Setting Money on Fire to 'Save the Planet'

The world wasted almost a billion dollars a day last year trying to “limit global warming,” according to the latest Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) report. $359 billion. It’s money that could have been used to feed and clothe a lot of poor people or eradicate a disease or invest in struggling third world economies.

The only sliver of good news is that it was $5 billion less than the year before.

This week, the self-anointed head of the Climate Church, Al Gore, is running a climate “telethon” on the Internet, called “24 Hours of Reality.” The goal is scare enough of the guilty into wasting even more money on a “carbon tax.” The website says “Join us as we go around the world, identifying the costs of carbon pollution and the solution that can change the course of our future.”

Al Gore knows a thing or two about the cost of “carbon pollution.” Forbes Magazine says Gore owns “a 20-room, 10,000 square foot antebellum mansion in Nashville’s wealthy Belle Meade neighborhood, and (a) $8.9 million rising ocean-front threatened villa in Montecito, Calif., he purchased following his divorce.“

Gore’s Nashville home alone generates a 221,000 kilowatt-hours utility bill, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. That’s 20 times the energy consumption of the average household.

There are a few hopeful signs that the world just might be coming to its senses about all this climate change hooey. Tony Abbott was just elected in Australia on a platform of ending their carbon tax. Renewable subsidies are being cut in ten European nations, the price of carbon credits has collapsed in Europe, and global coal usage is growing.

Global temperatures have been stubbornly flat for almost 17 years despite apocalyptic climate model predictions. Extreme weather in the U.S. defied the scare-mongers this year. America's hurricane season was a no-show. Antarctica continues to set ice records.

The Earth will never cooperate with you, Mr. Gore. It will go its own way. Droughts and floods, warm and cold periods, all will come and go as they did millennia before coal or the invention of the internal combustion engine.

What the world really needs is a telethon to save the hundreds of billions being utterly wasted every year to "save the planet." Billions that could be used for so much good. That is a true global tragedy.