“Why Should the Soviets Have All of the Fun Remaking the World?”

"There is something in the human 

psyche that must abhor tranquility."

Just published is one of the most astute essays I have read on the topic of global warming.

Though we are not without significant personal and public challenges, they pale compared to those endured during the Great Depression and the Second World War. And so, bequeathed an inferiority complex, we seem eager to appropriate these terrible experiences for ourselves.

The scale of the threat posed by climatic and environmental changes is just not comparable to an aggressive fascist menace and the collapse of the global economy. Perhaps that’s why advocates for radical environmental policy prescriptions are so eager to borrow from the Greatest Generation’s hardships if only to lend psychological urgency to a cause that is empirically lacking.

For quite some time, it has been apparent that global warming has morphed into a religious political movement complete with "noble cause corruption" and self-sacrifice. There is also a significant amount of arrogance and authoritarianism. When it was global cooling, the solution was more

government regulations. Now, even with the problem the opposite (warming instead of cooling), the solution is the same: more taxes, more government regulation, and more central planning. Private sector innovation and market solutions are nowhere to be found on most activists' "wish lists." Just last week, it was reveals that most wind turbines wear out at twice the rate originally thought and that Poland is going to phase out wind power entirely beginning in less than 20 years.

Is global warming a real problem? Yes. Does the planet have serious environmental issues? Of course.

But, the idea that central planning (which has wrecked every nation in which it has been tried) is the solution flies in the face of hundreds of years of accumulated knowledge. What we need is low-carbon, reliable energy that costs same or less as what we use now. It really is that simple if the goal is to meaningly lower atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.

Unfortunately, for many activists, global warming is the means. More control over our lives is the end.