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.

Malice or stupidity?

I'm normally extremely skeptical of conspiracy theories, but when I think about the Daylight Savings Time I have a hard time resisting the temptation of thinking about it as a grand experiment of governments to see how far they could go in pushing harebrained schemes on their subjects without eliciting massive protests. I'm sorry, but I just can't see any other benefits to this massive disruption of all things that depend on time as measureb by clocks. Energy savings? There might be some, but they probably pale in comparison to time, money, and energy wasted in preparation and response to the time shift.

This year provides an especially egregious example of that waste. A small handful of countries including USA and Canada, decided to extend the DST by several weeks at the beginning and end of that period. Since almost all aspects of our lives are now heavily dependent on computers, and those in turn depend on their clocks, the impact of that decision is enormous. I run a small IT shop in a relatively small part of a large university, but our group already spent many hours dealing with the change in DST: learning about the implications and steps we needed to take; obtaining, testing and applying patches; informing users; dealing with computer problems that arouse due to the patches, etc... I'm sure there will be more disruption and time wasted when the DST rolls in this weekend... I just pray that at least a few congressmen will miss a few very important events due to the havoc they unleashed, but I'm afraid that the diligence and hard work of their IT people will shield them from the consequences of their stupidity.

I'm not an economist and don't have hard data, but if someone were to calculate the economic cost of the change in the DST, I suspect it would be staggering, even in the IT-related costs alone. It may well be more costly and disruptive than the infamous "Y2K bug", because that one affected mostly older, large-scale systems, while the current problem will impact all kinds of devices, including personal PCs, PDAs, phones, etc. So why isn't it getting the same level of media attention as Y2K? Why is the IT industry swallowing this bitter and costly pill without so much as a whine? I think that this is at least in part due to the out-of-proportion frenzy that was whipped up the last time around. The Y2K bug, which was supposed to bring the post-industrial nations to their knees (remember the stories about seemingly intelligent people stacking up supplies and moving out of cities and into primitive cabins so as to avoid the mayhem that was to follow?), fizzled, and so both the media and the IT people are now afraid to even bring up the subject of DST, so as not to be seen as Chicken Littles yet again. That's why the US Congress will get away with making the stupidest and costliest mistake since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The real tragedy is: that'll only encourage them.

A cure worse than the disease

Why is it that whenever the government bureaucrats try to "fix"something, their solution is often clumsy, burdensome, and illogical? Take the airport security, for example: after the Lockerbie bombing the airline personnel receiving luggage from passengers was required to ask every passenger 3 inane questions: "Did anyone unknown to you give you any items to carry on board this aircraft? Did you pack these bags yourselves? Have these bags been in your possession at all times since you packed them?" This went on for years and I haven't heard of any bombing or hijacking attempts that had been thwarted by that dumb procedure. Luckily for the government and the airlines, the passengers played along and did not bother to answer these questions truthfully, as this would have wrecked havoc. ("To be honest, since I packed these bags yesterday I left them unattended several times to go to the bathroom and to run errands." "Full check, please!")

Immediately after 9/11 security screeners confiscated, among other things, nail clippers, although it must have been self-evident to anybody with half a brain that after the events of that day no hijackers would be able to take over an airplane, even with box cutters, let alone nail clippers! The formerly operative advice, "Stay calm and do what the hijackers tell you to do" has gone out the window, even before any government official declared it invalid. After the most recent bombing plot discovered in the UK, people not only had their shampoo and toothpaste confiscated (this was, at least, somewhat reasonable given the nature of the threat, apparently involving liquid chemicals smuggled on board and then combined to make explosives), but laptops were also banned from carry-on luggage for no discernible reason whatsoever. This latter directive was recently rescinded, but it is still bewildering why it was issued in the first place. It is still somewhat of a miracle that the government did not make us fly barefoot, given the scare with the "shoe bomber" Richard Reid.

Of course, this could be dismissed as a mere nuisance that makes otherwise comfortable lives a little bit less comfortable, but with minimal societal costs. It's a very different story with legislations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which, in reaction to the Enron debacle, imposed a lot of onerous requirements on businesses, stiffling American competitiveness and hobbling the stock market. As the Opinion Journal's John Fund writes: "Increasingly, Hong Kong and London are the places where companies are finding it easier and cheaper to list their shares and raise capital. Last year, of the 25 largest initial public offerings in the world, only one took place in America. This year, Hong Kong is likely to end up as the No. 1 market for stock offerings world-wide." This sort of governmental overreaction can have consequences far more costly and damaging than a silly ban on nail clippers.