This ran on VanityFair.com earlier today.
George Will is far from the only middle-aged Boomer pundit who spends his time shadowboxing Dirty Hippies on the Washington Post editorial page, but his Thursday column is a doozy even by that genre's dubious standards. Seems the Communist Greens, with their "hostility to markets" and contempt for individual freedom, have teamed up with Activist Judges yet again. They're after America's vital fluids!
Amidst the error and oleaginous bad faith, however, lies one valuable nugget of insight. Let's dig it out.
What's at issue is whether polar bears should be listed under the Endangered Species Act (as they were last week ... kind of) because of the danger of climate change.
Now, Will doesn't believe in climate change, though it's clear he hasn't updated his cue cards in a while. One sure indication of lazy conservative hackery on climate is the invocation of a "global cooling scare" in the 1970s. Will deploys this tired trope not once, not twice, but three times in a 700-word column. Not a good sign.
(Side note: the "global cooling scare" talking point is refuted here; see much more in How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic.)
But about the polar bears. Will think it's a "fatal conceit" that humans can know, much less influence, the future. Obscurantism masquerading as world-weary wisdom is a hallmark of the rightwing pinhead faction, and as always, it's meant to distract your attention. Will wants you to think about hippies doing bong hits and dreamily speculating what might happen to the bears. But it's not the hippies who are worried -- it's scientists.
Over the last few years the U.S. Geological Survey did a series of studies up in Anchorage, Alaska. Steven Amstrup, the wildlife biologist who headed the project, said, "Our results have demonstrated that as the sea ice goes, so goes the polar bear." How's the sea ice? Mark Serreze, a researcher at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Centre who specializes on the Arctic, put it this way late last year:
If you asked me a couple of years ago when the Arctic could lose all of its ice then I would have said 2100, or 2070 maybe. But now I think that 2030 is a reasonable estimate. It seems that the Arctic is going to be a very different place within our lifetimes, and certainly within our children's lifetimes.
So the science is pretty clear. But science is beside the point with an ideologue like Will. He has to deny that polar bears are in trouble, because he correctly senses the implications.
This is his insight: If we acknowledge that the bears' survival is threatened by global warming, then "anything that can be said to increase global warming can -- must -- be said to threaten bears already designated as threatened." That means every power plant, vehicle, and leaky building could potentially be held in violation of the Endangered Species Act.
In other words: the ESA is far more radical than we dreamed when we passed it. When it was put into law, threats to species were localized: loggers who wanted a forest; a factory dumping chemicals in a river; development around a rural town. It has since become clear that the greatest threats to species are shifting climate zones, droughts, and habitat loss -- the effects of climate change. We had no idea what we were getting into.
Preventing further species extinctions from climate change will require a society-wide mobilization beyond anything in this country's history. Yet that's what our law implies. We said we'd protect the earth's other species.
Did we mean it?
‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science
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TheGreenMiles Posted 3:55 am
23 May 2008
Intellectual conservatives are still fighting the battles of the 1960s.
With all the references to commies and leftists, this fits right in with the latter.
Join the discussion on global warming, recycling, and organic beer at The Green Miles!
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caniscandida Posted 7:33 pm
23 May 2008
George Will is clearly very learned (and a great stylist), and so one might go wrong by underestimating him. Nevertheless he is regularly crotchety and infuriating, at least on the end page of every other Newsweek, which is where I read him, so by all means fire away.
Regarding the listing of polar bears, and the fecklessness of the gesture, the common word from various sources, with no clearly partisan leaning, has been that the ESA is too slender and flimsy a legislative instrument by which to support an enlightened policy on global-warming mitigation. To which, in response, I ask, Why? Do not the interpretations and applications of laws evolve over time?
TheGreenMiles, your chronology puzzles me. Civil rights for African-Americans, women's rights, and environmentalism bloomed in the 1960s, with gay rights too toward the end: all big issues in the culture wars. It is true that people were starting to read On the origin of species in the 1860s, which would before long open up another front in the culture wars. But by the same time, socialists of one flavor or another had already been flourishing, including one which we may call Hot-Chile-Strawberry-Swirl, associated with Marx and Engels (The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848).
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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Colin Wright Posted 2:38 pm
24 May 2008
What Friedrich Hayek called the "fatal conceit" -- the idea that government can know the future's possibilities and can and should control the future's unfolding -- is the left's agenda. The left exists to enlarge the state's supervision of life, narrowing individual choices in the name of collective goods. Hence the left's hostility to markets. And to automobiles -- people going wherever they want whenever they want.
Here we have Will setting himself up as the savior of individual freedom against those evil power-hungry "leftists" at the door. With his sharp intellect he sees through the environmental myth of global warming as a way for the Stalinists to take over and confine everyone to the Gulag? Is this really credible?
Now who is it that wants to take away a woman's right to choose? Who is it that makes the U.S. the largest prison state in the world? Who shredded the Constitution (undue searches, habeas corpus, etc.)? Don't get me started on the right-wing...
As for taking away people's cars, the oil markets will take care of that!
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caniscandida Posted 6:42 pm
24 May 2008
If World War I was not the most idiotic of all wars, it certainly was the most deadly of all idiotic wars. And yet, the officers, even the junior officers, on both sides, were remarkably well-educated.
In World War II -- which was NOT an idiotic war in itself, though many idiotic things were perpetrated in the course of it -- , the much vilified kamikaze pilots seem to have been a group of idealistic young men many of whom were just about the best educated people of their age on the planet, with a formidable background in European languages and the Western liberal arts.
In this case, by no means do I mean to defend George Will. All I am saying is, he is a sophist with a long professional background; if he seems to blunder, well, he has probably figured out the game a few moves ahead, and the blunders, and appearances of weakness, are quite intentional.
And unfortunately, victory for him means no more than momentary befuddlement of his adversaries (i.e., us, and such as us), and with that, a cheer-leaderish reassurance to those on his side (such as they are).
On how we, and such as we, are all Stalinists (haha): I can sort of see that, actually. I mean, no, we are certainly not "Stalinists." But, many environmentalists are concerned about the welfare of all kinds of underprivileged, the "have-nots," and have always demanded regulations or redirections of the "haves" -- with the result that the "haves" and their spokespuppets can easily (well, glibly, rhetorically) accuse us of communism and class-warfare-mongering.
On shredding the Constitution: Not that I especially care about the purity or venerability of the term "conservative," but the very fact that so many Republicans delight in restricting constitutional rights plainly demonstrates that they are not truly conservative. True conservatives, one might think, should be the staunchest defenders of the Constitution; but when they say, by way of defending warrantless surveillance and the dismissal of the habeas corpus provision (glibly!) that "the Constitution is not a suicide pact," we should be prompt to drive a wedge, and accuse them of being false and hypocritical conservatives.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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MAD MAC Posted 3:09 pm
19 Jun 2008
If the polar bears go down, too bad. They're nasty animals anyway.
"Preventing further species extinctions from climate change will require a society-wide mobilization beyond anything in this country's history. Yet that's what our law implies. We said we'd protect the earth's other species.
Did we mean it?"
Of course we didn't mean it to the point where the country was planning on committing collective suicide to preserve polar bears. We'll give them nice pens in the zoo. Get real!
The fool who wrote this thinks we are going to turn off all of our power generation capacity, and in the process bankrupt the country and starves millions of our citizens for polar bears?????
Jesus H. Christ, what another whack job.
Victory in Pattani
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