heureusement, ici, c'est james

We have to forgive conservatives like David Frum. As evidenced by his recent rampage of arrogant self-evidence in the National Post, it seems they're just slow learners.

First, he tries to convince us that the oil and gas supply situation is dire. Good on 'ya. Second, he tries to convince Republicans to advocate for reducing consumption. A little damn late. Then he takes an intellectual detour, as if clarifying for himself that people "respond to price signals," and that "national economies" hardly exist anymore insofar as governments can help change oil supply and demand.

So what's his one great idea? Green taxes." It would look exactly like the carbon tax advocated by global warming crusaders," he says. Way to come around.

But does he actually give credit where it's due? No. In great conservative fashion, he instead belittles environmentalists as alarmists by launching into a self-righteous attack on the "environmental movement," arrogantly claiming they were "wrong all along":

The environmental movement has always trafficked in apocalyptic fantasy. From its onset, it has offered one vision after another of impending catastrophe... environmentalists seem positively to crave disaster as a righteous judgment on erring humanity.

He follows that up with this stunning flash of catastrophic idiocy:

It is a plain matter of record that the American environment has steadily and substantially improved over the past three decades.

Environmental trends are nearly all positive, with all forms of pollution except greenhouse gases in steady decline in the United States and the European Union. In the middle-1970s, only one-third of America's lakes and rivers were safe for fishing and swimming. Today, two-thirds are, and the proportion continues to rise. Since 1970, smog has declined by one-third, even as the number of cars has nearly doubled and vehicle-miles traveled have increased by 43%. Acid rain has declined by 67%, even though the United States now burns almost twice as much coal annually to produce electric power.

The logic of this argument is fundamentally flawed – much like that of instituting “intensity-based targets” for reducing C02: it doesn't consider the increase in overall entropy in the global system or the outsourcing of pollution to new manufacturing centres - in China, for instance, where there has been a clear increase in smog and acid rain. How is it that he can rightly espouse the disappearance of "national economies" but fail to see this global environmental repercussions of this orthodoxy?

Finally, treating "greenhouse gasses" as a mere exception to the rule while shrugging off the increase in American coal-burning amounts to flagrant stupidity, and it flags an immature understanding of how entrenched this problem really is.

He could have spared us this diatribe by listening to what others have had to say in the past or doing some more critical research that extends beyond the partisan box of his mind. But that's not nearly as fun as gain-saying and taking credit for another's ideas.

Labels: cons, David frum, National Post, slow learners