Apple’s Steve Jobs nailed the folly of the rhetoric emanating from green pressure groups, politicians, supranational organizations, the media’s superficial treatment of the global warming issue, and — above all — Europeans from all walks of life spouting the received wisdom of Europe’s superiority when it comes to the issue of climate change based on their breast-beating and grandiose claims

It was in a specific context of Greenpeace’s criticism of Apple for not sufficiently bowing and scraping, but the assessment rings clear like a bell:

“I think your organisation particularly depends too much on principle and not enough on fact,” Jobs said to the Greenpeace representatives. “You guys rate people based on what people say their plans are in the distant future, not what they are doing today. I think you put way too much weight on these glorified principles and way too little weight on science and engineering.
“It would be very helpful if your organisation hired a few more engineers and actually entered into dialogue with companies to find out what they are really doing and not just listen to all the flowery language when in reality most of them aren’t doing anything. That’s my opinion.”

As previously noted here (and here and here and here…and especially here), the public, political, diplomatic and media discourse on “global warming” is about as fact-free a zone as one could ever despair of, even simply in terms of the purported angels and demons. Europe — in high dudgeon over the fact that the better-performing U.S. refuses to make a promise that Europe is breaking — is the bee’s knees and the U.S. a rogue pariah.