Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Instapundit thinks that the “political class” just ain’t serious about global warming.  He cites a book that covers the 2005 Cape Cod Wind Farm debacle where elite liberals like Ted Kennedy and Bill Delahunt, and their wealthy supporters who either lived or vacation on the Cape, put together their money to block the construction of a wind farm five miles off the coast because, one assumes, it obstructed their view.  Of course, this post could just be an obnoxious put down of the Kennedy’s, but no, according to Instapundit, it’s proof positive that the political elites just won’t ever give up their tea and crumpets and ocean views to do anything about climate change.

Now as far as right win global warming denialism/scepticism/do-nothingness goes, this is a novel track.  Usually the Planet Gore types look at climate change as an excuse for some Knockian horror-story “political class” to gain even more power of our lives, delegating our decisions over what cars we can drive to some gay, muscle shirt wearing, Bjorn Lomberg* looking Danish Eurocrats in Brussels who want nothing more than to stick it to crass, overconsuming Americans.  Instapundit, however, revels in his own warped stereotypes of environmentalists, insisting that the elites don’t actually care about the environment, instead its just conspicuous virtue.  Of course, with Leo on the cover of Vanity Fair, this isn’t all that an unreasonable assumption.  And considering that the most commonly proposed policies to address carbon emissions, like a carbon tax, are going to disproportionally affect lower income people, one again could conclude the rich, or “political class,” just don’t give a shit about anything besides looking good.  Instapundit, however, misses a key point.

The Cape Wind Farm controversey was before a truly paradigm-shifting moment, the release of An Inconvenient Truth.  Notice how it took Gore going to the silver screen and give the same Power Point he’s been giving for over a decade, for National Review to get their panties in a bunch about the possibility that we might be living on Planet Gore.  After An Inconvient Truth, we have Goldman Sachs driving around hybrid limos, buying up hundreds of thousands of acresin Chile to preserve it, Bush mentioning GW in the State of the Union, Prius sales sky-rocketing, my mom stealing my car because it has better gas mileage, what I think can only be called a major cultural shift.  So maybe for a while the political class wasn’t actually committed to doing anything about global warming, but I really think there’s been a sea change in America, and Instapundit is choosing to ignore a very consequential two years since the Wind Farm went down.

* Yes, i know Bjorn Lomberg is the “Skeptical Enviromentalist” and his approach to Global Warming is just having more growth and us figuring it out later.  He does, however, look just so god damned Euro, I coudlnt’ resist linking to that picture.