A Lesser Place

Nolan Finley explains that truth, by definition, is flattering to Americans:

The former vice president and recent Nobel Peace Prize winner declared with great disdain at the international climate change talks in Bali that the United States bears the blame and shame for stalling the crusade against greenhouse gases....

But Gore is now bigger than America. He belongs to the world. As such, he's fluent in the international language that translates every wrong into an indictment of Americans.

They talk of our drinking, but never our thirst!

In 2006, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell by 1.5 percent. If Gore were honest, Finley says, he'd trumpet this datum as evidence that we can decrease emissions 15 percent over the next ten years, while continuing to grow at our accustomed rate.

He won't, though, because "that would rub hard against Gore's agenda of forcing America to accept a lesser place on the planet."

Finley is writing from Detroit, a hotbed of innovation whose best and brightest would never dream of ceding American supremacy to foreign pretenders. All the same, he's overlooking a couple of points:

"Favorable weather patterns, where both heating and cooling degree-days were lower in 2006 than 2005, and higher energy prices, were the primary causes of lower total energy consumption," the DoE said.

Supposedly, one of the problems with Algore's Global Warming Theory® is that one hundred years of data are not enough to demonstrate warming. And yet, one year of below-average CO2 emissions somehow constitutes a trend:

If last year's reduction proves to be a trend, the United States will trim its greenhouse gas emissions 15 percent during the next decade, without damaging economic growth.

I found ten dollars on the sidewalk today. If this proves to be a trend, I'll have made ten thousand dollars in roughly 27 years. (I'll be able to quit my job at the jute mill! No more shiftin', piecin', spinnin' warp, weft and twine to feed and clothe my bairnie offa ten and nine!)

What'll happen if we accept the Gore Doctrine, instead of counting on this "trend" to continue? Plainly put, the sky will fall:

That will trigger the greatest transfer of wealth in modern history, as American jobs rush to places with the least regulatory burdens, and more Americans join the ranks of the world's poor.

In other words, cutting emissions will lead to an unprecedented new era of offshoring. Pretty sobering!

In a column he wrote earlier this week, Finley blames and shames Michigan's unemployed for being ignorant and lazy:

Create an appetite for the jobs, and maybe job seekers will get off their backsides and get themselves some skills.

Something must change. Because nothing says stupid louder than a state that watches its nation-leading unemployment rate go up while good jobs sit vacant.

None of those "good jobs," it seems, are in the renewable energy or environmental service sector. Which makes Finley's parting sneer at Gore seem a little...frivolous:

A generation from now, Americans may well look back at Al Gore as the Benedict Arnold of his age, someone so determined to save the earth he was willing to ruin his country.

(Illustration by Warren Rockwell, 1911. Via Filboid Studge.)