WSJ: Pretty close to sickening
Posted by Pierre Igot in: SocietyAugust 15th, 2003 • 5:23 am
Today’s edition of the Wall Street Journal‘s Best of the Web column includes a long item on the recent death toll caused by the heat wave in France (which French authorities put at close to 3,000 deaths).
Then James Taranto writes:
Might it be noteworthy that the French are claiming almost the same number of deaths from the heat as America suffered on Sept. 11? A popular lunatic conspiracy theory on the “European street” has it that George W. Bush is to blame every time the weather is bad… Don’t be surprised if the America-haters’ next talking point is that by renouncing the Kyoto Protocols Bush killed as many people as Osama bin Laden did.
I must admit that I find this type of writing downright sickening. Nowhere in the articles that I’ve read on the subject or, indeed, in the very column referred to by Taranto — nowhere have I seen any mention of any link, however remote, between the recent heat wave with its associated death toll and the US’s refusal to ratify the Kyoto Accord.
From what I can see, the “conspiracy theory” is not happening on the European street. It’s happening in the heads of dangerously influential editorial writers in major American publications, who are exhibiting clear symptoms of a very bad case of international paranoia. from what I can see, the “lunatics” are not in the streets of Europe. They are in the Oval Office, 10 Downing Street, and the head offices of ultra-conservative American newspapers.
Meanwhile, reasonable people worldwide are simply saying that we are obviously polluting our planet at an increasingly alarming rate and that — whether it has anything to do with climate change, heat waves, or dreary, rainy summers in Nova Scotia like the one we’ve been HAVING here — this careless destruction of our environment must be brought back under control. Needless to say, this is not something that’s going to be achieved by “securing oil fields” in Iraq.