Freedom Line Blog

Perhaps the most delicious recent indictment of the arrogance and hypocrisy of “Climate Change Cassandras” comes courtesy of Mary Kissel’s commentary in today’s Wall Street Journal regarding Indian Environment and Forests Minister Jairam Ramesh.

What seems to rankle Mr. Ramesh the most about these kinds of demands is the idea that India should sign themselves on to the rich world’s environmental fads at the expense of its own poor people.  Many Indians have long understood that the kind of climate interventions pushed by the likes of Mr. Gore – binding emissions targets, carbon taxes, cap-and-trade schemes and so on – all amount to giving up on cheap energy sources in exchange for sharply higher costs and economically unproven technologies. In India, that means consigning legions of the poor, many of whom don’t even yet have electricity or gas, to perpetual life in the slums.

It’s easy for Al Gore or Leo DiCaprio to feel as though they’re “sacrificing” to save Mother Earth by separating glass from plastic in kitchens larger than most Indians’ entire houses.  It’s also easy for such sanctimonious activists to command others to primitive lifestyles while they hypocritically consume tons of jet fuel gallivanting to the latest film festival.

But if such airheaded celebrities can’t even reduce their carbon footprints to the size of the average American’s, how can they in good conscience expect developing populations to consign themselves to poverty on behalf of “the rich world’s environmental fads?”