Rick Perry Is Right about Global Warming

Texas Governor Rick Perry has opened the global warming box that the world has been afraid to look into ever since the “politically correct” thing to do was to smile at Al Gore and be nice to the folks who are pitching “green” as a replacement for “growth.”

It seems long ago but it was early in 2010 when the committee of scientists published the startling UN report explaining how fast the world is warming and how the only solution is to stop emitting greenhouse gases. Their numbers and mathematical logic were proven wrong, but nobody could simply say “the Emperor has no clothes.” Instead, we were all fed the line that the conclusion was right even if the numbers were concocted out of air and slight of hand.

But, along comes Rick Perry, the newest Republican candidate for president, whose frank approach to politics is refreshing, to say the least. His comment about global warming?

Perry told the Guardian, a respected English newspaper, that global warming is "one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight.”

Perry hit the mark dead on. We do not know much, if anything about global warming cycles. We may know why they occurred tens of thousands of years before the internal combustion engine created the industrial age. It is perhaps a cycle of CO2 that rises from volcanoes and falls into the seas, warming them before being re-absorbed back into the magma deep under the seas and re-rising to be spewed again from volcanoes. The El Nino cycle may have something to do with it. It May Be. Nobody knows and anyone who tells you differently is lying or has been sold a rather large Brooklyn Bridge.

Manmade CO2 is evidently not something to be proud of in excessive quantities. It can be reduced, even eliminated from some industrial processes. It cannot be eliminated from cow dung, which is one of its greatest sources.

But, what is stifling to growth is to have governmental agencies pass regulations that make the elimination of greenhouse gases (CO2 and others) the most important work of industry. Developing countries who are still building their industrial base are right to fight its being applied one-to-one for them, the same as for already-developed industrial countries.

American industrial countries are right to complain bitterly that they cannot maintain their EPA profile as the government wants it to be and at the same time lead the world’s industrial engine.

Natural resource companies, oil and gas for example, are right to ask that “green” regulations at least take into account that the main purpose of these companies is to produce carbon-based fuels, which we all need.

I am not advocating going back to the smoky, coal-dust days before World War II. And, by the way, it was the Republican Mellon family that joined hands with a powerful Pittsburgh Democrat mayor, who probably started the whole “green” idea because they just wanted to clean up Pittsburgh, which was then the steel-making capital of the world. They succeeded without an EPA to tell them what to do. They succeeded because they were civic-minded and wanted their city to be one they could be proud of.

So, clean, yes. Fewer greenhouse emissions, yes. But not to the degree that they halt the fundamental industrial processes that make our world function. And not to the degree that make goods and services made in the developed world become so expensive that they can no longer compete with those coming from the developing world that often ignores the environment.