Blaming Bush

By now, conservatives should be used to being held responsible for most of life's hardships. From poverty to homelessness to global warming, the left rarely misses an opportunity to find fault with others for society's failure to create a temporal utopia.

Environmentalism, however, has always been a special case. Even though liberals are as quick to take advantage of modern technology as the rest of us, they're eager to point the finger at "them," meaning conservatives, for environmental degradation, at least as they define it. Live in a new house (perhaps not your first), drive an SUV (perhaps more than one), jet across the planet (sometimes on your own plane), and eat food from around the globe? No problem, at least not if you profess to feel really, really bad about it. That allows you to blame evil capitalists, Republicans, practicing Christians, and other unenlightened types. More importantly, it provides lefties with what they believe is a solid foundation for their sanctimoniousness.

All of this rests on a faulty premise: we control our environment to such a degree that our actions literally determine the weather. If you accept this, you'll happily believe just about anything the environmentalist wacko fringe tosses out. So what if the weatherman doesn't know whether or not it will rain day after tomorrow, or that dire predictions of a coming ice age and mass starvation -- made only 30 years ago -- didn't pan out. We know more now, having become god-like via the boomer brain trust, and can see clearly now that the acid rain has come.

So when a horrific tsunami kills over a hundred thousand, it never occurs to those suffering from self-induced apotheosis that the steps we can take to alleviate the impact of natural disasters rest not on some mystical, unarticulated (because intellectually vacuous) philosophy of world-control. Rather, the means of reducing mass suffering depends on the growth of affluence in Third World countries. In other words, unless poor nations can Westernize so that they, too, can enjoy the benefits that civil society brings -- rule of law, private property rights, religious and civil freedoms -- natural disasters will continue to have a disproportionate impact on their societies. That's not because they can be stopped, of course, but because their effects can be mitigated.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial page made this point earlier in the week, when it noted that Stephen Tindale, executive director of Greenpeace UK, and Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth, told the Independent newspaper that global warming was to blame for the tsunami. The Journal's response:

It is preposterous to blame the inexorable forces of nature on the development of industry and infrastructures of modern society. The more sensible response to natural disasters is to improve forecasting, put in place efficient communications and evacuation procedures and, should the worst arrive, conduct relief efforts and rebuild what nature has destroyed. Those cautionary measures, as is now clear, cost money. The national income necessary to afford them is made possible only by economic growth of the sort too many of environmentalists retard with their policy extremism.

Today's New York Sun runs an editorial worth your time, also:

When America tries to depose a dictator like Saddam Hussein who put tens of thousands of Iraqi Shiites in mass graves and who was trying to acquire weapons that would allow him to kill tens of thousands of Israelis or Americans, the left complains that America is trying to be a global policeman and needs to learn humility. But when a naturally generated tsunami hits Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand, killing hundreds of thousands, it is somehow assumed that the American government must take the lead in the disaster relief efforts.

As John Podhoretz argues, the urgent effort today should be about disaster relief, not quantities of foreign aid. Just behind this comes frank talk about improving the lives of countless millions who suffer the depredations of poverty and ignorance daily. Decades' worth of foreign aid didn't change that, as last week's giant waves demonstrated for all to see. Perhaps a little freedom would allow such countries to build a safer future.