The Global Warming Police State

Relacionado con este articulo de Václav Klaus, a los amantes de todas las formas de colectivismo esto del "calentamiento global" les viene como anillo al dedo:

For those seeking to justify this kind of all-encompassing government control, global warming is the best candidate to come along since the collapse of Marxism. Like Marxism, environmentalism steals the "scientific" aura of an established field--but in this case it has invaded the "hard sciences," which carry greater prestige than economics. And unlike previous environmentalist crusades, global warming is a threat that is global in scope and total and all-encompassing in its detailed application to human life. Other pollution scares--DDT, acid rain, the ozone layer--required only the banning of a single product or control over a single industry. None was big enough to require control of the entire economy over the period of a century, nor could any claim to be so urgent as to make dissent an "irresponsible" act that is not to be tolerated.

Global warming provides a basis for all of these claims: urgent action is needed, we are told, or the catastrophic effects will be irreversible. But to reverse global warming will require massive reductions in our use of power, requiring a total restructuring of the economy--and the deployment of the "carbon cops" to police every parsimonious detail of our everyday lives.

And this global warming police state has one big advantage over Marxism: it makes a virtue of the chronic shortages and privation that were such a mortal embarrassment to Communism. This time, the left won't have to explain away the lines at the stores, the decade-long waiting lists for tin-can automobiles, even the scarcity of decent toilet paper. These are not failures of the system: they are the goal of the system. They are all necessary to reduce our "carbon footprint."

A perceptive reader suggested to me recently that when left claims that "the science is settled" in the global warming controversy, what they really mean is that the political science of the issue is settled. The global warming hysteria reinforces all of their settled anti-capitalist prejudices--and it provides an open-ended justification for the central, dominant, overpowering role they think government ought to play in the individual's life.