September 11, 2008

I'll bet Ezra a dollar this doesn't come to pass

By: Sonny Bunch

Sigh:

A presidential election grinds on, and one side merrily chants “drill baby drill!” Every time I hear it, I wonder how we’ll be judged in 60 years. When the planet has burnt, and the foretold consequences have unleashed untold devastation. This election is the first to occur when you could definitively say that America was warned. That we were aware. That global warming was on our lips, and on our screens, and in our minds. When they look back at us, when they show the “drill baby drill!” posters in museums, when they see the clips playing the wall-to-wall coverage of a bad-faith misinterpretation, what will that look like? Like the witch trials? Like simple irresponsibility? Will they laugh sadly, and assure themselves that such madness could never grip hold of their society?

Seriously? Didn’t those on the left already learn their lesson in doom-and-glooming when Paul Ehrlich was proven to be a pompous windbag?

You know what’s going to happen in 60 years if we don’t engage in economy-crippling, Kyoto-like measures, Ezra? The world will get along just fine. It will not be reduced to a cinder. The market will work everything out. We’ll get along. The planet’s citizens will experience unprecedented levels of wealth. War will still exist. Famine will be used only as a tool of warfare. Alarmists will have moved on to the next scare, with which they will try to take even more than control peoples’ lives.

In the spirit of economist Julian Simon, I’ll bet Ezra a dollar that life 60 years from now will be pretty much like life right now, with the following exceptions: people will live longer; people around the world will be richer; people will look back at the global warming scare and wonder “what the hell were those people worried about?”