Investor's Business Daily, March 20th, 2007
Climate Change: The former beneficiary of a polluting zinc mine and one of the biggest per capita emitters of greenhouse gases comes before Congress. Will we get the truth and nothing but, no matter how inconvenient?
The current Democratic Congress is not much for genuine legislative accomplishment, but it's great theater, albeit the theater of the absurd.
We have Valerie Plame's 16th minute of fame and an investigation into whether some U.S. attorneys who are political appointees might have been fired for political reasons by the administration they serve at the pleasure of.
But things will really warm up when the jolly green giant himself, Oscar winner Al Gore, appears at House and Senate hearings Wednesday to explain why the planet faces imminent climate catastrophe at the hands of soccer moms driving SUVs.
Will he claim global warming is going to melt the polar ice caps and cause a flood in which "we could expect to lose all of Florida, Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles basin"? Or that "we'll be in rising waters with no ark in sight?"
Will he warn that the ice sheets of Antarctica are slipping and that "we'll be facing a sea level rise not of one to three feet in a century, but of 10 to 20 feet in a much shorter time"? Will he predict "the Supreme Court would be flooded," that "you could tie your boat to the Washington Monument" and that "storm surges would make the Capitol unusable."
Those aren't the words of Gore working on the script for his next climate disaster epic. They are those -- or were those, in 1989 and 1990 -- of another doomsayer, Paul Ehrlich, author of "The Population Bomb," which turned out to be a dud
But they could just as easily have been uttered by the vice president-turned-Cassandra.
When Gore shows up Wednesday, we hope Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., a global warming heretic who will co-chair the Senate hearings, will ask if Gore's countdown to doom started when he published "Earth in the Balance," filmed an "Inconvenient Truth" or when Ehrlich was as poor at weather forecasting as he was in predicting the consequences of overpopulation.
Gore will also appear before Rep. John Dingell's powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. Dingell, a Democrat from Motown, is not convinced that we face a greater threat from the internal combustion engine than from nuclear terror.
He's also invited a Gore critic, Bjorn Lomborg, adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School and author of the book "The Skeptical Environmentalist." Lomborg says the money spent on efforts like the Kyoto accord, which best-case scenarios show would reduce earth's temperature by an amount too small to measure, could be better spent on solving real problems.
"The cost of such a Kyoto pact just for the U.S. will be higher than the cost of providing the entire world with clean drinking water and sanitation," Lomborg has said. "It's estimated the latter would prevent 2 million deaths (from disease like infant diarrhea) a year and prevent half a billion people from becoming seriously ill each year."
People who live in 20-room, 10,000-square feet homes that consume 20 times the national average in electricity, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, shouldn't throw stones at those of us who live in more modest dwellings. TCPR also reports that since the release of Gore's movie, energy consumption by the Gore household has jumped 14%.
One question to ask is how Gore assuages his conscience by buying what are called "carbon offsets" from a company he founded and that let him pollute because someone is planting trees in Africa with his money. You can buy a lot of offsets from the $500,000 in royalties he received from a zinc mine next to his property.
And why aren't there any boats moored to the Washington Monument?
Copyright 2007 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
