Posted by
voice_of_reason on Sunday, February 28, 2010 9:06:31 AM
If anyone was wondering how former Vice President Al Gore would attempt to redeem his Nobel Prize in the light of the recent scandal at the temple of Global Warming, the Gore-acle has spoken!
In his NY Times article "
We Can't Wish Away Climate Change" makes a strange connection between the fall of Communism and the rise of Global Warm-ism that is worth exploring.
Mr. Gore writes:
"
The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to a period of philosophical dominance for market economics worldwide and the illusion of a unipolar world. It also led, in the United States, to a hubristic “bubble” of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere. Over time, markets would most efficiently solve most problems, they argued. Laws and regulations interfering with the operations of the market carried a faint odor of the discredited statist adversary we had just defeated.
This period of market triumphalism coincided with confirmation by scientists that earlier fears about global warming had been grossly understated. But by then, the political context in which this debate took form was tilted heavily toward the views of market fundamentalists, who fought to weaken existing constraints and scoffed at the possibility that global constraints would be needed to halt the dangerous dumping of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere. "
Since Al isn't particularly opposed to Statism - and, in fact, prescribes Statism as a remedy to Anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW) - one gets the sense that he isn't particularly enthusiastic about 'democratic capitalism'. However, he adroitly (and preemptively) innoculates himself by seeming to celebrate the decisive victory of Capitalism, while panning the 'period of market triumphalism' that followed.
Stripped of all the clever verbiage, Al Gore's writing reveals his watermelon credentials ... Green outside, but Red inside.
There is a planetary killer that is silent, deadly and unmerciful. However, that killer is not AGW, as Mr. Gore would have us believe, That killer is POVERTY. It kills through hunger, famine, war, disease, waste ... and, yes, even pollution.
And the only known, proven system that can combat poverty is ... Capitalism. Anyone who has seen the squalid cesspools of Africa and Asia can attest to the fact that the lack of sanitation and waste management is a bigger threat to human life than climate change. In contrast, the semi-Capitalist countries of Europe and North America have wealth-creation mechanisms - the antidote - to such squalor.
Mr. Gore applies the same flawed, zero-sum calculations that made Leftists admire Communism. However, Mr. Gore's version substitutes "Planet Earth" for "the State", and advocates the same kind of poverty-inducing solutions.