A conservative conservationist

It's encouraging to see conservatives taking up this issue, but to date, only economists and pundits have dared advocate the measure that is universally agreed to be most likely to reduce emissions without government regulation--a carbon or gas tax. Sanford claims he wants a free market solution, but doesn't mention the obvious. How serious is he? Instead he talks, as does the Current Occupant of the White House, about "stewardship," That's a nice phrase for doing nothing, as far I can tell. GWB claims to be "a good steward" of the land, but who really believes that he values the health of the environment over the interests of the oil industry? (Not to mention the coal industry, the timber industry, etc.) But Dad29 brings up a good point. The government today, abetted by various real estate interests, does nothing to discourage people from living in regions known to be vulnerable to hurricanes. The insurance industry is doing their level best to pull out of the Gulf Coast and even much of the East Coast (Allstate has stopped writing new policies in the New York region, for example). Which politician, conservative or liberal, will dare suggest to voters that perhaps they will not be able to live in a hurricane zone without bearing the cost of the risk themselves?

Again, I think that global warming is a bandwagon non-issue. The climate has never been in a state of stasis, and I'm skeptical that human activity has contributed to major global warming (or that human activity could lead to a rectification of the putative problem; click here for Zakaria's latest piece on GW in Newsweek: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17080934/site/newsweek/from/ET/). Global warming may also not be a net negative; those of us in nothern climes may use a lot less energy on heat in the winter. Although environmentalists claim to be concerned for the poor, doing the sort of things GW activists want us to do will end up keeping millions and millions in poverty. Finally, the superstitious, puritanical, zealous apocalyptic mindset of the GW crowd is annoying and dangerous. It'd be laughable if it didn't risk affecting policy. I do think we need to undertake sensible pro-environmental measures for the sake of local and regional environmental health (ie., smog in cities, water free of industrial pollution, etc.). But the idea that we're 'killing the planet' (as if it were a quasi-divine entity) is not helpful. Be all that as it may, here's a note from Archbishop Pell of Sydney, Australia some might find interesting: We have been subjected to a lot of nonsense about climate disasters as some zealots have been painting extreme scenarios to frighten us. They claim ocean levels are about to rise spectacularly, that there could be the occasional tsunami as high as an eight story building, the Amazon basin could be destroyed as the ice cap in the Arctic and in Greenland melts. An overseas magazine called for Nuremberg-style trials for global warming skeptics while a U.S.A. television correspondent compared skeptics to holocaust deniers . A local newspaper editorial s complaint about the doomsdayers religious enthusiasm is unfair to mainstream Christianity. Christians don t go against reason although we sometimes go beyond it in faith to embrace probabilities. What we were seeing from the doomsdayers was an induced dose of mild hysteria, semi-religious if you like, but dangerously close to superstition. I am deeply skeptical about man-made catastrophic global warming, but still open to further evidence. I would be surprised if industrial pollution, and carbon emissions, had no ill effect at all. But enough is enough. A few fixed points might provide some light. We know that enormous climate changes have occurred in world history, e.g. the Ice Ages and Noah s flood, where human causation could only be negligible. Neither should it be too surprising to learn that the media during the last 100 years has alternated between promoting fears of a coming Ice Age and fear of global warming!... The evidence on warming is mixed, often exaggerated, but often reassuring. Global warming has been increasing constantly since 1975 at the rate of less than one fifth of a degree centigrade per decade. The concentration of carbon dioxide increased surface temperatures more in winter than in summer and especially in mid and high latitudes over land, while there was a global cooling of the stratosphere. The East Anglia university climate research unit found that global temperatures did not increase between 1998 2005 and a recent NASA satellite found that the Southern Hemisphere has not warmed in the past 25 years. Is mild global warming a Northern phenomenon? While we might have been alarmed by the sighting of an iceberg off Dunedin as large as an aircraft carrier we should be consoled by the news that the Antarctic is getting colder and the ice is growing there.