Saturday, November 17, 2007

Bow Your Heads and Let Us Regulate

Several years ago, Michael Crichton, in an insightful essay, stated that environmentalism had become a religion, and like any religion, operates on dogma and faith rather than on science. His words were prophetic indeed, and the growth of the global warming issue has since become the central tenet of faith. There are many who challenge that faith, some of whose work can be found here.

But such is religion that any dissent is heresy. Thus we have the faith's High Priest, Al Gore, demanding that any dissenting opinion be silenced and denied access to the public. Then only a few days ago, one UN official ominously called the questioning of global warming "criminally irresponsible."

The religion of global warming has been seized upon by the socialist left in Europe in particular. They jettisoned Christianity generations ago, and have since found their raison d'etre in environmentalism and global warming. And the EU is the world's greatest experiment in socialism. Lacking any checks and balances and with only a patina of democracy, the EU has fully embraced environmentalism and global warming, using it to justify the centralization of power and the issuance of a tsunami of regulation - for that is what the left does best, regulate and control. For example, see here, here, here and here. No thought is given to using the free market to promote environmentalism, as for all their moral posing, the left ultimately is using their new religion to achieve power.

And in this they are aided by a like motivated UN that has just upped the ante a little more today:

Climate change is "severe and so sweeping that only urgent, global action" can head it off, a United Nations scientific panel said in a report on global warming issued Saturday.

The report produced by the Nobel prize-winning panel warns of the devastating impact for developing countries and the threat of species extinction posed by the climate crisis.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, presenting the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in Valencia, Spain, warned that some of the effects of rising levels of greenhouse gases may already be irreversible.

The U.N. head said the situation was already "so severe and so sweeping that only urgent, global action" could head off the crisis.

Read the article here. There is no time for verifying the science or for hearing the dissent. There is no cost benefit analysis to be had. The UN organization that won the Peace Prize (does that have anything to do with science?) has just issued the next encyclical. Bow your heads and let us regulate.

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