Protesting in Cancun, freezing in Michigan (The Michigan View.com 12.15.10)

Posted by hpayne on December 15, 2010

Should Michigan voters support a plan to send billions in tax dollars to mitigate global warming’s effects in the Third World at a time when their state is setting records for cold weather, their per capita income is down 5 percent in a decade, unemployment is hovering near 13 percent, and Detroit warming shelters are expecting a 25 percent increase in homeless?

“That’s a strong way to put the question,” says Andy Hoffman, professor of sustainable enterprise at the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and the Environment, who just retuned from sunny Cancun with a U-M delegation of 30 students and alumni to monitor the 2010 United Nation’s Climate Summit.

It’s a question global warming activists should get used to.There’s a new sheriff in town in Michigan’s Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph, the new chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who with other Republican legislators will be keen on asking why the United States tripled its funding of global warming aid to developing nations — to $1.7 billion — this year when deficits are out of control and global warming legislation is a dead letter among the American people.

A green advocate, EPA veteran, and prolific author, Hoffman is unfazed by the brutal weather than greeted his companions upon their return from Cancun. “One cold snap is not a sign that global warming is losing steam,” he says, though the Green movement itself has made a history of exploiting warm weather events to advance its agenda. “There are long-term concerns about shifting weather patterns. Think of the droughts in Africa.”

Last year’s Climategate scandal, however, revealed that top global warming scientists were manipulating data to fit their pre-conceived unions. That scandal — and a decade of flat temperatures — have combined to gut public support of the climate movement. An unpopular House cap-and-trade bill — passed with the support of the entire Michigan Democratic delegation — fueled this fall’s tea party rage against a Democratic Congress that seemed intent on burdening a crippled U.S. economy rather than helping it to its feet.

Hoffman seems undeterred.

He says spending billions “to develop technology and components transfer to developing nations” is crucial in heading off a climate catastrophe. He says that Upton & Co. should find somewhere else to cut — perhaps defense spending at a time when the U.S. is fighting two wars on the Mideast terror front. He deflects a question as to whether fighting global warming is as important as fighting the War on Terror, but says it’s essential that the U.S. not only send billions aboard but invest billions at home to develop green technologies.

“We should be doing what China is doing in renewables, or else we’re going to be buying these technologies from abroad,” he says, sounding a common theme of green envy for the Communist nation that — ironically — is building a new coal plant at the rate of one-per-month while the GranObama administrations have strangled coal power here. “Any new technology requires government support”This is poppycock, of course.

From automobiles to cell phones, new products have succeeded in America because its markets are relatively free of government interference. Capital is finite, and the more capital is free to find its most efficient use, that is where prosperity will grow.

Michigan and the nation are desperate for that kind of prosperity. Its electorate has just voted to steer away from Green Democrats who have diverted one-sixth of the trillion-dollar stimulus package to green technologies.

Rather than traveling to Cancun to lobby for a post-warming, green utopian future funded by U.S dollars, Hoffman’s U-M students might have spent the week in a Detroit soup kitchen, seeing how the poor freeze when the state’s economic engine, the auto industry, doesn’t produce enough carbon-burning vehicles.

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