“Tension in the room mounted. The old man … pleaded with the [California] planning commission to protect his pigeons from ‘the Cuisinarts of the air’. The arrow went straight home, sending up a roar from the audience. A new image had been created, and the cameras flashed it across the country. Although often credited to staging by Cerrell and Associates, the term was conceived by the Sierra Club.”
…– Paul Gipe, Wind Energy Comes of Age (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995, p. 450.
“I once believed in the Sierra Club, until the CLUB ( an insular bunch of activists who aren’t looking at the entire picture but only at their own agendas) started fully supporting [windpower] …. Everything the environmentalists (including myself for 20 years) have worked so hard to protect, is now being destroyed or in jeopardy.
Yesterday’s post presented a series of quotations on why a global agreement to ration the most utilitarian of energies–oil, gas, and coal–was doomed to failure. Today, Part II provides a series of quotations on the moral dilemma and economic distortions of trying to do so.
From this the question arises: what if the resources and spirit dedicated to the futile, misdirected climate crusade went instead to the truly noble cause of promoting capitalism and industrialization for the 1.3 billion living in statist poverty?
It is time to change minds one at a time to the heroic task of promoting human freedom to advance prosperity at home and abroad–an inspiration for many of us going in 2013.
More quotations follow on the pernicious wealth effects and all-pain/no-gain aspects of carbon rationing as envisioned by the Kyoto Protocol.…
“It’s the weakest text I have ever seen. It’s a travesty of the process and commitments. It can be summed up in two words: We’ll talk.”
– Farukh Khan, Pakistan lead negotiator, quoted in Lisa Friedman, “After A Bruising Parley, Climate Conference Veers Toward a Successor to Kyoto Pact.” E&E Climate News, December 19, 2012.
“The total efforts of the last 20 years of climate policy has likely reduced global emissions by less than 1 percent, or about 250 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.”
– Bjorn Lomborg, “Climate Course Correction.” Foreign Policy, October 2012.
Notable voices with the conviction to speak truth to power predicted the futility of the global global-warming agreement of 1997, better known as the Kyoto Protocol. Of course, the rent-seekers applauded the prospect of new competitive space–such as Enron with its seven profit-centers.…