Conveniently, here's a recent example of cynical opportunism by a climate hysteric, Alex "the poseur" Steffen at world whingeing - please donate now and buy my book. It attempts to spin recent remarks by noted climate scientist and technology guru President George Bush into a statement of support for climate hysteria. Bush said:

[I]n my judgment we need to set aside whether or not greenhouse gases have been caused by mankind or because of natural effects and focus on the technologies that will enable us to live better lives and at the same time protect the environment.

Which is exactly what he has been saying all along. "Live better lives" means continued economic expansion. Technological development to enable this has been his chosen path. "Protect the environment" is meaningless happy talk in that it is an inevitable byproduct of the technological and economic development he seeks.

Bush is a politician so none of this is surprising or out of character. The text can be spun by artists of the cognitive kaleidoscope to see nearly any cherished illusion they desire. But there's nothing sufficiently precise in his words to make a difference one way or another. It's a success from a political perspective but of no other value.

"The Poseur" presses on with an illusory narrative that this Bush statement supports an NYT op-ed.

Here's the truly inconvenient truth: Scientists have long been warning that the world must cut back on greenhouse-gas emissions by as much as 70 percent, as soon as possible, if we're to have a fighting chance of stabilizing the climate. Yet even with full participation by the United States, the controversial Kyoto Protocol - the only global plan in the works - would hardly begin to do that. . .

a team of scientists, economists and business executives have put forward a potentially revolutionary plan. Outlined by Ross Gelbspan, a former Boston Globe reporter and editor, in his book "Boiling Point," the so-called Clean Energy Transition would start by turning over an estimated $25 billion in annual federal government payments now supporting the fossil-fuel industry to a new fund for renewable energy investments. It would also create a $300 billion clean-energy fund for developing countries through a tax on international currency transactions, while calling on industry to get in line with a progressive fossil-fuel efficiency standard, forcing greenhouse-gas emitters to immediately work on conservation.

Billions and billions. Poseurs are slavering at the thought of all those slops. But would it be any more useful? Would it "cut back on greenhouse-gas emissions by as much as 70 percent"? No. It wouldn't. It's just the next hustle by greedy opportunists looking to exploit our legitimate environmental concerns. And, it would hamstring their enemies in the energy business while negatively impacting the economy as a whole. No President interested in policies to allow us to "Live better lives" can support it, so it is a wedge, a tool to bludgeon politicians.

Politics has nothing to offer, no contribution to make to this problem. These sorts of petty conflicts are irrelevant to real environmental issues. The billions and billions of dollars at stake are their issues - not the environment, especially not the climate.

That's the "truly inconvenient truth". What may be the issue of our times has no political significance, no handles for politicians to grab, no way for them to aggrandize themselves. It's not like war or even economic crisis. Government policy is irrelevant - as European countries have vividly demonstrated with the Kyoto debacle. Government is the wrong tool to work this task. Force of every sort is useless, it's like trying to nail gelatin to a wall. A bigger hammer won't help.

If we had a world king - an enlightened despot - nothing would change. Absolute power to spend all our resources and command all humans would not solve this problem without crippling world society and bringing about collapse into an even more chaotic and polluting state. The cure wouldn't just be worse than the disease, we'd still have the disease too.

We haven't yet developed the needed technologies. It's too soon. But it may not be long. We are at a point comparable to the transition from steam and beasts of burden to internal combustion engines. The streets were knee deep in dung, people were filthy and lives were lost to diseases as a direct result. Life was ugly and dangerous. But there was no magic, no way to command the filth to stop. We had to develop and move up to the next level, a task that took decades.

There are sometimes ways to encourage development and innovation. Prizes have been used to spur targeted development. It would be wise to always consider the effect of policies on innovation and try to develop societies that are free thinking and innovative. You could see it as simple good governance but it is also a kind of insurance or precautionary behavior that recognizes the "black swan" effect, the threat out of nowhere that can't be predicted though it can always be anticipated. Something always happens, we just don't know what it will be. It's good to be prepared though that means being balanced and attentive rather than rigidly armed to the teeth to fight a particular foe.

It's galling for activists and politicians but this means looser control rather than tighter control, less government rather than more, and generalized competence rather than selected champions. This may in a strange way be an opportunity for those concerned with good governance rather than political power. It seems inevitable that an increasingly large segment of society will twig to the fact that the politicians are useless for modern problems and that the old fashioned fist-in-the-air activist and collective mob approach - the bigger hammer - won't nail the gelatin. Those with more reasonable views may get a hearing.

Update:

Climate Religion

Under conditions of systems and ontological complexity which push people beyond their adaptive capacity, retreat to fundamentalism -- religious, environmental, scientific, philosophical, ideological -- is a common response. Unfortunately, such responses are profoundly dysfunctional . . .

It is not that fundamentalism or ideologies are necessarily “bad,” although they have certainly spilled their share of blood in the past century. But it is very clear that they are especially maladaptive in periods of rapid and fundamental change.

If, then, the major adaptive mechanism to dauntingly rapid change, fundamentalism of various kinds, is dysfunctional, what is one to rely on? . . . For the individual, a difficult authenticity must be demanded; for the systems response, we must first accept the complexity of the world we have created, and our fairly pervasive ignorance of it, and learn to construct systems which remain stable even as contingent meanings and belief systems shift beneath us.

I might quibble with that a bit - they do seem necessarily bad as well as dysfunctional - but it would be an unproductive discussion about the good, the bad and the ugly. Allenby is right to focus on dysfunctionality.

Update:

More about European climate cock-ups

A campaign to convince Europeans they can help stop climate change is being launched by the European Commission. . .

Households are responsible for around 15% of the EU's greenhouse gas emissions. Private car use accounts for another 10%.

But the EU's record on climate change is mixed.

In a recent review, its flagship policy to cut greenhouse gases from industry was found to have miscalculated - thus taking away the incentive for companies to cut pollution or invest in clean technology.

Europe can't seem to get its climate act together though it has become the continental religion. But even if Europe did all it seeks to do it would have no effect on climate change. They are dusting the furniture while the house burns.

This isn't always wrong. Martin Luther's assertion that "Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree" affirms an idea of doing good things for their own sake. By all means dust the furniture. But when the dusting is done instead of fighting the fire rather than in addition it's a case of foolishly mistaken priorities.

They have a disease of sorts, a political disease. Things aren't judged or done for rational reasons, they depend only on the political implications. Though this is foolish in every case it is especially foolish for matters such as this where there are no political solutions.

Update:

Clumsy as well as ugly. [via Instapundit -> The Agitator]

Before President Bush touched down in Pennsylvania Wednesday to promote his nuclear energy policy, the environmental group Greenpeace was mobilizing.

"This volatile and dangerous source of energy" is no answer to the country's energy needs, shouted a Greenpeace fact sheet decrying the "threat" posed by the Limerick reactors Bush visited.

But a factoid or two later, the Greenpeace authors were stumped while searching for the ideal menacing metaphor.

We present it here exactly as it was written, capital letters and all: "In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE]."

This is tragic. It would be so simple to assemble a cheat sheet of ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOIDs. Perhaps a wiki could be set up to collect them from cynical poseurs all over the world. There is simply no good reason for any empty headed activist to be stymied by the lack of spurious factoids.