 THE WORLD
Fever in the Alps
Global elites and global warming
JAY NORDLINGER
Davos, Switzerland
Every year, the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum has a theme, and this year it’s “The Shifting Power Equation.” But the real theme here in Davos is global warming — it’s on everyone’s lips, and everyone’s brain. There are 17 — 17! — separate sessions on global warming, or, as you’re supposed to call it, “climate change” (because “climate change” covers everything under the sun). You have “The Security Implications of Climate Change,” “The Economics of Climate Change,” “The Legal Landscape Around Climate Change,” etc., etc. And if you’re still feeling climate-changey after hours, you can attend the Climate Change Nightcap, whose hosts include Shimon Peres, the Israeli elder statesman, and Claudia Schiffer, the German supermodel.
Oh, yes, the great and the good attend the meeting, as always. We have heads of government, like Tony Blair, Angela Merkel, and Lula (just one name, please), and captains of industry, like Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and Sergey Brin (the Google guy), and some wild cards, like Anatoly Karpov, the chess master, and Maxim Vengerov, the violinist, and Robert Trent Jones Jr., the golf-course architect.
But no matter who you are, you are deeply, deeply concerned about climate change, or at least pretend to be. Early on the first day, I find myself on a panel with Arianna Huffington, the Greek-born writer and doyenne of the L.A. Left (which is to say, of L.A.). She says that debate about global warming has now ended. Television no longer pits one person arguing for global warming against another person who says no, sir. The question is settled.
I’m afraid I agree with this, although I don’t think the shutting off of debate is to be welcomed. A little dissent here would be helpful. The global-warming people have scored a great lexical and rhetorical coup in calling skeptics, or dissenters, “deniers.” This is parallel to “Holocaust deniers,” and, speaking of them, they are reigning supreme in Tehran, openly planning the second holocaust, even as they dismiss the first. I am hardly the first to make this point, but it should be made more often. And, in Davos, there is much more concern about climate change than there is about a nuclear Iran.
Indeed, you hear, from many lips, that Ahmadinejad is just a blowhard, that he has no real power, that the relevant mullahs are more reasonable, and the subtext is that Iran is being used as an excuse for Bushian-Zionist belligerence.
There is no doubt that conservatives and other misfits are on the defensive about global warming. I see a column in the Financial Times by Gideon Rachman, and the column is headed, “How Iraq and climate change threw the right into disarray.” Here is its second paragraph:
From 1979 [when Thatcher was elected] to 2004, the right won the battle of ideas in the western world. Conservatives triumphed because they got the two big issues of the era right: they were in favour of free markets and against communism. But now the right is in disarray because it has found itself on the wrong side of the two dominating issues in contemporary western politics: global warming and the Iraq war. Is that so? Iraq aside, I wonder whether global warming will be the death of us, and I mean, in a political sense. Between panels, I talk to a World Economic Forum official, good-natured. I express some disbelief at all the attention to climate change. It seems to me a spectacular example of groupthink, not to say hysteria. He says — good-naturedly — “Oh, come on, Jay! Don’t tell me you still don’t believe in global warming!”
Well, “believe” is an interesting word. I relate to him a little personal history: I grew up during the coming ice age, when we were in for a terrible freeze — there would be cross-country skiing in Miami. We also had the population scare. Remember population? It was the global warming of its time. Our planet was being choked off, because there were too many people — too many mouths to feed, too many bodies to care for. Population was the enemy. And responsible people were having only one child, or, preferably, none. The phrase “population control” was on everyone’s lips.
Then, sometime in the 1990s, I began hearing about a “birth dearth.” And — come to think of it — I haven’t heard the phrase “population control” in years.
My point is, I, and my contemporaries, came of age in a period of environmental alarums — various and successive ones. And, for the rest of one’s life, that makes one a wee bit wary of jumping on bandwagons. Besides which, you have to wonder about the motivations of some global-warmingists, who seem as eager to punish the “greedy” American economy as they do to nurse the earth. I suggest the following, when talking to my World Economic Forum friend: It could be that global warming is, in fact, an impending disaster, and that mankind must take radical steps to save itself — just as everyone here says. Or it could be that future generations will look back at us and say, “What in the world were they smoking?”
BLOVIATION AND DESERTIFICATION
But no such skepticism — “denial” — is heard in Davos’s Congress Center, where a German conservative, Chancellor Merkel, has the floor. She cites the Club of Rome, approvingly — I had always thought of them as something of an embarrassment — and warns of encroaching “desertification.” But she says that, to be green, you don’t have to “limit growth”; you need only to grow responsibly. And I think this is one of Merkel’s best characteristics: responsibleness.
 A view of Davos’s Congress CenterYoshiko Kusano
A few hours later, I moderate a dinner panel, and the theme is storytelling — specifically, “Getting the Message Across with a Story.” Several business moguls speak of advertising, and how to do it effectively, but many people want to talk about global warming. They can’t help themselves; the subject is simply unstoppable. One participant says he knows of someone who fears he will never be a grandfather . . . because of global warming. Not because the Jihad will snuff us all — well, many of us — but because of global warming. I find it hard to keep still, marveling at the fever that has gripped this illustrious audience. It seems a millenarian fever.
And someone has forwarded me an article, via the Internet: It was published in The Journal of Affective Disorders, and it is titled “Global warming possibly linked to an enhanced risk of suicide: Data from Italy, 1974-2003.” Really.
As the dinner winds down, I am grateful to one mogul who says all the right things about global warming — meaning, the politically correct things: This is a terrible threat, we all must adjust our behavior, etc. But he adds, as a kind of coda, that, last year in Davos, the big topic was bird flu — and “I’ve heard no mention whatever of it this year.” Quite so.
Behind the scenes, some of us doubters — skeptics, deniers — get together and compare notes. An official from the Bush administration says that she has been accosted on global warming wherever she has gone. The line is, “Why is the United States letting the rest of the planet burn?” She has not disguised her heterodoxy, or heresy. One fancy lady said to her, “But haven’t you seen Al Gore’s movie?” The Bushie said no. The fancy lady said to her, not with malice, but like she was a pathetic, ignorant child, “Oh, you must learn, dear. I’ll send the movie to you.”
A friend of mine says that he attended a crowded session on the meeting’s (official) theme: “The Shifting Power Equation.” Global warming was not among the topics to be discussed. And the participants revolted — forcing the moderator to include it. They then judged global warming to be the single most important issue facing the world. They did this by actual votes.
As my friend tells it, one brave woman, perhaps Indian, got up and expressed amazement that Davos should be so “enamored” with global warming. And that word “enamored” provoked gasps. I would like to find the woman and throw some kind of medal around her neck.
A third doubter — more like a realist — tries to find a comparison to the 1930s. Today, the obvious and global danger is militant Islam. The wolf is not only at the door, it is in some cases already in the house. And yet the world — certainly as represented by Davos (a pretty good representative) — is obsessed with global warming. In the 1930s, as the Axis built, were they perhaps worried about the quality of lakes?
In due course, we all receive a bulletin in our Davos e-mail: Climate Change: Make Davos Greenhouse Gas Neutral. The notice goes on to say,
Climate Change is at the centre of our discussions [no kidding], and you can act now. Please consider compensating your greenhouse gas emissions related to participating in the Annual Meeting in Davos.
This is possible with 1 click at any kiosk or at the Davos Climate Alliance desk.
Many thanks for your help. In other words, you can contribute to an anti-global-warming fund in order to relieve your guilt at having used, for example, an airplane. I put this in Jacksonian terms (I mean Jesse, not Andrew): Don’t be emittin’ without remittin’. Later, Kevin Schmiesing of the Acton Institute will write that these remissions remind him of the indulgences of old, whereby you washed away your sins by your financial contributions. The notorious German friar Johann Tetzel (allegedly) said, “As soon a coin in coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.” (He was a rhymer too, at least in English translation.) And more than a few of us have described a certain kind of environmentalism as a modern religion.
BRITISH ACCENTS
Have you heard, by the way, about Prince Charles? He canceled his trip to Klosters — the next town over from Davos — where he has long skied. The reason was, he wanted to reduce his “carbon footprint.” The prince would be a natural Davos attendee, in that he has declared global warming “the biggest threat to mankind.”
Speaking of Brits, David Cameron, MP for Witney, is here. He is the new leader of the Conservative party, and thus a successor, in this sense, to Winston Churchill. And he is a firm, firm global-warming man (Cameron, I mean, not Churchill). He tells a group of us journalists that the “big question” is, “Are we going to act before it’s too late?” He believes that Americans are finally waking up to this threat, as evidenced by the reelection of Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. Obviously, Cameron is not a student of American politics, or at least of California. But Schwarzenegger is an American hero in Davos, because he has made all the right moves on global warming. Cameron further says that enlightened politicians are trekking to Norway, “to see the importance of climate change firsthand.” He himself has, and so have Hillary Clinton and John McCain.
As he continues with us, Cameron speaks of “green growth” and “green outcomes” and “gas-guzzling cars.” No one in this town — this pretty Swiss village up in the Alps — can out-climate-change him, and that’s saying something.
But the British prime minister, Mr. Blair, does fairly well. Giving a speech in the Congress Center, he calls global warming “a moral cause.” And he, too, praises Schwarzenegger, and also McCain, who is in attendance. McCain, says Blair, has “driven the agenda forward in the United States.” Soon, McCain himself is onstage, driving the agenda forward. He says, “I bring you good news” — and that news is that Congress will probably act quickly on global warming, and that the administration is coming along, too. “I freely admit to you that it’s very late and may not be enough, but I think that for the first time there may be some action on this very important issue.”
My sense is that McCain’s global-warming passion is almost enough to make Davos forgive him for the Iraq War. In this, he is not unlike Tony Blair.
Some days later, the lights go out all over Europe, but not in the way Sir Edward Grey meant: Frenchmen make the Eiffel Tower go dark, Italians make the Colosseum go dark, and Greeks make their parliament go dark, all in protest of climate change. I can’t help feeling we’re witnessing some large, end-of-the-world cult. The splendid British journalist Charles Moore, writing in The Spectator, has the same feeling:
Now and again, one reads little news stories about sects which, believing that the end of the world is nigh, gather on a hill in Montana or in a car park in Geneva to await the Last Day, and then, when nothing happens, rather sheepishly go home. The same embarrassment threatens those environmentalists who say that if we fail to reverse greenhouse gas emissions now, it will be too late (latest Sunday Times headline: ‘Last warning: 10 years to save world’). What will they do when the planet stubbornly refuses to die? They will go on to the next cause, with nary a backward glance. Another Davos, another theme.
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