Carbon Chastity

Every now and again I read something that I think yes, that's exactly how I think, and wish I could express myself only half as well. Via Greenie Watch we find this excellent OpEd in the Washington post:

I'm not a global warming believer. I'm not a global warming denier. I'm a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can't be very good to pump lots of CO2into the atmosphere but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.

I started to become a skeptic when I realised all the great and the good had made up their minds and that anyone who challenged them was somehow deranged. I thought it was me but:

For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class -- social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies -- arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism).

Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.

Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but -- even better -- in the name of Earth itself.

Great summation of the arrogance of the Pollys, Monbiots and general Beeboids of this world; for it is their arrogance and closed minds that does the debate on AGW most harm. Their may well be a problem with CO2, but if there a problem is their cure worse than the decease?

But this is the real reason why they want the debate to be finished and their consensus accepted:

Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.

There's no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society.

Its all about controlling the minutiae of our lives so that we only do the things of they approve.

Go and read the whole thing, it is very good.