Cooling on Warming

James Glassman is making his fifth appearance at the annual conference of UN-backed professional busybodies gathered to discuss global warming and the Kyoto Treaty. His report will warm the cuckolds of your heart if you're skeptical of the doomsday scenario painted by international Luddites:

[R]esponsible advocates are building a consensus around the right approach, which concentrates not on destroying the economies of developing countries through limits to growth, but on improving those economies through the use of more energy — the best leverage for boosting living standards. Wealth, after all, makes health. As a nation gets richer, it gets cleaner.

And: Michael Crichton, author of science-based best sellers like "Jurassic Park," has a new book, "State of Fear," which casts serious doubt on global warming and extremists who espouse it.
As Mr. Crichton says, "Why are we not feeding people in this world who are hungry? Why are we not giving clean water to the almost billion people who don't have clean water? The greatest source of environmental degradation is poverty. Why aren't we cleaning up poverty?"
Those are the right questions for the multitudes in Buenos Aires.

Indeed. It takes a great deal of affluence to live cleanly, as American history itself shows. When you're principal concern is filling the stomachs of yourself and your family, you don't have time to worry about pollution. In fact, you probably don't have much of a conception of what pollution is, much less what should be done to reduce it and make your life better. The technological innovations that have transformed our lives over the past century are part and parcel of the same system that allows us to live in a cleaner environment. Free markets, which reward and encourage innovation, create affluence, and affluence is a prerequisite for cleaning up the environment.

The Kyoto crowd either doesn't understand this, or, more likely, don't care. They're livelihoods -- jetting around the globe, using every means of technology available -- rest upon a presumed moral superiority to those whose brains and backs makes their lifestyles possible. So let me add another question to Michael Crichton's list: why should we listen to a crowd of UN-sponsored elites who live in fiscal bubbles supported by the societies they condemn?

Update: The New York Sun runs a thoughtful editorial on the possible opening of ANWR. It concludes:

These columns do not wish to be counted among the anti-environmentalists. But one of the great truths of the last century is that between the capitalist societies and the communist, the capitalists were the clean ones. Neither drilling nor economic growth are inimical to a clean environment. Finally, it is ludicrous for the left to rule out drilling in ANWR at a time when it is also complaining about our trade deficit. The right way to approach the 2,000 acres in the ANWR is carefully but determinedly, so as to maximize our own supplies of oil in a world when war already makes our access to oil too chancy by half.