The Greening of Earth’s Economy

If you seriously believe that the Earth is threatened with destruction by global warming, then the current global economic slowdown is providential. Reduced economic activity equals less energy consumption equals less carbon emitted into the atmosphere. Environmentalists have been telling us we need to reduce our energy consumption, and live more modestly, for years. Now we’re doing it. So where’s the celebration of the world’s sharp turn Greenward?

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

I’m very puzzled by the nexus between the current downturn and concern about global warming. Given that we were told we had to immediately cut back on carbon emissions (even before sustainable alternative energies are in place), largely by curbing our lavish energy-dependent lifestyles, why then all the concern about stimuli and global depression? Surely, the world right now is sort of what the radical Gorists wanted to see, since the current cutback in gasoline usage, and general economic slowdown, are radically restricting the burning of fossil fuels in a manner that even the most optimistic green utopian could hardly have envisioned just few years ago? In other words, in the booming 2004-6 years, radical suggested scale-backs would have probably led to something akin to what we are experiencing now. So why the gloom instead of headlines blaring–“The Planet Continues to Green–as Archaic Consumption Practices Erode Further!”

The questions are rhetorical, of course. I don’t think that anyone actually does believe that the planet is threatened by global warming. I think that was just an excuse–like the global cooling scare of a few decades ago–for centralizing control over the economy in the government. Now that such centralization is happening, quite unexpectedly, for reasons having nothing to do with the environment, watch for the Left to throw the global warming gang–who always were tiresome, at best–overboard.

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