Peter,

George Will’s article is great. Over in the UK, two other articles by influential commentators this weekend said similar things. First, Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph:

If I am right, the politics of climate change are bad. They attract the self-righteous and the self-flagellating, the controlling, the life-denying, the people who don’t like people, the people who, like Private Fraser in Dad’s Army, think we’re “all DOOMED”. And when I listen to many of the scientists who join in the argument, I often hear in what they say not the voice of science itself, but of the bad politics, thinly disguised by a white coat.

(That’s an important point about the scientists, by the way). Next, Matthew Parris in The Times:

Guilt, resentment and apocalypse. Prophets have since the dawn of history recognised the power they can unleash by linking these three. Elijah told of earthquake, wind and fire; Jeremiah of disasters unnumbered. Ignatius Loyola, Luther, Calvin, the Wesleys, Moses, Mohammad . . . and countless other seers, ayatollahs and divines, have called upon us to bail out of whatever version of Sodom and Gomorrah it has pleased them to paint, before those cities burn. The prophets of climate change are their inheritors, reclothing new belief in the metaphor of the old, reconnecting it to those ancient drives. So there you have it. The Friends of the Earth are Elijah’s latest recruits. Eco-apocalypticism is the new religion.

Meanwhile, we see Tony Blair personally blocking environmentalist-inspired plans to cut emissions. If there’s one thing Tony is good at, it is recognizing and opposing zealotry.