On the anniversary of Climategate the Watermelons show their true colours
By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: November 19th, 2010
Green on the outside, red on the inside....
Watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside. This is the theme of my forthcoming book on the controlling, poisonously misanthropic and aggressively socialistic instincts of the modern environmental movement. So how very generous that two of that movement’s leading lights should have chosen the anniversary of Climategate to prove my point entirely.
The first comes courtesy of German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer who has openly admitted what some of us have been saying for some time: that “Climate Change” has nothing to do with man’s modest and thoroughly unthreatening contribution to global mean temperatures, nor even with the plight of baby polar bears so sweet you could almost hug them if you didn’t know they’d take your arm off in a trice. All it is, really, is a Marxist exercise in minority grievance-mongering and wealth redistribution on a global scale.
Or, as Edenhoffer so helpfully puts it it Neue Zurcher Zeitung: (H/T Global Warming Policy Foundation):
First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.
And if that sounds sinister, wait till you hear what our old friend Nicholas “Lord” Stern has gone and done. Nicky, you’ll remember, was the funny little World Banker responsible for possibly the most hysterically overblown policy document in the entire history of the great Global Climate Change Scam: the infamous Stern Review which recommended, inter alia, that we all go veggie in order to spare the planet from hideous boiling man-made meltdown.
Now, “Lord” Stern (of Brentford, no less) has gone one better. He has got it into his dear little head that he has the power, influence and importance to dictate terms to the US economy. If America doesn’t toe the line on CO2 emissions reductions, he has threatened, then it could jolly well find itself the victim of an international trade boycott.
I would give you the link to the Times article in which Ben Webster’s interview appears, but sadly it’s hidden behind a paywall. Still, Watts Up With That has the gist:
Lord Stern said that Europe and the Far East (sic) were forging ahead of the US in controlling emissions and switching to low carbon sources of energy. They would not tolerate having their industries undermined by American competitors that had not paid for their emissions. “If you are charging properly for carbon and other people are not, you will take that into account,” he said. “Many of the more forward-looking people in the US are thinking about this. If they see a danger on the trade front to US exports that could influence public discussion.”
Asked what type of US products could face restrictions, Lord Stern said: “Aircraft, clearly, some cars, machine tools — it’s not simply what’s in the capital good, it’s what kind of processes the capital good is facilitating.”
What a mellifluous turn of phrase the man has: “what kind of processes the capital good is facilitating.” Doesn’t it just make you SO happy to think that this veritable Gerald Manley Hopkins among economists has the ear of several G20 leaders?
But I don’t believe a word of his threat, do you? Not, at least, in so far as the Far East is concerned. Can anyone seriously imagine China or Japan or any of the Asian tiger economies severing trade links with the US in order to make a political point about a non-existent environmental problem based on “science” which they all know is a crock. For China, for the BRICs economies generally in fact, AGW is just a handy pretext for milking the Western nations of what money they can. It’s certainly not an issue over which they’d choose to lose money on a point of principle.
Where the European Union is concerned, on the other hand, Lord Stern’s toys-out-of-pram scenario looks frighteningly plausible. Frightening, that is, for those of us unfortunate enough to live in the EU and to be one of the US’s bigger trading partners; not frightening at all for the US, though, for whom if we carry on going in the direction we’re heading at the moment the EU will soon be a sclerotic, socialistic irrelevance.
Here’s my prediction: with the exception of crazed socialist relicts like California (which really ought to be allowed to secede and take its proper place on the North American continent as a kind of comedy pariah state), the US is going to grow increasingly bored with the Great Global Warming Scam. Cap and trade will go the way of the failed Chicago carbon exchange – and with it all prospects of a binding global agreement on carbon emissions.
But that’s only the beginning of the fun. Thanks to the glorious mid-terms, the House is about to fill up with red meat conservatives who know “Climate Change” is a crock and will be hoping to secure some kind of Climate Nuremberg. Then, when Obama goes in 2012, the whole AGW issue will as far as America is concerned be dead in the water.
Not in Europe, unfortunately. Increasingly, the EUSSR will look as irrelevant as the old USSR, burdened with entirely unnecessary eco-taxes and regulations, destroyed by the watermelons of the green movement. Sad, isn’t it?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100064423/on-the-anniversary-of-climategate-the-watermelons-show-their-true-colours/
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