Notable and Quotable

Yes, there still is some sense on Usenet. In particular, the following post from John Schilling is an all-purpose response to nearly any type of environmentalist hysteria:

The reason people are so incredibly skeptical on your points a, b, c, and d, is that pretty much EVERY SINGLE TIME something like this has come up in the past, the environmental movement and the scientists willing to stand with them have been pretty obviously STARTING with the "Wealthy nations must chang their ways, difficult/expensive/painful!" conclusion, and trying to backfill it with, let's see, air pollution, water pollution, pesticide use, acid rain, ozone depletion, and I think at one point there was even an incipient ice age in there.

They have been wrong EVERY SINGLE TIME, with the necessary fixes being relatively inexpensive and not requiring wholesale changes in the western way of life. And they've been wrong in ways that do not the least bit suggest, "Oops, honest mistake, we'll get it right next time", but rather, "curses, foiled again in our plan to bring down Western civilization!"

We'll probably get around to fixing global warming, whether anthropogenic or otherwise. We'll probably do it while maintaining the extravagant and wasteful lifestyle we've become acustomed to. Demands that we fix the problem by crashing Western civilization, or even just downsizing the US economy to something you're comfortable with, are only going to delay the process a bit.