The Real Danger
of Global Warming Policy
By Dr. Marvin J. Folkertsma
The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City
College
US
Amidst
the rock concert mania surrounding a post-July 4th
global warming consciousness raising, it is important
for citizens to understand the difference between
reasoned debate about public policy and the verbal
pyrotechnics of a crusade. The politics of policy
formation typically involve cost-benefit analyses,
reviews of trade-offs, implications for other policies,
possible unintended effects, long-term consequences—those
sorts of things.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that the whole
process isn’t attended by artery-bursting
passion and demagoguery, since both are inextricably
entwined with how bills wiggle their way through
the thicket of rules in the House and Senate. The
old adage about how the making of sausage and legislation
inspires nausea will remain as long as Oscar Meyer
and Congress stay in business. Still, manufacturers
and consumers of such products have managed over
the decades to stifle their impulse to upchuck and
get on with the next item on the agenda.
The real problem arises if that next item deals
with a proposal that ignites the crusading impulse
of zealots who, in Winston Churchill’s phrase,
will never change their minds and refuse to change
the subject. In this case, treatment of the issue
in question is very different. Prosaic inquiries
about costs, benefits, trade-offs and the like are
cast aside with derision, and often with a chorus
of denunciations about the moral turpitude of the
questioners. After all, how dare anyone raise points
about such irrelevancies when the fate of the world
is at stake?
Such has been the case with arguments about global
warming, which for the most part have had frightening
overtones. Since its inception about two decades
ago, global warming rhetoric has been bursting with
apocalyptic warnings and accusations of evil motives
lurking in the hearts of those who disagree with
what has developed as a media consensus, which is
that the planet is going to the devil, temperature-wise,
that is, and we had better do something about it.
Thus, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) once suggested
that opponents to global warming enthusiasts be
silenced. President Bush’s “sincerity”
about his position has been questioned by sanctimonious
Europeans. Indeed, the most frequently heard phrase
about global warming issues from the secular-messianic
fervor of its adherents: Do you believe in global
warming?
Aye, belief! That’s the rub, mate. The problem
is that the media circus-atmosphere on this issue
has distorted reasoned public discourse. There are
scary precedents for this sort of politics, the
worst coming from totalitarian countries—Nazi
Germany, the Soviet Union and today’s North
Korea come to mind. Though understood largely in
military terms, these regimes and others like them
are known for orchestrating parades, celebrations
and pageantries in grotesque proportions, often
to generate regime support or to ignite public frenzy
against the rulers’ enemies. We now recognize
what a sham all this is.
But inhabitants of such countries have no reason
to believe otherwise. As Hannah Arendt pointed out
in her nonpareil study of totalitarianism 50 years
ago, PR-induced fantasies have their uses. Ordinary
citizens who are assaulted constantly with reports
screeching about a witch’s Sabbath of nefarious
schemes against their country or, in this case,
apocalyptic consequences of not “Acting right
now!” have every right to conclude that there
must be something to all the excitement.
Now America is not Hitler’s Reich or the USSR
, and the New York Times is not run by
Josef Goebbels or Pravda apparatchiks. But the propaganda
deluge launched on a daily basis by those in public
symbol producing institutions—filmmakers,
journalists, celebrities, single-issue groups—seems
motivated by a desire to produce a similar effect,
which is generally to stifle debate. Americans have
every right to be suspicious of claims made by global
warming scaremongers, because the last few versions
from an apocalypse-now frenzy turned out to be outrageous
hoaxes—fears of global cooling and the population
bomb come to mind.
In short, when global warming crusaders resort to
tactics resembling the Nuremburg Rallies, the point
is to create hysteria, not advance reasoned debate;
have you ever tried to think at a rock concert?
And where hysteria rules, reason is silenced. This
is the real danger of the current turmoil about
global warming.
(Marvin Folkertsma, PhD, is a professor of political
science and Fellow for American Studies with the
Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College
. He is the author of several books. His latest
release is a high-energy novel titled The Thirteenth
Commandment.)
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