Sunday, October 22, 2006

I enjoyed reading Cato-at-Liberty on "The Kyoto Charade."

Quote: "One of the things I keep trying to hammer home to the media is the extent to which legislative promises to meet environmental goal X sometime in the future have almost always been, and likely always will be, meaningless blather.

The reason is simple. Voters love promises to accomplish wonderful things, but they don’t love burdensome policies to secure those wonderful things. Because the public’s attention span is quite limited to say the least, loud and vigorous promises to slay environmental dragons will harvest political capital while subsequent failure to actually slay those dragons will go relatively unnoticed and cost politicians little."

That sums up the entire environmental/global warming movement: make promises impossible to keep, but let everyone feel good about having made them, regardless of the consequences.