World leaders are currently meeting in Paris to discuss the issue of climate change and propose solutions to, well, we aren’t exactly sure what. To keep the world’s climate from changing? To stop “warming,” if indeed that is happening?
Their target, of course, is fossil fuels; the eco-utopian elites claim that their use must be curbed and ultimately stopped. Coal, gas, and oil are all causing the earth to warm and will result in the destruction of the planet, so we are told. So sayeth the prophets of a new religion. The science is settled, the debate closed. Naysayers and doubters and skeptics need not utter a word; in fact, the response of the believers is to silence all “deniers” – indeed, to punish them.
But let’s pull back. In a century that saw tens of millions die as a result of the twin great utopias, Nazism and Communism, the single greatest achievement in the 20th century, outside of defeating those utopian ideologies, was the lifting out of poverty of millions of people around the globe. There is much we take for granted in the West – nothing more so than the simple act of being able to turn on a light. Yes, electricity.
