It looks obvious

Who ever said that only Michael Moore can make a point by being provocative, shallow and not 100% loyal to the truth? here is a clip, which I really like, that show the preferred transportation method of some of those who came to show support to Al Gore in his big Global Warming in Washington DC.

Don’t you love the example the Gore family set? But we already knew that…

In his, as always wonderful, column George Will suggests that declaring the polar bear as threatened species is a symptom for much bigger phenomena:

Now that polar bears are wards of the government, and now that it is a legal doctrine that humans are responsible for global warming, the Endangered Species Act has acquired unlimited application. Anything that can be said to increase global warming can - must - be said to threaten bears already designated as threatened.

[...]

What Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit” - the idea that government can know the future’s possibilities and can and should control the future’s unfolding — is the left’s agenda. The left exists to enlarge the state’s supervision of life, narrowing individual choices in the name of collective goods. Hence the left’s hostility to markets. And to automobiles - people going wherever they want whenever they want.

Today’s “green left” is the old “red left” revised. Marx, a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist, prophesied deepening class conflict but thought that history’s violent dialectic would culminate in a revolution that would usher in material abundance and such spontaneous cooperation that the state would wither away.

The green left preaches pessimism: Ineluctable scarcities (of energy, food, animal habitat, humans’ living space) will require a perpetual regime of comprehensive rationing. The green left understands that the direct route to government control of almost everything is to stigmatize, as a planetary menace, something involved in almost everything — carbon.

While I agree with Will’s observation I don’t see any real alternatives - the right is no less intrusive. Given the choices one might eve see the left intrusiveness - “protection” of the environment, forced health measure and economic measure that remove risk - as the leaser evil compare to the “values” policing by the modern conservatives.

We should abandon the old division of left and right, socialist and conservative. The frontline is between those who yearn for the dignity of being free and those who don’t, between those who don’t want to be coerced to those who believe in regulations, databases and coercion.

We are leaving in the era of the busy bodies - those who think that the mere fact that they think that something is right justify coercing others to follow. It is completely acceptable, it our times, to tell people that they can’t get marry because of your personal religious believes. It is perfectly acceptable to regulate what people will watch on TV or what they eat, and how much. And it is perfectly OK to collect every e-mail, every phone call and every web page you visited, so the busy bodies can protect you from the risks of life. We have long and tedious fight, so maybe our children will be free again.

Earlier this week John McCain gave a speech about his plan to fight global warming. It shouldn’t be surprising that McCain’s plan calls from more government regulations and more limitations on the market. So in order to balance the election campaign populism here is a short interview with Prof. Bob Carter, which unlike McCain actually know what he is talking about and thus doesn’t fit for public office, in much more sane discussion about global warming.

(h/t Maggie’s Farm)

George Will looks at the housing crisis and find resemblances to another high profile crisis:

The housing perhaps-not-entirely-a-crisis resembles, in one particular, the curious consensus about the global warming “crisis,” concerning which, the assumption is: Although Earth’s temperature has risen and fallen through many millennia, the temperature was exactly right when, in the 1960s, Al Gore became interested in the subject. Are we to assume that last year, when housing prices were, say, 10 percent higher than they are now, they were exactly right? If so, why is that so? Because the market had set those prices, therefore they were where they belonged? But if the market was the proper arbiter of value then, why is it not the proper arbiter now? Whatever happened to the belief, way back in 2007, that there was a housing “bubble”? Or to the more ancient consensus that, because of, among other things, the deductibility of mortgage interest payments from taxable income, too much American capital flows into the housing stock?

[...]

Everyone knows that there is only one commodity the price of which always rises — major league pitchers. Concerning the market for them, Congress should do something

I guess that he knows that it was never about global warming, but about paternalism. But it is good question nevertheless:

So there will be no global warming for the next ten years … and there has been none the past ten years. Are we knuckle-dragging flat-Earthers allowed to be skeptical yet?