WASHINGTON -- In a campaign without peacetime precedent, the
media-entertainment-environmental complex is warning about global warming.
Never, other than during the two world wars, has there been such a
concerted effort by opinion-forming institutions to indoctrinate Americans,
83 percent of whom now call global warming a ``serious problem.''
Indoctrination is supposed to be a predicate for action commensurate with
professions of seriousness.
For example, Democrats could demand that the president send the Kyoto
Protocol to the Senate so they can embrace it. In 1997, the Senate voted
95-0 in opposition to any agreement which would, like the protocol, require
significant reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions in America and some other
developed nations but would involve no ``specific scheduled commitments''
for 129 ``developing'' countries, including the second, fourth, 10th, 11th,
13th and 15th largest economies (China, India, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico
and Indonesia). Forty-two of the senators serving in 1997 are gone. Let's
find out if the new senators disagree with the 1997 vote.
Do they also disagree with Bjorn Lomborg, author of ``The Skeptical
Environmentalist''? He says: Compliance with Kyoto would reduce global
warming by an amount too small to measure. But the cost of compliance just to the United States would be higher than the cost of
providing the entire world with clean drinking water and sanitation, which
would prevent 2 million deaths (from diseases like infant diarrhea) a year
and prevent half a billion people from becoming seriously ill each year.
Nature designed us as carnivores, but what does nature know about
nature? Meat has been designated a menace. Among the 51 exhortations in
Time magazine's ``global warming survival guide'' (April 9), No. 22 says a
BMW is less responsible than a Big Mac for ``climate change,'' that
conveniently imprecise name for our peril. This is because the world meat
industry produces 18 percent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions, more
than transportation produces. Nitrous oxide in manure (warming effect: 296
times greater than that of carbon) and methane from animal flatulence (23
times greater) mean that ``a 16 ounce T-bone is like a Hummer on a plate.''
Ben & Jerry's ice cream might be even more sinister: A gallon of it
requires electricity guzzling refrigeration, and four gallons of milk
produced by cows that simultaneously produce eight gallons of manure and
flatulence with eight gallons of methane. The cows do this while consuming
lots of grain and hay, which are cultivated by using tractor fuel, chemical
fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides, and transported by fuel-consuming
trains and trucks.