"The world cannot afford to wait for regime change in the US," declared Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth recently at the UN conference on global warming in ice-bound Montreal. "What is needed is clear leadership from the EU." Clear leadership from what?, asks Kevin Myers
The EU has all the leadership skills of seaweed in a tsunami, the vision of a kebabbed mole over hot coals, and the ability of a dead halibut to assert its will beyond its own boundaries. Even if the rest of the world were composed of naked stone-age nomads who had sex with their grandparents and who worshipped worms, the EU couldn't lead them to its own umbilicus. But, apart from certain regions of Dalkey, it is not so composed.
Instead, the rest of the world consists largely of emerging countries such as Brazil, China and India, with clear visions of their futures. The last thing they want is to be scolded by some EU Commissioner for Equality, Mandatory Secularism and Respect for Islam,
Ms Fittelikkir Saphosdottir, about their failure to introduce mandatory lesbian marriage, or allocate quotas for the legless in their special forces units - or, for that matter, their reluctance to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
At the heart of the new pseudo-religion of climate control is the Revealed Truth of the Kyoto treaty. Michael Grubb of the Royal Institute of International Relations in London even declared at the time that it would stand alongside the Treaties of Versailles and Bretton Woods as one of the major deals of the modern era.
Dear me. Allow me to stop typing while I wipe away the tears of laughter before they short-circuit my keyboard. For yes, Kyoto certainly stands with Versailles.
The British Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) appointed a committee to examine the feasibility of the Kyoto protocols, on which it had been spending millions. It found that the DEFRA would be far wiser to tackle specific problems, such as malaria, biodiversity loss and water scarcity. But naturally, DEFRA ignored these findings, primarily because they violated its eco-dogmas, and so it continued to hail Kyoto as the vital first step towards dealing with climate change.
A book attacking Kyoto's false gods, Carrots Sticks and Climate Change, was launched during Montreal's frozen fiasco. One of its contributors, German journalist Dirk Maxeiner, said: "Climate bureaucrats have been living in a cloud cuckoo land - a dream world where costs are irrelevant to decisions. . .Now they must wake up and smell the very expensive Kyoto-flavoured coffee." Perhaps it's not so very surprising that climate control became the new secular religion not long after the collapse of communism. For mankind apparently needs a powerful global brand of secular piety, regardless of all evidence. The truth is that any attempt to control the climate through limiting carbon emissions will probably be as successful as communist central planning. Dirk Maxeiner believes that real solutions to climate change can emerge only when decentralised markets provide the impetus for discovery. Indian economist Barun Mitra agrees: "DEFRA's studies show that climate control would produce few - if any - benefits for the poor in the future. Today, the poor are vulnerable to climate problems because of their poverty - yet climate control would perpetuate poverty. Climate control would harm millions of people today by artificially constraining energy supplies, driving up the cost of economic activity and hindering economic growth in both poor and wealthy countries." He concludes that the poor need neither climate control, so-called "Clean Development Mechanisms", foreign aid schemes nor yet more subsidies to deal with climate change. What they do need is less government and a competitive marketplace, one which leads to economic development by uniting various modern technologies, and which will enable mankind to live more sustainably.
Less government? LESS GOVERNMENT? Have you tried that one in Brussels, Mitra? Of course, the freezing greenies in Montreal (to their tired old cliché of frostbitten, faux-ethnic drums) chanted denunciations of - naturally - George Bush. Who else do people gather in this world to condemn? Not Osama bin Laden, or suicide bombers, or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; no, always George Bush. Why? Because he told the truth about Kyoto. He said there was no point in signing up for its fashionable heresies, because they would cost a fortune, slow economic growth, and achieve nothing.
Mark Steyn in the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday reported that in the past 30 years, the US economy has swollen by 150 per cent and its energy consumption by 45 per cent while its air pollutants have dropped by nearly 30 per cent, toxic emissions by nearly 50 per cent, sulphur dioxide by 65 per cent, and its airborne lead by 97 per cent. Since the EU signed on to Kyoto, its greenhouse gas emissions have risen; those of the US have fallen.
But even if everyone had signed up for Kyoto and then kept their word, by 2050 global warming would have been reduced by merely 0.070C, at a cost, by 2010 alone, of possibly $400 billion to the US GDP. The damage would have been infinitely worse for the developing countries scrabbling at the very bottom of the economic ladder. (Imagine how unspeakable for them the Tony Juniper alternative: the busy-body snooping of EU Commissioner Ms Fittelikkir Saphosdottir and her vast inspectorate of Eco-Snoopers, jetting in to rub their supercilious fingers over their third world eco-mantelpieces).
The melting icecaps, unlike the Andean gods of the Aztecs, do not cause us publicly to burn virgins; but instead, the eco-sirens of Kyoto would have us starve those virgins to death, only this time, comfortably unseen in developing countries.