Defining prosperity down

The power hungry "radicals" of the left have to maintain a set of hysterical causes going at any given time to keep themselves on the radar, and to keep their supports purple enough in the face to keep their mean ticket.
Jack Kemp writes about one such front in the left's assaults whose only purpose is to convince themselves that they have some virtue at all:

«The Bush administration deserves enormous credit for resisting this thinly disguised attempt to disadvantage America economically under the pretext of environmentalism and the pseudo-science of global warming. Scientists cannot even agree on whether global temperatures are rising, falling or staying the same, much less find scientific consensus on what might account for any changes in average temperatures. The administration should use these discussions to unmask the hostile, anti- American agenda that lies beneath this nonsense.

According to Fred Singer, University of Virginia scientist and professor emeritus, the data on global temperature are ambiguous, at best. The climate clearly warmed between 1900 and 1940, long before modern industrial activity consumed much energy. Between 1940 and 1975, when industrial carbon emissions accelerated, the climate cooled and then warmed again for a brief five years. Since then, the most reliable data indicate the climate has been cooling just slightly.
"Certainly," Singer says, "it has not been warming ... and there is no evidence that man is causing the warming."

If the models don't even square with what's going on now in the real world, how can any reasonable person place confidence in what they predict for the future, especially if taking action based on those dubious predictions means inflicting incredible damage on the economy and consigning people to a declining standard of living?
The calls for radical reductions in carbon emissions are a frontal attack on American global economic pre-eminence and a pretext for replacing the current international system of sovereign nation states with a global government possessing the far-reaching authority to engage in economic leveling and redistribution.

The best statement of this [the Kyoto supports'] agenda can be found in a Harper's magazine article by Bill McKibben titled "The Great Leap."

McKibben revealed the real agenda behind Kyoto and its progeny when he said, "The goal of the 21st century must somehow be to simultaneously develop the economies of the poorest parts of the world and undevelop those of the rich - to transfer enough technology and wealth that we're able to meet somewhere in the middle."

Global warming is not really about the global climate at all; it's about global government turning the whole world into Old Europe or stagnating Japan. This most recent round of eco-hysteria - along with its predecessors - is simply a thinly veiled effort to do by international treaty, and eventually global government, what Communism failed to do, namely define global prosperity down in the name of "equality."»

- as if the Zero Sum Game which was never true can be made true. By McKibben's logic, for him to be concidered wise, everyone else must become a fool. The trend has nothing to do with natural science, but a desire to validate poor scholarship and science in the name of its' authors. It embodies the vanity of the comfortable and detatched who remain enamored with failed ideas and utopian models that have led us to disasters in the past.
The idea that these jerks have is that in order to make the rest of civilization "feel better" that we have to be worse off, so that they don't have any goals in life. It's a joke to the rest of us, including the developing world, but in the sankpdbox that it's advocates live in it's supposed to be globally meaningful. In reality it's an emotional problem shared by leftists.
They want the admiration that comes with being the first to change things somehow and we're supposed to admire them unquestionably for simply knowing better. If you've ever witnessed a faculty lounge disagreement, you'll notice that they even do this among themselves.

It's about personal power, or more accurately their own powerlessness because the rest of the world doesn't drop everything and carry through their ideas into practice.