ninme

Ah, where to begin…

NRO – Climate Hypocrites<br/> Island nations underwater, and offsetting princes. By Mark Steyn

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 underwater 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?…

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.

Even making allowances for the stupidity of youthful idealism, the protesters in the streets of Copenhagen seem especially obtuse. Far from sticking it to the Man, they’re cheerleading for the biggest Man of all: They’re supporting a new globalized feudalism in which Prince Charles, Prince Al, Prince Rajendra, and others “very high up in climate change” jet around the world at public expense telling the rest of us we need to stay put. A British parliamentarian recently proposed that everyone be issued with an annual “carbon allowance” that would be drawn down every time he booked a flight, or filled up his car, or bought a washer and dryer instead of beating his laundry on the rocks down by the river with the village women every week. You think the Prince of Wales or any other member of the new global elite will be subject to that “allowance”?

Because I’m just that irritated by it, I’m gonna bring up that ridiculous movie again. They spent $300 million making Avatar and a further $200 million advertising it. For half a BILLION dollars, they could have BOUGHT a rainforest (at $100/acre, that’s 5 million acres, (right Brett?), which is this much rainforest, apparently, which I think is also roughly the size of Wales) and delivered the same message WITHOUT driving me quite SO FAR up the wall.