What's really scary about global warming?

I feel very conflicted about the "global warming" meme being shoved down our collective throats. On the one hand, I'm convinced that this is a gigantic hoax driven in part by well-meaning people, but largely by anti-Western, anti-capitalist ideologies I'm extremely wary of. On the other hand, won't the good that may come out of that, like alternative energy and cleaner environment, outweigh the bad? Well, that's exactly what I'm afraid of - that it will not. For one thing, the benefits are yet to be realized, but there are already plenty of very troubling signs that evoke terrible associations for me. After all, wasn't the premise of communism a benevolent one? To distribute wealth more equally, to stop exploitation of one person by another, to introduce rational planning into the volatile nature of capitalist economy... And look what we ended up with.

I'm not saying that the global warming hysteria will lead to a revolution, a world socialist government, or gulags.  (I'm also not saying that it won't.) However, the attempts to silence and vilify the skeptics are extremely troubling. As is the politicization of science, the involvement of government bureaucracies, the enormous amounts of money that will be extracted from societies for all kinds of hare-brained ideas that, in the best of circumstances, will have very little effect, and in the worst, will cause irreparable damage.

Yes, I always hated the SUVs, considering them an idiotic fad that refused to go away. I don't think of myself as a tree-hugger (although I was one in my teenage years and early adulthood), but at the same time I don't like cars very much, and the notion that a single person could be burning so much gas moving his/her ass in a humongous car from one place to another was making me genuinely angry. Especially after 9/11, when it became painfully clear what our gas money had been paying for...

I would really welcome a much better public transit system in the US, and much smaller cars. I think I wrote about this before, but George W. Bush wasted a tremendous opportunity by not rallying the country around the idea of energy conservation and independence in response to the 9/11 carnage. Previous attempts by Presidents Ford and Carter to lower our dependence on foreign oil failed, because the OPEC countries responded by pumping more oil and lowering its price, thus making alternative energy sources badly uneconomical. Tying this to national security in the wake of the terrorist attack would have insulated this project - at least to some extent - from such economic pressures. The Americans would have swallowed $2 or $3 per gallon, if they knew that the revenue would go toward building energy independence. Now our only hope is that the price will stay high long enough for alternative energy to take hold, and that OPEC will not be able to increase production to kill it. (At the same time, it would be even worse if the price of oil got much higher, forcing the world's economy into a nosedive... It is a tough balancing act and we will need all the luck we can get.)

I cringe imagining government bureaucrats all over the world rubbing their hands together in anticipation of the windfall the global warming scare will produce. They will be relevant again! The public is virtually begging for more onerous regulations,  bigger taxes, more intrusions into their personal choices - let's give it to them! Governments are like those gigantic steam engines of the past: hard to get them going, but once they are in motion you have to keep feeding them, and it's awfully hard to make them stop or turn around. Remember these three idiotic questions the airline agents were required to ask years and years after the "Lockerbie bombing"?  "Who packed your bags?", "Have these bags been under your complete control since the time you packed them?", "Has anyone given you anything to bring on board?". It mast have been pretty evident to anybody with half a brain how ridiculously ineffective was this method of thwarting terrorism (was even a single bombing prevented because of this measure??) and yet it took 15 (or more?) years until finally the US government decided to let go of it. (Imagine my shock when I heard those questions last November, before boarding a plane at Schiphol in Amsterdam... They are still doing it. How sad and annoying.)

Another example: the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which is doing grave damage to American competitiveness, yet nobody has the guts to pull the plug on it. My point is that once you open the door for the government to regulate, you will have to live with the consequences for many, many years, even if it turns out that these regulations were ill-advised to begin with. This scares me much more than a change of a couple of degrees in average temperatures.