If there's one outstanding reason to celebrate George Bush's abandonment of the Kyoto accords, it is that it gets right up the tiresome noses of the Natterers Who Dine. It's not difficult to imagine the jubilantly dismayed ooohs and aaahs over the polenta. There, we said it all along, he's in the pocket of the oil moguls, and this is pay-back time: we should isolate the US, once and for all. Murmurs of agreement before they all tuck into the pasta and squid-ink. It's not merely in eurogreen salons that the Bush position is simplified to fatuity and then dismissed. Last Sunday, with uncanny and predictable imbalance, RTE rubbished Bush's rejection of Kyoto. Do RTE licence-payers not have the right to hear both sides of the argument? Or is it sufficient, in covering the issue, to indulge the national bias against US Republicanism, with sneers about Bush's debt to the oil industry and jeers about his IQ, meanwhile interviewing only members of the environmentalist lobby? Apparently.
Gibberish
The Kyoto agreement was the kind of rubbish which always seems to result when politicians gather to discuss ecopiety. These are not meetings of minds so much as seances, in which almost any kind of hysterical gibberish conjured out of a green glass in the centre of the table, aided by the promptings of the group subconscious, can suddenly become world policy. The hypnotised participants then automaton-walk back to their capitals, intoning whatever mantra their combined suspension of intellect created.
Rio was good - I remember that - but whatever it sought or achieved now defeats me. But that, of course, is the point of all these ecofests: the actual practical measures resulting count less than the feeling of group satisfaction generated by everybody simultaneously putting their fingers on the spirit-glass and thinking benign things about the environment. Yet even by the deranged standards of green group hysteria, Kyoto was bonkers, and the sooner the world wakes up to the meaninglessness of these gatherings, and the gibberish which results, the better.
In its predictably anti-Bush report last Sunday, RTE News, which managed not to tell us that that the US Senate voted 95-0 against Kyoto, declared that 23 per cent of the world emissions of carbon dioxide came from the US. This is rubbish of the kind which the environmentalist lobby spouts the whole time, and which is repeated endlessly by Natterers Who Dine. In fact, perhaps 5 per cent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is created by human activity; the rest is by dear old nature - so maybe the best way to tackle global warming is by felling those nasty, COs2 producing rain-forests.
Emissions
Now I haven't a clue about whether global warming exists, and if it does, what it is causing it. But it does seem that if the US is to live up to its obligations under Kyoto, by 2012 it would have to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 7 per cent of its 1990 level. However, since the US economy has grown so much since 1990, in essence the US cutback on current levels would by 2012 have to be in the region of 40 per cent, thereby throwing hundreds of thousands of people out of work, with blackouts galore in California.
Unimpressed? So forget about the US. Talk about you and your home, your children's school and your office. Are you going to cut back your COs2] emissions by 40 per cent in the next decade? You are? How? By selling the car and walking to work? By removing the central heating in home and school, and getting some thermal underwear, woolly mittens and maybe a nice cap with earflaps instead? And if that's not enough - and it won't be - what do you say to closing down the office, so that the only carbon dioxide you're emitting is coming from the dole queue you're shuffling in?
You're not going to do that, and nor is the US, a country which we insist should make the sort of sacrifices we as individuals refuse to - which doesn't stop us giving the Americans homilies about their conduct. What makes the present orgy of sanctimony worse than usual is that it is in response to Bush's honest admission that the Kyoto goals are not economically or politically achievable. This is the kind of directness and honesty which huggy, I-feel-your-pain Bill Clinton was simply incapable of; and for that, Bush is pilloried.
Living standards
Even if the Americans were prepared to accept such an assault on their standards of living - and we certainly wouldn't - it would make almost no difference to the total global emissions of carbon dioxide. So the Americans are expected almost to wreck their economy in some madcap venture which might just result in lowering global warming by a fraction of a degree over the next half century - or, on the other hand, might not. Would you freely cut your standard of living, and happily see some of your family become impoverished, because an expert has told you that such a sacrifice might be good for the environment in 50 years' time?
The bright soothsayers of today who only say might might prove as wrong as the mighty soothsayers of yesteryear, who warned that the world might well run out of oil by the year 2000. The lives that we live are the lives that we live, now. We should not deliberately endanger the future for our present needs; but more importantly, we should not wreck the present for some hypothetical needs of the future. Be assured: the Natterers Who Dine don't.