What Goes On In Davos...

I have to admit, I'm starting to worry about climate change. Not about the actual impact of the earth moderately warming mind you, rather the fact that more and more folks, some of them previously thought to be reasonably minded, are getting on board Al Gore's "we must act now to save the children and prevent the end of the world as we know it" bandwagon.

As Jay Nordlinger reports in the latest issue of National Review (sub req), climate change was the subject du jour at Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos:

But no matter who you are, you are deeply, deeply concerned about climate change, or at least pretend to be. Early on the first day, I find myself on a panel with Arianna Huffington, the Greek-born writer and doyenne of the L.A. Left (which is to say, of L.A.). She says that debate about global warming has now ended. Television no longer pits one person arguing for global warming against another person who says no, sir. The question is settled.

I'm afraid I agree with this, although I don't think the shutting off of debate is to be welcomed. A little dissent here would be helpful. The global-warming people have scored a great lexical and rhetorical coup in calling skeptics, or dissenters, "deniers." This is parallel to "Holocaust deniers," and, speaking of them, they are reigning supreme in Tehran, openly planning the second holocaust, even as they dismiss the first. I am hardly the first to make this point, but it should be made more often. And, in Davos, there is much more concern about climate change than there is about a nuclear Iran.

But it's not just the usual suspects in Davos who are buying the hype:

But the British prime minister, Mr. Blair, does fairly well. Giving a speech in the Congress Center, he calls global warming "a moral cause." And he, too, praises Schwarzenegger, and also McCain, who is in attendance. McCain, says Blair, has "driven the agenda forward in the United States." Soon, McCain himself is onstage, driving the agenda forward. He says, "I bring you good news"--and that news is that Congress will probably act quickly on global warming, and that the administration is coming along, too. "I freely admit to you that it's very late and may not be enough, but I think that for the first time there may be some action on this very important issue."

My sense is that McCain's global-warming passion is almost enough to make Davos forgive him for the Iraq War. In this, he is not unlike Tony Blair.

It will be interesting to see how McCain's "global-warming passion" plays with GOP voters in the aught-eight primaries.