The Global Warming Police State

There's an important piece for your consideration at RealClearPolitics by Robert Tracinski, titled The Seeds of the Global Warming Police State. Here are a few paragraphs:

For those seeking to justify this kind of all-encompassing government control, global warming is the best candidate to come along since the collapse of Marxism. Like Marxism, environmentalism steals the "scientific" aura of an established field--but in this case it has invaded the "hard sciences," which carry greater prestige than economics. And unlike previous environmentalist crusades, global warming is a threat that is global in scope and total and all-encompassing in its detailed application to human life. Other pollution scares--DDT, acid rain, the ozone layer--required only the banning of a single product or control over a single industry. None was big enough to require control of the entire economy over the period of a century, nor could any claim to be so urgent as to make dissent an "irresponsible" act that is not to be tolerated.

Global warming provides a basis for all of these claims: urgent action is needed, we are told, or the catastrophic effects will be irreversible. But to reverse global warming will require massive reductions in our use of power, requiring a total restructuring of the economy--and the deployment of the "carbon cops" to police every parsimonious detail of our everyday lives.

And this global warming police state has one big advantage over Marxism: it makes a virtue of the chronic shortages and privation that were such a mortal embarrassment to Communism. This time, the left won't have to explain away the lines at the stores, the decade-long waiting lists for tin-can automobiles, even the scarcity of decent toilet paper. These are not failures of the system: they are the goal of the system. They are all necessary to reduce our "carbon footprint."

A perceptive reader suggested to me recently that when left claims that "the science is settled" in the global warming controversy, what they really mean is that the political science of the issue is settled. The global warming hysteria reinforces all of their settled anti-capitalist prejudices--and it provides an open-ended justification for the central, dominant, overpowering role they think government ought to play in the individuals life

For those of us who eschew leftist politics and recognize the global warming fanatics for what they are, it's easy to dismiss their antics as superficial and ineffective. After all, does anyone really take Al Gore seriously? Didn't he invent the Internet? Weren't he and Tipper the inspiration behind the novel Love Story? Isn't he the one who said "there was no controlling legal authority" when that pesky problem of illegal campaign contributions arose with a California based Buddhist Temple? Isn't he the one who screamed uncontrollably that Bush "played on our fears" and isn't he doing that very thing by demanding the entire world believe as he does regarding global warming?

Those of us who don't believe that Western Civilization has anything to do with global warming are of the opinion that the masses will ultimately wake up and realize this is all a ginormous hoax to penalize the US via taxes in order to redistribute wealth to poor nations (international socialism)...at least we HOPE they'll wake up!

With the help of the media, academia, trade unions and well funded special interest groups, the left is winning. The constant drum of the big lie is perpetually repeated in every imaginable venue and it wears people down and they inevitably begin to believe and go along with whatever the left wants; if for no other reason than to just get them off our backs. But the left prods on and is never satisfied with what they've already achieved. They always want more. More of our freedoms, that is.

Maybe you thought Big Tobacco was evil and needed to be taxed and smokers needed to be penalized. Maybe you think Big Oil makes too much money. What about Big Fast Food? Did you ever think a method of deep frying would be banned in certain municipalities?

Why don't more people question Big Government? Why is it okay for Big Government to make more money on each gallon of gas (30 to 60 cents/gallon depending on the state) via confiscatory taxes than so-called Big Oil (which makes on average 8 cents/gallon of gas).

Why don't more people question Big Education which consumes voracious amounts of money and produces the least educated kids in the western world.

We can poo poo the leftist ideals all the doo dah day, but it seems like they eventually get their way. The leftists persist and conservatives too easily give in.

Be sure to read Rober Tracinski's piece. It's important and it's prescient.