Give North Koreans A Chance
For them to curse their government in public takes a lot of courage
Claudia Rosett
http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/09/north-korea-obama-climate-opinions-columnists-claudia-rosett.htmlWhile climate delegates are quarreling in Copenhagen, and President Barack Obama is collecting his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, an important story is unfolding in relative obscurity, in North Korea. Furious over a confiscatory currency "reform," citizens of the world's most repressive state have begun publicly criticizing their government.
It is hard to overstate just how bold a move that is. North Korea's military "is on alert for a possible civil uprising," according to a major South Korean newspaper, the Chosun Ilbo. Reports have been filtering out of North Korea that the country's markets have become arenas of protest, with traders--many of them women in their 40s and 50s--publicly cursing the North Korean authorities.
Most of these reports attribute the information to anonymous sources. That's no surprise, given that North Koreans can be condemned to starve and freeze to death in labor camps for such acts as singing a South Korean song or failing to pay fawning homage to the ubiquitous portraits of their tyrant, Kim Jong Il.
That is exactly why these signs of unrest are so important. Dissent in North Korea carries individual risks even worse than the horrors that street protesters have been braving in Iran. But the stories are credible, and they suggest that North Korea's regime is approaching a fragile moment. This comes on top of Kim's questionable health, following what is believed to have been a stroke in 2008.
President Barack Obama, and other leaders of the democratic world, have a choice. They can dismiss the rising murmurs of North Korea's stricken people, and stick with the sorry tradition of bailing out and propping up the North Korean regime via yet another round of nuclear talks and payoffs. Or they can leave Kim to struggle with this nightmare of his own making, and maybe even notch up the financial pressure to nudge North Korea's totalitarian regime toward its rightful place in history's unmarked graveyard of discarded lies.
The immediate cause of the anger sweeping North Korea is a currency "reform" that amounts to the government stealing from its own deprived population. With its priorities on bankrolling the military and the production of missiles and nuclear weapons, while its people endure repression, cold and hunger, North Korea's government has produced runaway inflation. On Dec. 1, North Korean authorities imposed a surprise plan to revalue the country's currency, the won. The plan has entailed issuing new banknotes, lopping off two zeroes, so 1,000 won becomes 10. People were given just one week to swap old money for new, after which the old notes would become worthless. A limit was placed on the amount that could be officially exchanged, effectively confiscating all individual savings worth more than about $40 at informal exchange rates.
This caused so much outrage that the government then eased up slightly, raising the limits on how much old currency people could trade for new. But even with the adjustment, many North Koreans have been left with outright state theft of their money.
North Korea's government has done this before, most recently in the early 1990s, without major ructions. But that was back in the days when money was far less important, because there were no markets.
This time is different. Back in the early-1990s, when the Soviet collapse put an end to the Russian dole, North Korea's state-run distribution system largely collapsed. The result was a famine in which an estimated 1 million or more North Koreans died. Struggling to survive, North Koreans began defying the state by doing business with each other--setting up small markets. Since then, at least some market activity has been incorporated into the system. That is what many North Koreans depend on simply to eat. That is how some have been able to salt away a little cash, and a glimmer of hope for some control over their own lives.
That is what has just come under blitz attack by the North Korean regime. And though North Korea's state secrecy allows no way to know just how many people have been hit by this state thievery, the number is clearly large. "It is serious," says a North Korean defector, Kim Kwang-Jin, an expert in North Korean finance, currently a visiting fellow at the Washington-based U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
History suggests that while tyrannized people may endure astounding hardships before rising up, state plunder of their money is a particularly explosive gambit. In late-1987, Burma's repressive junta wiped out high denomination banknotes for Burma's currency, the kyat. That wholesale state larceny lit the fuse for the massive Burmese street protests of 1988.
China's government tried a variation on this sort of sweeping confiscation in the late 1980s, paying workers with state bonds that the state did not plan to honor anytime soon. That helped fuel the huge protest movement, which burst into public view in mid-1989 as the Tiananmen Square uprising.
Indonesia beggared millions of its emerging middle class with a currency devaluation in 1997, aggravated by a bungled bank cleanup, all of which turned into a rout of the rupiah. In early-1998, stripped of their purchasing power, Indonesians rioted. That led to the resignation within months of longtime dictator Suharto.
None of these stories are pleasant. In China and Burma, the authorities regained control by gunning down protestors in the streets. Only in Indonesia, where Suharto ran a relatively benign autocracy compared with such places as China, Burma and especially North Korea, did the dictator go.
But if there is any likelihood of North Koreans rising up against their government, they deserve the chance to at least make a run for it. They live under the worst government on the planet--a racketeering, weapons-vending, nuclear extortionist regime that is a menace to the world and a horror to its own captive population. Kim keeps control by running a Stalinist gulag that has swallowed hundreds of thousands of North Koreans. Citizens caught trying to flee the country have been punished with everything from time in often-lethal labor camps, to execution--in some cases carried out in public, to deter others.
Officially, as consolation for the shock of having their money suddenly snatched away by the state, North Korea's people can turn to the usual programming of breathless affirmations of Kim Jong Il's glory. That runs to such stuff as this week's report by the state-run Korean Central News Agency that the People's Security Ministry has been giving art performances showing "the firm faith and will of the people's security men to share intention and destiny with Supreme Commander Kim Jong Il." The starring acts include a male guitar quintet performing such pieces as "Let's Defend Socialism."
Meanwhile, Obama's envoy, Stephen Bosworth, has just paid a visit to Pyongyang, trying to wheedle Kim Jong Il's regime back to the nuclear bargaining table. Both presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush trod this same slippery path, providing Kim with nuclear payoffs over the years that have amounted to massive handouts of food, fuel, hard cash and diplomatic concessions. North Korea, with an unbroken record of lying and cheating on such deals, has carried on with its weapons programs, plus such stunts as counterfeiting U.S. currency, and sending sanctions-busting arms shipments to Iran. This spring, Kim welcomed Obama's arrival in the White House by conducting North Korea's second nuclear test.
Real progress in coping with North Korea would begin with the refusal to do anything more to prop up Kim Jong Il's regime. That would mean an end to the haggling, concessions and handouts. In sheer humanitarian terms, anything leading to the end of Kim's regime would be an achievement on a par with liberating the concentration camps of Nazi Germany--as the world may one day understand, when the prison camps of North Korea are finally opened to public view and shut down forever. In terms of global security, it would send a healthy message to Iran's mullahs and other tyrannical nuclear wannabes, if North Korea were to provide a graphic demonstration that building the bomb is not, after all, the fast track to lifelong rule and out-sized leverage in world politics.
For North Koreans to curse their government in public requires not only anger, but astounding courage. Give these people a chance.
[Salamantis] Also see here:
http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/12/09/yeah_north_koreas_problem_is_that_its_not_socialist_enough[Salamantis] Some highly enlightening context is provided in the next three articles that I simply give the addies to:
Some Historical Perspective
By J. Storrs Hall
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3553The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero
by Willis Eschenbach
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/Understanding Climategate's Hidden Decline
By Marc Sheppard
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/understanding_climategates_hid.html[Salamantis] Too many charts to import, and they're important to all of these articles' contentions, as are their links. Just go over and read them. You'll be glad you did. Even if you won't admit it to me.
Take This Paradigm and Shove It
Each year, I get invited to Washington DC to serve as a pimp
by Barbara Oakley
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/scalliwag/200912/take-paradigm-and-shove-itRocket Man
Richard Fernandez (the man behind The Belmont Club)
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/12/09/rocket-man/Journalists and Rocket Scientists
David Foster
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/10648.htmlIn 1920, Robert Goddard was conducting experiments with rockets. In an editorial, The New York Times sneered at Goddard’s work and particularly at the idea that a rocket could function in a vacuum:
"That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react – to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."
In 1969…the year of the Apollo moon mission…the NYT finally got around to issuing a correction for their 1920 mistake.
What is noteworthy about the original editorial is not just the ignorance, but the arrogance and the outright nastiness. As the AstronauticsNow post points out, “The enlightened newspaper not only ridiculed the idea that rocket propulsion would work in vacuum but it questioned the integrity and professionalism of Goddard.” The post goes on to say that “The sensationalism and merciless attack by the New York Times and other newspapers left a profound impression on Robert Goddard who became secretive about his work (to detriment of development of rocketry in the United States)…”
It appears that some of the attributes of the NYT which make it so untrustworthy and unlovable today are actually cultural characteristics of long standing.
Worth keeping in mind when reading NYT analyses of Climategate.
The Tip of the Climategate Iceberg
The global-warming scandal is bigger than one email leak
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704342404574576683216723794.htmlThe opening days of the Copenhagen climate-change conference have been rife with denials and—dare we say it?—deniers. American delegate Jonathan Pershing said the emails and files leaked from East Anglia have helped make clear "the robustness of the science." Talk about brazening it out. And Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and so ex-officio guardian of the integrity of the science, said the leak proved only that his opponents would stop at nothing to avoid facing the truth of climate change. Uh-huh.
Mr. Pachauri and his allies are fond of pointing out that climate change science is bigger than East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), and that other institutions' research backs the theory. This is true. But it's also the best argument for opening up to public scrutiny both the raw data and the computer code that lies behind pronouncements of looming climate catastrophe. Citizen-researchers—some of whom are, indeed, skeptics—have been after some of this information for years. CRU's apparent obstruction of freedom-of-information requests, as revealed by the leaks, is only the tip of the iceberg.
In 2004, retired businessman Stephen McIntyre asked the National Science Foundation for information on various climate research that it funds. Affirming "the importance of public access to scientific research supported by U.S. federal funds," the Foundation nonetheless declined, saying "in general, we allow researchers the freedom to convey their scientific results in a manner consistent with their professional judgment."
Which leaves researchers free to withhold information selectively from critics, as when CRU director Phil Jones told Australian scientist Warwick Hughes in a 2005 email: "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it."
An interesting question. Often, when independents obtain raw temperature data or computer codes, they do uncover flaws, thus advancing climate science—the "sunlight" now shining on CRU's data and codes is doing just that. That's what motivated Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar Christopher Horner to request a slew of information from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which has already corrected its temperature records thanks to Mr. McIntyre's probing. Mr. Horner told us he wants "an entire accounting of rolling, relevant data, adjustments, codes, annotations and of course internal discussion about the frequent revisions."
Two years later, the requests are unmet. A NASA spokesman said "We're clearly late, but we are working on it." Probably wise, considering Mr. Horner is set to sue, and two U.S. senators have asked NASA's Inspector General to investigate.
When it comes to questionable accounting, independent researchers cite the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its National Climate Data Center (NCDC) as the most egregious offenders. The NCDC is the world's largest repository of weather data, responsible for maintaining global historical climate information. But researchers, led by meteorology expert Anthony Watts, grew so frustrated with what they describe as the organization's failure to quality-control the data, that they created Surfacestations.org to provide an up-to-date, standardized database for the continental U.S.
Mr. McIntyre also notes unsuccessful attempts to get information from NOAA. For the record, NOAA told us that it took quality-control "very seriously," as well as transparency, and that all of its datasets were available to the public—except those "protected by prior agreement," such as "commercially purchased with limited distribution, proprietary for internal use only, researcher limited."
Even politicians and activists—for whom robust wrangling is meant to be a specialty—resist open discussion about climate science. See Al Gore, and his repeated refusals to debate critics such as Denmark's Bjørn Lomborg.
Which brings us back to CRU, and calls to prosecute whoever exposed its sanctum. U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer has said "email-theft-gate" requires "looking at a criminal activity which could well have been coordinated." Senator Boxer has so far shown considerably less appetite for investigating the various attempts to thwart or obstruct FOIA requests that the leaked emails have brought to light.
Most of the participants in Copenhagen seem intent on rushing headlong into a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. But it would seem more fruitful at this point to redouble our efforts to figure out what we do and don't know about the climate's past, present and future. That includes casting some much-needed sunshine on the data on which so much importance is being placed, but which so far has remained shielded from public view.
Climategate: Science Is Dying
Science is on the credibility bubble
By Daniel Henninger
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574572091993737848.htmlSurely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.
I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called "the scientific community" had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).
Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.
What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences—physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering—came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.
This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and "messy" as, say, gender studies. The New England Journal of Medicine has turned into a weird weekly amalgam of straight medical-research and propaganda for the Obama redesign of U.S. medicine.
The East Anglians' mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming's claims—plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish—evokes the attempt to silence Galileo. The exchanges between Penn State's Michael Mann and East Anglia CRU director Phil Jones sound like Father Firenzuola, the Commissary-General of the Inquisition.
For three centuries Galileo has symbolized dissent in science. In our time, most scientists outside this circle have kept silent as their climatologist fellows, helped by the cardinals of the press, mocked and ostracized scientists who questioned this grand theory of global doom. Even a doubter as eminent as Princeton's Freeman Dyson was dismissed as an aging crank.
Beneath this dispute is a relatively new, very postmodern environmental idea known as "the precautionary principle." As defined by one official version: "When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically." The global-warming establishment says we know "enough" to impose new rules on the world's use of carbon fuels. The dissenters say this demotes science's traditional standards of evidence.
The Environmental Protection Agency's dramatic Endangerment Finding in April that greenhouse gas emissions qualify as an air pollutant—with implications for a vast new regulatory regime—used what the agency called a precautionary approach. The EPA admitted "varying degrees of uncertainty across many of these scientific issues." Again, this puts hard science in the new position of saying, close enough is good enough. One hopes civil engineers never build bridges under this theory.
The Obama administration's new head of policy at EPA, Lisa Heinzerling, is an advocate of turning precaution into standard policy. In a law-review article titled "Law and Economics for a Warming World," Ms. Heinzerling wrote, "Policy formation based on prediction and calculation of expected harm is no longer relevant; the only coherent response to a situation of chaotically worsening outcomes is a precautionary policy. . . ."
If the new ethos is that "close-enough" science is now sufficient to achieve political goals, serious scientists should be under no illusion that politicians will press-gang them into service for future agendas. Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails. Science is on the credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with it.
[Salamantis] Also see:
Climategate and Scientific Conduct
Derek Lowe
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/12/01/climategate_and_scientific_conduct.phpThe EPA and Obama’s Uncertainty Tax
James Pethokoukis
http://blogs.reuters.com/james-pethokoukis/2009/12/08/the-epa-and-obamas-uncertainty-tax/Here’s the theory about the new U.S. position on greenhouse gases. The official finding by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that the emissions endanger human health sets the stage for permit requirements on power plants, factories and automobiles. It also supplies President Barack Obama with more evidence at the Copenhagen summit of a “new normal” in America when it comes to climate policy. And back home, it supposedly gives a nudge to the Senate where cap-and-trade legislation is stuck on the back burner.
But in practice, the only thing certain about the EPA ruling is more regulatory uncertainty leading to less economic growth and fewer jobs. Bad news, to be sure, for American businesses already flummoxed by the mercurial state of healthcare, financial and tax reform. Call it Obama’s Uncertainty Tax.
While a cap-and-trade bill has already passed the House of Representatives, few Capitol Hill observers expected the Senate to approve one, even by the end of 2010 thanks to the anemic economy and political risks for incumbent Democrats facing midterm elections. What’s more, expectations of a more Republican-leaning congress after 2010 made it seem like economy-wide carbon caps were sliding off the Obama agenda for the foreseeable future.
But now it’s conceivable carbon restrictions would be implemented as early as next year – even though the EPA itself admits its efforts would be more disruptive and less efficient than congressional action. Such an optimistic timetable assumes no legal challenges. But there will be plenty of those. Already, business groups are preparing to file suit against the EPA. It could fall to U.S. courts to determine the future of the nation’s approach to climate policy. This is a nightmare scenario for the private sector when it comes to planning for new expansion or hiring. Note that the big problem with the job market at the moment is not so much job losses and zippo new jobs being created. It will take a year of 4 percent growth adding 250,000 jobs a month to lower the unemployment rate to 9 percent.
Of course, about the only thing worse than regulatory uncertainty would be for the EPA to follow through with its top-down, command-and-control approach to dealing with perceived climate change.
One solution would be for Congress itself to act. GOP strategists would love to disrupt reeling Democrats with another controversial proposal – which is precisely why it won’t happen. Dems in the Senate are well aware of the shellacking their House colleagues have taken on their cap-and-trade vote.
Another option would be for the White House to devise a plan that would generate some bipartisan support. One idea might be a carbon tax whose revenue could be distributed back to citizens as a dividend, or used to offset payroll taxes. Such a refund could be progressive and popular.
But the most likely scenario is no cap-and-trade and no carbon tax, just more government “investment” in clean energy. But for now, workers and business are left to keep paying the Uncertainty Tax.
Capping Emissions, Trading On The Future
The West's goals in Copenhagen are tantamount to suicide
Joel Kotkin
http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/07/copenhagen-climate-change-carbon-emissions-opinions-columnists-joel-kotkin.htmlWhatever the results of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, one thing is for sure: Draconian reductions on carbon emissions will be tacitly accepted by the most developed economies and sloughed off by many developing ones. In essence, emerging economies get to cut their "carbon" intensity--a natural product of their economic evolution--while we get to cut our throats.
The logic behind this prediction goes something like this. Since the West created the industrial revolution and the greenhouse gases that supposedly caused this "crisis," it's our obligation to take much of the burden for cleaning them up.
Plagued by self-doubt and even self-loathing, many in the West will no doubt consider this an appropriate mea culpa. Our leaders will dutifully accept cuts in our carbon emissions--up to 80% by 2050--while developing countries increasetheirs, albeit at a lower rate. Oh, we also pledge to send billions in aid to help them achieve this goal.
The media shills, scientists, bureaucrats and corporate rent-seekers gathered at Copenhagen won't give much thought to what this means to the industrialized world's middle and working class. For many of them the new carbon regime means a gradual decline in living standards. Huge increases in energy costs, taxes and a spate of regulatory mandates will restrict their access to everything from single-family housing and personal mobility to employment in carbon-intensive industries like construction, manufacturing, warehousing and agriculture.
You can get a glimpse of this future in high-unemployment California. Here a burgeoning regulatory regime tied to global warming threatens to turn the state into a total "no go" economic development zone. Not only do companies have to deal with high taxes, cascading energy prices and regulations, they now face audits of their impact on global warming. Far easier to move your project to Texas--or if necessary, China.
The notion that the hoi polloi must be sacrificed to save the earth is not a new one. Paul Ehrlich, who was the mentor of President Obama's science advisor, John Holdren, laid out the defining logic in his 1968 best-seller, The Population Bomb. In this influential work, Ehrlich predicted mass starvation by the 1970s and "an age of scarcity" in key metals by the mid-1980s. Similar views were echoed by a 1972 "Limits to Growth" report issued by the Club of Rome, a global confab that enjoyed a cache similar to that of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
To deal with this looming crisis, Holdren in the 1977 book Ecoscience (co-authored with Anne and Paul Ehrlich) developed the notion of "de-development." According to Holdren, poorer countries like India and China could not be expected to work their way out of poverty since they were "foredoomed by enormous if not insurmountable economic and environmental obstacles." The only way to close "the prosperity gap" was to lower the living standards of what he labeled "over-developed" nations.
These predictions were less than accurate. World-wide systemic mass starvation did not take place as population escalated. Rather those many millions wallowing in poverty in the developing world, particularly in Asia, lifted themselves into the global middle class. Far more efficient ways to use energy have been developed, and unexpected caches new resources continue to be discovered all over the planet.
Yet however wrong-headed, Holdren's world view now has jumped from the dustbin of history into the craniums of presidents and prime ministers. President Obama's pledge to "restore science to its rightful place" has morphed into state-sponsored scientific ideology.
The blind acceptance of this agenda threatens the credibility of Obama and other Western leaders. For one, if the crisis is by its nature global why should we allow massive increases in carbon emissions in developing countries--China will soon surpass us in greenhouse gas emissions, if it hasn't already--while we draconically cut ours? Does the planet really care if it's turned to toast by American- vs. Chinese-made gas?
Then there's the specious historical narrative that insists we pay for creating the industrial revolution since it brought on global warming. Should the West pay for the sins of the British who brought electricity and railroads to India? Does America owe carbon penance for making the technology transfers critical to East Asia's remarkable rise? Maybe we should start by making Wal-Mart ( WMT - news - people ) cancel its China orders. That might help de-carbonize the planet a bit.
There's also growing skepticism about the whole warmist narrative. Climate change now ranks last among 20 top issues in a recent Pew report. There's been a similar rise in skepticism in the U.K., once a hot bed of warmist sentiment.
The reasons for the shift may vary. First, there's a controversy over the temperatures of the past decade, with even some concerned about climate change admitting that there has not been the expected warming. Or perhaps a deep recession has made many "rich" countries feel a trifle less "overdeveloped."
And now we have Climate-gate--where leading warmist pedagogues are trying to suppress unsuitably conformist scientists and perhaps even cook the numbers a bit. Although you won't see too much tough coverage in the mainstream press, the tawdry details have poured out over the Internet and diminished the aura of scientific objectivity of some leading global warming researchers. One recent poll shows that a large majority of Americans believe scientists may have indeed falsified their research data. By well over 4 to 1, they also believe stimulating the economy is a bigger priority than stopping global warming.
Clearly the political risks of giving first priority to the carbon agenda are on the rise. Australia's Senate just voted down that country's proposed cap and trade scheme. The Western center-right, once intimidated by the well-financed greens and their media claque, has become bolder in challenging climate change alarmism.
There's also something of a rebellion brewing, at least toward emissions trading schemes, among some liberals from the South and Midwest, notably Wisconsin's Russ Feingold and North Dakota's Byron Dorgan. As analyst Aaron Renn has pointed out, these areas are most likely to be negatively affected by the current climate change legislation. Feingold recently stated that he was "not signing onto any bill that rips off Wisconsin."
So why do leaders like Barack Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown continue identifying themselves with the climate change agenda and policies like cap and trade? Perhaps it's best to see this as a clash of classes. Today's environmental movement reflects the values of a large portion of the post-industrial upper class. The big money behind the warming industry includes many powerful corporate interests that would benefit from a super-regulated environment that would all but eliminate potential upstarts.
These people generally also do not fear the loss of millions of factory, truck, construction and agriculture-related jobs slated to be "de-developed." These tasks can shift to China, India or Vietnam--where the net emissions would no doubt be higher--at little immediate cost to tenured professors, nonprofit executives or investment bankers. The endowments and the investment funds can just as happily mint their profits in Chongqing as in Chicago.
Global warming-driven land-use legislation possesses a similarly pro-gentry slant. Suburban single family homes need to be sacrificed in the name of climate change, but this will not threaten the large Park Avenue apartments and private retreats of media superstars, financial tycoons and the scions of former carbon-spewing fortunes. After all, you can always pay for your pleasure with "carbon offsets."
So who benefits from this collective ritual seppaku? Hegemony-seeking communist capitalists in China might fancy seeing America and the West decline to the point that they can no longer compete or fund their militaries. A weakened European Union or U.S. also won't be able provide a model of a more democratic version of capitalism to counter China’s ultra-authoritarian version.
The Chinese may win a victory in Copenhagen greater than anything accomplished so far in the marketplace--and our leaders will likely thank them for it. Forget bowing to the emperor in Tokyo; like vassal states at the height of the old Middle Kingdom, the new requisite diplomatic skill for Westerners will be kow-towing to Beijing.
Yet most people in the developing world will not benefit from the suicide of the West. The warmists' vision is not one of growing prosperity, but of capping wealth at a comparatively low level. De-industrialization means the West falls back while emerging economies grow a bit. The "prosperity gap" may close, but ultimately everyone is left with less prosperity.
In the long run developing countries gain less from harvesting guilt than enjoying a bounty of customers, capital and expertise. The West's experience and technology can assist developing nations in improving their far more greatly threatened environment. Turning the West into a spent force will leave the world poorer, dirtier and ultimately less hopeful.
Joel Kotkin is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is also an adjunct fellow at the Legatum Institute (
www.li.com/) in London and serves as executive editor of newgeography.com.