A get-rich-quick scheme for bureaucrats and quacks
Circa 982, Erik the Red and a bunch of other Vikings landed in Greenland and thought, “Wow! This land really is green! Who knew?” So they started farming it, and were living it up for a couple of centuries. Then the Little Ice Age showed up, and they all died. A terrible warning to us all about “unsustainable development”: If a few hundred Vikings doing a little light hunter-gathering can totally unbalance the environment, imagine the havoc John Edwards’ new house must be wreaking.
The question is whether what’s happening now is just the natural give and take of the planet, as Erik the Red and my town’s early settlers understood it. Or whether it’s something so unprecedented that we need to divert vast resources to a transnational elite bureaucracy so that they can do their best to cripple the global economy and deny much of the developing world access to the healthier and longer lives that capitalism brings. To the eco-chondriacs that’s a no-brainer. As Mark Fenn of the Worldwide Fund for Nature says in the new documentary ”Mine Your Own Business”:
”In Madagascar, the indicators of quality of life are not housing. They’re not nutrition, specifically. They’re not health in a lot of cases. It’s not education. A lot of children in Fort Dauphin do not go to school because the parents don’t consider that to be important. . . . People have no jobs, but if I could put you with a family and you could count how many times in a day that that family smiles. Then I put you with a family well off, in New York or London, and you count how many times people smile. . . . You tell me who is rich and who is poor.”
Well, if smiles are the measure of quality of life, I’m Bill Gates; I’m laughing my head off. Male life expectancy in Madagascar is 52.5 years.
It’s pretty appalling — and also a sign of unimaginable affluence — that people can be so moronic as to idolize a theory and set of policies that would cut 25 years off the human life span. But that’s what the bureaucrats, quacks, and con men at places like the MSM and the UN want to do with the silly hysteria they are generating about global warming. They want to separate you from your money, and your country from its capitalism. So we can all grin the toothless smiles of the men of Madagascar and drop dead in our fifties. Who is worse, the fool, or the one who follows the fool?