HuffPo: 'Missed Opportunity' of BP Spill, Cap and Trade, are 'Point of No Return'

With any luck, we’re going to be seeing a lot more commentary like [1]Jim Garrison’s Aug. 31 Huffington Post piece. What’s positive about it isn’t the apocalyptic hysteria of his descriptions of “climate shock,” entertaining as they are. Rather, it’s his lamentation that President Obama, Al Gore and the global warming industry missed the perfect opportunity to dismantle the U.S. economy and severely curtail human freedom.

Garrison asserted that “the admixture of Copenhagen, the U.S. Senate Climate Bill, the BP oil spill disaster, and the climate itself” had created a “perfect storm,” derailing the warming alarmists’ agenda.

An “unprecedented coalition commanding hundreds of millions of dollars, at the helm of which was Al Gore and a range of VIPs and celebrities [celebrities, mind you!] as well as the major environmental, labor and social justice organizations, couldn’t get a climate treaty out of Copenhagen last December,” Garrison whined. This alliance of the virtuous “then worked furiously to ensure passage of the Senate Climate Bill, only to see it dropped by the Senate this July without even a peep from the president.”

What accounts for the shipwreck of their hopes? Well, “The airways have been full of ‘Climategate’ and the histrionics of the climate deniers,” Garrison claimed. This would come as a surprise to many histrionic deniers, given the [2]extreme reluctance of the mainstream media to even mention [3]Climategate. 

And the well-funded environmental, labor and social justice groups (not to mention the VIPs and celebrities!) were just too virtuous for the task. The do-gooding fellowship “was unprepared for the cynicism of the vested interests, the tenacity of Republican obstructionism, and the insidiousness of the climate deniers,” according to Garrison.

But “President Obama played the leading role in creating the perfect storm,” Garrison said, because of the growing unpopularity of his presidency and his resulting failure to take advantage of “the coup de grace, the BP oil disaster.” That “was a golden opportunity for the president or senior ‘wise ones’ or the environmentalists to connect the dots for the public and for the United States.” But all the ‘wise ones’ managed to do was shut down deep-water drilling in the gulf, throwing thousands out of work and ensuring that region would continue to struggle after the BP well was capped.

In the midst of all this failure and folly, the planet’s warming symptoms became acute Garrison declared, with huge snowstorms, a volcano eruption (caused by climate change?), breaking ice caps, Pakistani floods, Kentucky floods, Russian heat, Chinese mudslides – the earth manifested just about every unpleasant weather (and geological?) phenomenon imaginable as though it were trying to underscore our fecklessness. 

The upshot, Garrison said, is that a “colossal failure just took place the consequences of which will be with us for some time.” This, he posited, was “the point of no return” with “staggering implications” because “a cascade of climate crises and mega catastrophes are now inevitable.”

So it’s inevitable? We’ve failed to address the climate issue and it’s all over but the warming? Well, at least we won’t be subject to ridiculous eco-scoldings from Garrison et al any more. After all, the damage has been done, right?  

Wrong. That would be too easy, and it might put Garrison out of a job. “This is not to convey a sense of hopelessness or that the battle has been lost,” Garrison assured readers. “Can we turn things around? Totally. The situation is certainly redeemable if we can somehow find Ariadne's thread to the transformation of consciousness.”

The key, according to Garrison, seems to have something to do with Einstein, butterflies, “imaginal cells” and “changing consciousness.”

But Garrison did make one suggestion that, though it might be heresy to his liberal Huffington Post audience, actually made coherent sense.

If we could unleash the combined talents of the global entrepreneurial community on the extraordinary amount of money that will be made by a radical transition to clean and green technologies and sustainable lifestyles, that alone could potentially catalyze the entire transformation. Perhaps the public and the governments are irredeemable at this moment. Perhaps the quickest pathway to change is appealing to direct economic interest and focus on the private sector.

Whether Garrison’s doomsday warming scenarios are end-time fantasies or left-wing cynicism, a market-based approach to change instead of government fiat is something we can agree with. Totally.

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