31
Oct
2014
IPCC to Emphasize New Marketing Campaign
My latest at IER. An excerpt:
As [the interventionists] themselves are now admitting, the actual situation is much more nuanced, showing that the critics had a point all along. Originally the case for government restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions was portrayed as a “no-brainer” akin to changing the oil in your car, but now the analogy has shifted to buying fire insurance on your house. That shift in the rhetoric is very revealing: Years ago, aggressive government policies were not originally sold to the public as a form of insurance, because such language reveals the inherent uncertainty in the predictions of extreme loss.
The environmentalist movement, the way most of them think and react towards the rest of humanity as global conditions alter, reminds me of the scene in the movie Apocalypto, where the tribal leader and witch doctor at the top of the pyramid of human sacrifice stopped cutting people’s hearts out and heads off in reaction to the solar eclipse.
Since when does “you should emphasis this particular argument for x more” imply “all the other arguments for x are invalid”?
Since when did “you should emphasize this particular argument for x” never imply “all other arguments for x are invalid”?
If the world suddenly started cooling again, the climate alarmists would simply switch to telling you that fossil fuels were the cause of that, too.
Some people in the 1970s already did.
Yancey, it don’t matter if it gets cooler or warmer. Man made climate stasis they’ll all say!
They sell it as “insurance” because a lot of free market people accept that insurance is a useful thing and it is reasonable for insurance companies to impose some sort of contractual regulations on their customers. The intent is to dress up government regulations and wealth transfer (backed by force) and somehow pretend it is voluntary participation.
In Australia they were pushing the “National Disability Insurance Scheme” which is actually a forced charity scheme (we need a better word for that, because it is impossible to be charitable at gunpoint)… anyhow whatever you think about government charity, it clearly has nothing to do with “insurance”. This is just dishonest branding.