A hard, job-friendly rain

I might have been more careful when I wished, almost two years ago, that the yawner “green” movement would end its addiction to renewable clichés, and pump some poetic depth into the enviro-jihad. I suggested tweaking Bob Dylan’s “It’s a Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall.” Last week I got what was coming to me: At Copenhagen’s “climate summit”– where guests required 1,200 limos, 140 private planes, and as much carbon as Kansas City, KS over 11 days – Al Gore smashed the meaningless “eco-friendly” rhetoric with a poem:

…Neptune’s bones dissolve
Snow glides from the mountain
Ice fathers floods for a season
A hard rain comes quickly…

Apparently the enviro-jihad’s poetry czars got my memo, almost verbatim:

Acid rain’s a-gonna fall, my blue-eyed son,

Rain’s a-gonna fall in winter instead of snow, my darling young one.

So now the “hard rain” crisis group has it all: a tragic premonition, a sympathetic international community, a promise of a “green jobs” recovery, and – at last – a poet.

One way to appreciate the disingenuous defense of this “slam dunk” case for government actions like “cap-and-trade” is to compare it to the “slam dunk” case for invading Iraq. Back in 2003, the premonition was vague: even President Bush didn’t say Saddam Hussein caused 9/11 (and there was no “science” to cling to, only a gray case for striking a WMD-craving chokepoint of the backward Arab world). The international community was profiting too much off of Iraqis’ misery to sympathize with an invasion. And while there was initial talk of oil revenues paying for the war, it soon became impossible to deny the American deaths and economic miscalculation.

But Iraq always had its poets. Whatever horrors Iraqis faced once the US invasion turned Iraq from a prison into a wilderness, few could help thinking of national poet Badir Shakir al-Sayyab’s promise of deliverance:

…I can almost hear Iraq gathering thunder

And storing up lightning in mountains and plains.

Ever since we were young, the sky was

Clouded in the winter,

And rain poured,

Yet every year when the earth bloomed we hungered.

Not a single year passed but Iraq had hunger…

The hard rain keeps falling on Iraq, and no one can refer to anything about the war as a “win-win.” Its defenders have not had the luxury of reciting poems at global lectures in Copenhagen where they can laugh and eat caviar. Everyone can see the price of their policies. Jon Stewart, therefore, criticized Douglas Feith (a DOD top-dog) a few years ago for underselling the dangers: “The fact that you seemed to know all the risks takes this from manslaughter to homicide.” Stewart is right: the administration should never have said “mission accomplished” and should have warned that it would be hard and long and deadly. But only a year into the war, “Is the sacrifice worth it?” was a question every supporter had to take seriously.

The Copenhageners, however, will never have to take that question seriously. The earth’s cycles will be too complex to allow us to diffinitively know whether cap-and-trade or a butterfly's flutter saved the polar bears. So too with the economy: President Obama can spend four years attributing our economic crisis to eight years of President Bush, and no one will be able to diffinitivly prove the green agenda's complicity. Thus, no need to admit that “going green” requires sacrifice.

The UN, for example, says climate change is the world’s top threat. But, they say, it’s “as much an opportunity as it is a threat, offering a chance to usher in a new age of green economics.”

Energy Secretary Steven Chu says, “Virtually everyone that I know has gotten more alarmed in the last half a dozen years.” But how alarming can it be if it is the pretext for his $39 billion “clean energy projects” save-the-economy stimulus? Just last week Chu was in Wisconsin lecturing on the win-win green jobs revolution.

President Obama, too, makes the solution seem fun: “The nation that leads in the creation of a clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the 21st century global economy.” Cap-and-trade, he says, is “a jobs bill.”

The Islamic Republic’s Ayatollah Khomeini once told an economy critic, “we did not make the revolution to lower the price of watermelons.” The “green” debate would benefit from such candidness. Freakonomics author Steven Levitt, for example, asks why we are preparing to spend trillions for benefits 50 years out. He concludes that spraying light-reflecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere through a 25 click hose would be wiser than cap-and-trade (which will cost $822 billion, according to the CBO). And that is to assume a problem even exists: at Copenhagen, Gore’s “slam dunk” case for the probability of the north polar ice caps completely melting in 5 years was refuted by the very scientist he based his claim off of (the ice caps have expanded since 2006). Meanwhile, no one has been able to explain the current decade of cooling, nor the reason that in five of the past six ice ages, carbon levels were actually higher than they are now.

If global warming is worth taking seriously, solving it will be hard. When Gore talks about “a hard rain” in his bizarre poem, he’s saying it can be avoided. Yet Badir Shakir ended his poem at peace with irony: “Iraq will bloom with rain.” Unfortunately, he was right.