They say that Dr Nick Smith, New Zealand's Minister for the Environment is smarter than the average bear. Which makes us spare a thought for bears. For sake of argument we gratuitously grant Dr Smith's superior smartiness. What he is now illustrating to a "t" is how a false ideology can reduce even the most learned to errant foolishness and blind stupidity.
Dr Smith has portentously informed us that the UN Climate gasfest at Cancun is really significant. He is attending with all the enthusiasm of little Pollyanna.
Environment Minister Nick Smith said there was a greater chance of progress at the Cancun, Mexico, summit compared with the high-profile, but ultimately futile, Copenhagen meeting last year.Oh, goody. Let's do some low-key hard negotiation. Images spring spontaneously to mind of the New Zealand front row (Groser, Smith, and Charles Chauvel) going through the motions of "Pause! Touch! Engage!" then putting the shove on . . . Botswanaland!
"I actually think it is helpful that there isn't the hype and high expectations of Copenhagen," said Dr Smith. "If we are to get a comprehensive replacement for Kyoto beyond 2013, it will come from low-key, hard negotiation in which all parties do some giving." (NZ Herald)
Smith is determined to make those Botsies see sense.
One of Dr Smith's priorities will be achieving changes in the way forestry emissions are counted. Under current rules, trees are considered to give off carbon when they are harvested.Oooh, no. The ETS again. We were so mind blowingly stupid in the first place to set the scam scheme up--now the famed and feared climate change front row have to go and do some hard negotiation to try to find cheap credits somewhere.
Dr Smith aims to have this changed so that wood products would be counted as carbon sinks (reservoirs which store carbon). This would reduce New Zealand's total emissions, and decrease the economic cost of buying credits from overseas.
Dr Smith is not heartless, however. He knows those Botsies are poor people. He is not going to negotiate too hard. More like a League scrum than the true full blooded Rugby one. Just go through a few motions, make a few grunts, but let them get the ball. Then roll around on the ground, moaning in pain to prove how hard those Botsies have scrummed. They need us to pay up large.
Participants will try to agree on smaller packages such as a fund to channel aid to the poor, who are acutely affected by climate change, and ways to protect rainforests that soak up carbon.Ah, yes Nicky. We know how it works.
We New Zealanders are such patsies. Not so everyone else. Here is the real politick surrounding Cancun. Wesley Pruden of the Washington Times tells us how it really is. Obviously, redneck Mr Pruden has not heard of the illustrious, yet low-key, hard negotiator, Dr Nicholas Smith who is going to make a difference. Otherwise he would not have displayed his ignorance and written as follows:
PRUDEN: Turn out the lights, the party's over
Scams die hard, but eventually they die, and when they do, nobody wants to get close to the corpse. You can get all the hotel rooms you want this week in Cancun. The global-warming caravan has moved on, bound for a destination in oblivion. The United Nations is hanging the usual lamb chop in the window this week in Mexico for the U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, but the Washington guests are staying home. Nobody wants to get the smell of the corpse on their clothes.
Everybody who imagined himself anybody raced to Copenhagen last year for the global-warming summit, renamed "climate change" when the globe began to cool, as it does from time to time. Some 45,000 delegates, "activists," business representatives and the usual retinue of journalists registered for the party in Copenhagen. This year, only 1,234 journalists registered for the Cancun beach party. The only story there is that there's no story there. The U.N. organizers glumly concede that Cancun won't amount to anything, even by U.N. standards.
Rep. Henry A. Waxman of California, who wrote and sponsored the cap-and-trade legislation last year, says he'll be too busy with congressional business (buying stamps for the Christmas cards and getting a haircut and a shoeshine) even to think about going to Cancun. Last year, he joined Speaker Nancy Pelosi and dozens of other congressmen in taking staffers and spouses to the party in Copenhagen. The junket cost taxpayers $400,000, but Copenhagen is a friendly town and a good time was had by all. This year, they're all staying home, learning to live like lame ducks.
The Senate's California ladies, cheerleaders for the global-warming scam only yesterday, can't get far enough away from Cancun this year. Dianne Feinstein says she's not even thinking about the weather. "I haven't really thought about [Cancun], to be honest with you," she tells Politico, the Capitol Hill daily. She still loves the scam, but "no - no, no, no, it's just that I'm not on a committee related to it." She's grateful for small blessings.
Barbara Boxer, who was proud to make global warming her "signature" issue only last year, obviously regards that signature now to be a forgery. She would like to be in Cancun, but she has to stay home to wash her hair. She's not even sending anyone from her staff, willing as congressional staffers always are to party on the taxpayer dime. "I'm sending a statement to Cancun." (Stop the press for that.)
This is another lesson that Washington's swamp fevers inevitably subside. Who now remembers Smoot-Hawley, Quemoy and Matsu, and the Teapot Dome? But these were once issues on which the survival of the known world rested. The only global-warming news of this week was the announcement that the House Select Committee on Global Warming would die with the 111th Congress. Mrs. Pelosi established the committee three years ago to beat the eardrums of one and all, a platform for endless argle-bargle about the causes and effects of climate change. The result was the proposed job-killing national energy tax, but with the Republican sweep, there's no longer an appetite for killing jobs.
Rep. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, the chairman of the doomed committee, organized one final event this week, a splashy daylong exercise in gasbaggery starring the usual suspects assigned to drone on for most of the day about the coming global-warming disasters, the melting of the North Pole and the rising of the seas that would make Denver, Omaha and Kansas City seaside resorts. Wesley Clark was the only former presidential candidate to accept an invitation, and he was a no-show. The star witness of the afternoon session was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an "environmental attorney" who talked about how "clean energy" is nicer than the other kind. Mr. Markey himself, as bored as everyone else, didn't bother to return after lunch.
The members of the committee can now retire with their scrapbooks of clippings to recall the happy days of hearings about global warming (some of them before "global warming" became "climate change" and "liberals" became "progressives"), about how clean energy could replace smelly oil wells and provide Democrats with the means to enact sweeping climate-change legislation. Who could have foreseen that the only "sweeping" would be the sweeping out of so many Democrats?
When the thrill is gone, the thrill is gone, as star-crossed lovers have learned through the ages, and when a scam collapses, it stays collapsed. The thought is enough to warm hearts all across the globe.
- Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
We believe these little anecdotes of the behaviour and body language of Washington career pollies tells us volumes about the real politick of climate change and where things now sit. Like a cacophonous siren they are proclaiming that climate change is dead and long gone as a political cause. But the ignorance of some would hold irresistible to the end.
That's why Dr Smith is smarter than the average bear. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
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