to this Big Brother all your life.

Anyway, Jimmy is "disappointed" in George II. He had high hopes for Dubya, you see. It is why he deigned to attend the inauguration. I guess he figured that the new guy would be like most of the old guys, even some Southerners I can think of, and totally sell out his campaign agenda once the Beltway tightened up around him. But Bush turned out to be something less than the total sellout that Carter had hoped for. Misery does love company, after all. Dubya has actually done some of what he said he would do.

Let’s be clear on something. Ex-President Jimmy may be a very nice man. (I had to say that. It is in the bylaws, Pundit’s Local 46.) Most people say he is so it must be true, although being a nice man is not what usually gets Minor league Democratic governors a seat on the Trilateral Commission. Different column. But you have to admit that taking policy advice from Carter is like taking driving lessons from Teddy Kennedy. Like taking lessons in moderation and self-control from Jesse Jackson. Like taking lessons in damage control from Gary Condit. As President, Jimmy Carter had neither ideas nor leadership to offer. Dubya seems to be showing the occasional glimpse of both.

John Kerry (D-People’s Republic of Massachusetts), another sad sack whose idea bank has gone bankrupt, stated that he, "Feel(s) badly for us as a country that we have been put into this position." I’ll tell you what I feel badly about, Johnny. I feel badly that you are the best we can come up with when we try to put good people in Washington. I feel badly when you and your ilk take every opportunity to confiscate more of our liberty and more of our wealth at any opportunity you can concoct. Like global warming. I feel badly that we put money in your pocket every time we buy Heinz Ketchup. No, I take that back. At least that way we get ketchup. Usually we just get screwed.

But I don’t feel badly that we told the statist Eurotrash, the pre-feudal Third World totalitarians and the rest of the people with American prosperity envy to take a hike. I don’t feel badly that Dubya refused to let us get regulated back to the Stone Age by control freak, Gaian bureaucrats who’d change places with us in a heartbeat if they had any idea of how to do it by achieving what we have. Which they don’t.

And I don’t feel badly that in exchange for modern medicine, air conditioning, Nero Wolfe, an ever increasing food supply, the Internet, a higher worldwide standard of living than could have been imagined a century ago and James Brown we paid by adding one thousandth of one percent to the sum total of greenhouse gases. I do not feel badly about that at all. If we got all that for one thousandth of one percent what could we get for two? Nope, I don’t feel badly about that at all.

In fact, I feel good. So should you.

July 26, 2001

Ed Cobb [send him mail] is a printer in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. He is a northerner by birth, a southerner by choice, and a Catholic by the grace of God.

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