Coming Home from Copenhagen

Roger L. Simon summarizes his experience at the Copenhagen Climate Conference: "I have seen the future, and it stinks.

I am only just back last night from the Copenhagen UN climate change conference, yet am convinced of the accuracy of my headline – an obvious parody of Lincoln Steffens’ famous 1921 declaration about the Soviet Union, “I have seen the future and it works. ” In this case, however, the future concerns (supposedly democratic) “global governance” and not the workers’ state. For make no mistake about it, Kenneth Andersen is correct. COP15 was only peripherally about “climate change” and almost entirely about UN hegemony.

His comments on the European press and on ClimateGate are interesting. Also:

Copenhagen was intended as an important advance toward world governance. On the face of it, it’s a beautiful idea. When I was younger, I was highly attracted to it. But my up-close-and-personal encounters with the UN have turned that attraction to near revulsion. It’s very clear that under global government – because of its size and natural inefficiencies – accountability is nigh on to impossible, transparency nothing but a distant dream, very often not even desired. In short, it’s 1984. And COP15 was just that – legions staring at world leaders on Jumbotrons as they blathered platitudes, while negotiations were conducted behind closed doors. (That’s bad enough in our Congress, but on a global scale…?)

Simon did take advantage of his trip to repair a hole in his education:

But I will add that, perhaps fortuitously, my long voyage home . . . finally gave me ample undisturbed time to finish a book I had wanted to read for a long time – F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. How apropos it turned out to be. Hayek had a lot of this figured out in 1944. I recommend to all who haven’t taken the time. It’s just a sign of my own indoctrination that I had read Marx, Marcuse, Gramsci, etc., etc. first.

From the comments:

I would also urge you to read Hayek’s collection of essays titled “The Fatal Conceit”. I fortunately read his polemic 40 years ago and realized that I loved liberty more than equality. Hayek said that those that placed a higher value on liberty did better on any measure of equality, other than that of the grave or the gulag, than those who purported to produce a society of equals.