Infamy! Infamy!

They've all got it in for me!

That most alarmist of worshippers at the altar of Gaia has a catchy headline at the top of the front page:

Copenhagen – Historic failure that will live in infamy

It is further billed as a “Green activist’s searing despatch from Denmark“. I’m certain that Mr (or perhaps Ms, who can tell) Garman will be enjoying their moment of fame on the front page, but let us consider the “searing despatch from Denmark” in more detail:

The most progressive US president in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speaker-phone from a beach in Hawaii.

It’s hard to know where to begin, really. Presumably, Garman is one of that strange breed that believes that “progressives” are people of substance. One need only look at the immense achievements of “progressives” like our own Harman or Smith or Mandelson to disabuse ourselves of this notion. But it is further curious to assume that the Chicago-machine politician known as the “Teleprompter Jesus” across the pond would have anything of substance to say ever. Widely regarded as America’s answer to Blair, Obama is certainly better-looking than Saint Tony, but without the assistance of teleprompter, he makes George W. Bush look articulate! In fact, as frightening as the concept may be, I think he may actually be less intelligent than Bush and he is also not nearly as good a politician as Blair.

His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that could challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation that put a man on the Moon can’t summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantle of a religion.

Is that not perhaps the most astonishingly ironical lack of self-awareness that has ever occurred in the whole of human history? An alarmist who proclaims the end of the world through mankind’s misdeeds, who demands the sacrifice of our lifestyle, our economy and, almost certainly, our lives on the altar of an unsubstantiated belief, accuses someone else of turning their chosen lifestyle and economic model into a religion.

Quite extraordinary!

Then a Chinese premier who is in the process of converting his Communist nation to that new faith (high-carbon consumer capitalism) takes such umbrage at Barack Obama’s speech that he refuses to meet – sulking in his hotel room, as if this were a teenager’s house party instead of a final effort to stave off the breakdown of our biosphere.

Indeed: a Chinese premier who has seen Communism fail to deliver a decent life for his nation and is grudgingly allowing his people a better life is not showing proper obeisance to environmentalism. How dare put the interests of his people above those of environmental activists.

Late in the evening, the two men meet and cobble together a collection of paragraphs that they call a “deal”, although in reality it has all the meaning and authority of a bus ticket, not that it stops them signing it with great solemnity.

And thank goodness for that!

I found this next statement particularly telling:

Obama’s team then briefs the travelling White House press pack – most of whom, it seems, understand about as much about global-climate politics as our own lobby hacks know about baseball.

Notice that our activist is not concerned about the science, or even the economics of this whole folderol. The only thing that matters is the politics. Because, of course, the science is settled, the economics don’t matter and only politics can save us. The fact that any agreement achieved at Copenhagen would not even be thought through to the normal piffling extent for which politicians are so justly renowned and would be full of catastrophic consequences has not occurred to our intrepid correspondent. The fact that they have agreed some initial steps is, in itself, frightening enough. The world would be rendered unfit for human habitation if they had gotten away with it.

Things have come to a pretty pass when it’s only the incompetence of politicians that has saved us from immediate disaster.

(Or perhaps it was ever thus.)

TJW is an itinerant blogger who lives in East Angular. He grew up as a fascist, mellowed into a Tory and was converted to anarchism in his middle age by the Devil's Kitchen.