Copenhagen: A Postmodernist's Paradise

In his weekly column, Mark Steyn writes, “It’s settled; climate circus was a fairy tale”:

The best summation of the UN climate circus in Denmark comes from Andrew Bolt of Australia’s Herald Sun: “Nothing is real in Copenhagen – not the temperature record, not the predictions, not the agenda, not the ‘solution’.”

Just so. Reuters, for example, carried a moving account of the speech by Ian Fry, lead negotiator for Tuvalu, the beleaguered Pacific island nation soon to be under water because of a planet-devastating combination of your SUV and unsustainable bovine flatulence from Vermont farms. “The fate of my country rests in your hands,” Fry told the meeting. “I make this as a strong and impassioned plea … I woke this morning and I was crying and that was not easy for a grown man to admit,” he continued, “his voice choking with emotion,” in the Reuters reporter’s words. Who could fail to be moved?

“My country, ’tis of thee

Sweet land near rising sea

Of thee I choke!”

Alas, nowhere in this emotionally harrowing dispatch was there room to mention that Ian Fry’s country is not Tuvalu but Australia, where he lives relatively safe from rising sea levels given that he’s a hundred miles inland. A career doom-monger, he’s resided in Queanbeyan, New South Wales for over a decade while working his way, in the revealing phrase of his neighbor Michelle Ormay, to being “very high up in climate change.” As to whether the emotion-choked lachrymose pleader has ever lived in “his” endangered country of Tuvalu, his wife told Samantha Maiden of The Australian that she would “rather not comment.” Like his fellow Copenhagen delegate Brad Pitt, Ian Fry is an actor: He’s not a Tuvaluan, but he plays one on the world stage.

Whether he’s an Aussie or a Tuvaluan, Fry’s future king is Welsh, since under the British Commonwealth’s environmentally responsible king-share program, the Prince of Wales is simultaneously heir to the thrones of Britain, Australian, Tuvalu and a bunch of other countries. His Royal Highness was also in Copenhagen last week, telling delegates that there were now only seven years left to save the planet. Prince Charles is so famously concerned about the environment that he’s known as the Green Prince. Just for the record, his annual carbon footprint is 2,601 tons. The carbon footprint of an average Briton (i.e., all those wasteful, consumerist, environmentally unsustainable deadbeats) is 11 tons. To get him to Copenhagen to deliver his speech, His Highness was flown in by one of the Royal Air Force’s fleet of VIP jets from the Royal Squadron. Total carbon emissions: 6.4 tons. In other words, the Green Prince used up seven months’ of an average Brit’s annual carbon footprint on one short flight to give one mediocre speech of alarmist boilerplate.

But relax, it’s all cool, because he offsets! According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the Prince will be investing in exciting new green initiatives. “Investing” as in “using your own money”, you mean? Not exactly. Apparently, it will be taxpayers’ money. So he’ll “offset” the cost of using up seven months of an average peasant’s carbon footprint on one flight by taking the peasant’s money and tossing it down some sinkhole. No wonder he feels so virtuous. Oh, don’t worry, though. He does have to pay a personal penalty for the sin of flying by private jet: Seventy pounds. Which is the cost of about six new trees, or rather less than the bill for parking at Heathrow would have been.

So just to recap: The Prince of Wales, a man who has never drawn his own curtains, ramps up a carbon footprint of 2,601 tons while telling us that western capitalist excess is destroying the planet. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the railroad engineer who heads the International Panel on Climate Change and has demanded that “hefty aviation taxes should be introduced to deter people from flying,” flew 443,226 miles on “IPCC business” in the year and a half before the Copenhagen summit. And Al Gore is a carbon billionaire: He makes more money buying offsets from himself than his dad did from investing in Occidental Petroleum.

Of course, few expect a religion to be logical, as Czech President Vaclav Klaus notes, “We’ll be the victims of irrational ideology:”

“I’m convinced that after years of studying the phenomenon, global warming is not the real issue of temperature,” said Klaus, an economist by training. “That is the issue of a new ideology or a new religion. A religion of climate change or a religion of global warming. This is a religion which tells us that the people are responsible for the current, very small increase in temperatures. And they should be punished.”

Klaus, the second president of the Czech Republic since the fall of communism, is often called the Margaret Thatcher of Central Europe. In the interview, he sounded more like Winston Churchill, vowing to defend liberty and freedom from those who would restrain global economic growth.

“I’m absolutely convinced that the very small global warming we are experiencing is the result of natural causes,” Klaus told FoxNews.com. “It’s a cyclical phenomenon in the history of the Earth. The role of man is very small, almost negligible.”

And it’s a religion about as old and logical as heliocentrism, Roger L. Simon perceptively noted just before heading out of Copenhagen, one step ahead of the blizzards that intruded upon the global warming conference:

On the last day of COP 15, staring at a Jumbotron where Hugo Chavez was addressing the conference, something was nagging at me besides the obvious (that half the audience was enthusiastically applauding a maniac). I was trying to figure out what it was about the conference that so perplexed and disturbed. And then, before the Caudillo had concluded his tedious remarks and long before the “meaningful deal” between the world leaders was announced, I realized what it was. We had returned to the Middle Ages.

A high tech Middle Ages, of course, but still the Middle Ages. Forget the Renaissance, forget the Enlightenment, forget Spinoza, Locke, Galileo and everybody else, we had returned to our roots as gullible and idiotic human beings, as willing to believe in the primacy of anthropogenic global warming as we would in the sighting of the Madonna at a river crossing twelve kilometers south of Sienna in 1340.

And this even after the revelation of the Climategate emails and documents, not to mention the further revelations about the manipulation of Russian climate data with NOAA and NASA themselves complicit. No, the show must go on. The UN Pope had convened the College of Cardinals in Copenhagen. Everyone must attend, including the Princes of Macedonia and the President of Tuvalu.

Not that anyone believed it.

Except perhaps the earnest young woman from Mother Jones, I watched question, in a style reminiscent of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, some Republican House Members at a press conference, demanding to know if they believed in man-made global warming.

I had had my own, perhaps more humorous, Close Encounter of a Congressional Global Warming Kind only a couple of hours before. I was at the Marriott to interview Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WISC), when, on my way out, who do I spy in the gift shop (where else?) but Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY). I knew instantly why God had invented the Kodak Zi8 flip cam I had in my pocket.

I sashayed up to Rangel and, putting on my most sycophantic smile, asked for an interview. Question one was the softball. How do you feel about the conference, sir? (He thought it was a good thing.) Question two was a little more troubling. But what about all these Climategate revelations? The Ways and Means Chair grew rigid. This was settled science, he assured me, and hurried off, no doubt to a closed door meeting of the House Ethics Committee. (Everyone else was in Copenhagen. Why not them?)

You can watch Roger’s brief interview with Rangel here. Of course, Charlie’s so concernced about global warming that he monitors it firsthand in his lobbyist-funded Dominican Republic getaway.

Incidentally, Ayn Rand was way ahead of the notion of an increasingly reprimitivized society — progressives who reject progress, anti-modern postmodernists. She co-authored a book on the topic in the early 1970s, the dawning of the age of Ecoquarius.

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