Don't miss this: More great stuff from Pointman, who is without question one of my very favorite climate bloggers

Some thoughts about policy for the aftermath of the climate wars. | Pointman's

The global warming craze is dying down. People, as Mackay noted, are coming out of it one by one and that process is accelerating with every passing day. Governments are cutting subsidies for green technologies not only because they don’t work, but because government coffers are empty. They’re broke. The politicians no longer mention it because it no longer gets votes and indeed just attracts a baleful hostility from a cash-strapped electorate, worried about paying their soaring power bills in the midst of the worst recession in living memory.

The reputation of climate science has taken a terrible beating, with one iconic symbol after another brought down by the skeptic blogosphere. The arrogant and at times criminal behaviour of some of the alarmist scientists involved, such as Peter Gleick, has further eroded any respect for it. Within the field and in related ones, researchers are now emboldened to question the supposedly “settled” science. Across the world, the carbon trading market is dead. The journalists specialising on the environment are finding their jobs disappearing or under threat, and are consequently moving on to other more viable niches. Basically, the popular media are deserting the party. High principles about saving the planet are all okay, but one’s livelihood is so much more important, isn’t it?

The whole political movement has already made too many poor inward-looking decisions and from any conceivable strategic viewpoint, their position is by now unrecoverable. The mainstream politicians are avoiding them like the plague or keeping them in the waiting room for a change, and there’s an emergent pattern of alarmists being released from hitherto safe sinecures like NASA, the BBC and certain prestigious news outlets in places like Washington, amongst others. The embarrassment factor has just got too big and the establishment is, as they euphemistically say, reconfiguring its posture.

The only people, who will be left on the burning deck of the sinking ship when all else have fled, will be the political activists and the committed climate scientists, who aren’t all that clued up politically.

That’s a wall, look at it, and read the writing on it. You’re being flushed.
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Stepping back from the problem, I think we should be guided by a complete reversal of the current environmental priority. From now on, we should save people first and then the Earth, rather than the other way around. If any policy injures people in favour of the name of the environment, it gets scrapped. People first, planet second. A nice simple mantra.
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The big thing which is needed, and will bring on prosperity, is electricity...
When people are lifted out of grinding poverty, then they’ll be inclined to consider the environment, never mind the planet.
...Like every global warming skeptic out there whom I’ve ever talked with, I was and still am an old-fashioned environmentalist. Like a surprising number of them, I was there at the start, doing my part in preventing the needless and wanton destruction of nature, because I loved it.
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If there was a single effective result from those fights, it was wresting the scientific heights out of the hands of the alarmists, which gives the politicians the authority to say the science is far from settled. It simply created that crack in the establishment consensus, that room for manoeuvre, which they will use. The alarmists signally never ever came close to proving their case, and for me that was science at its glorious best. It’s pure Missouri – show me. Proof talks, bullshit walks. Science is a harsh mistress, as the alarmist scientists have found out.