"Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Friendly old girl of a town
'Neath her tavern light
On this merry night
Let us clink and drink one down
To wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Salty old queen of the sea"
— Frank
Loesser lyrics for "Wonderful Copenhagen"
first performed by Danny Kaye in the 1952 film, "Hans Christian
Andersen"
Well, according to the climate-concerned, if someone
doesn't do something soon, wonderful friendly Copenhagen will be a very
salty old queen when the globally-warmed sea rises over the world's
oldest ferris wheel in Tivoli Gardens.
I was there
20 years ago and I recall the city already sits low on a coastal island.
I arrived in
Denmark by boat, from Norway, then took the train back to Sweden. Though
I did fly to and from Scandinavia, tourist-class, I didn't leave as much
of a carbon footprint as the delegates to the United Nations
climate-change conference who are flying in on private jets this week.
Hope they at least carpool from the airport.
Maybe some
of the Beautiful People from here who have been fighting Cape Wind will
see the beautiful wind farms off the Danish coast.
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The Little Mermaid of Copenhagen |
Delegates to
the conference could have saved fuel by teleconferencing; though it
wouldn't have been as much fun to "clink and drink" from home. I heard
that
Leonardo DiCaprio and Daryl Hannah are dropping by. He once played
someone who was killed by an iceberg (freed from a melting glacier?),
and she was a mermaid in another movie (Copenhagen is famous for
its statue of The Little Mermaid from the Hans Christian Andersen
story).
One mission
of the conference is to reduce greenhouse gases by letting people who
want to make a lot of gases get "credits" from other people who don't
want to make as many gases. This sounds like, once again, the rich get
to buy whatever they want, while the rest of us fly coach.
Europe is
presently using this carbon trading scheme; and much of the resulting
international criminal activity originates in Denmark because it has a
VAT (value added tax) rate of 25 percent. Don't ask me what the VAT has
to do with carbon credits or how this scam works; but rest assured — it
was inevitable, and lots of euros were involved.
Denmark
recently rushed to pass laws prohibiting this criminal activity,
whatever it was, before the climate conference at which other countries
would be urged to consider trading in carbon credits.
Speaking of
scams, have you heard the one about the climate-concerned British
researchers who decided to ignore data that didn't fit the global
warming scenario? Unfortunately for them and the credibility of their
research, they put their discussions in e-mails that hackers found and
publicized.
Professor
Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East
Anglia referred to a "trick" used to adjust statistics to "hide the
decline" in recent temperatures. Jones insists that the word "trick" was
just a euphemism for "clever thing to do." No doubt.
Now I must
say that hacking into private e-mail isn't nice. But neither is using
unproven "man-made global warming" to empower governments to wheel and
deal with favored polluters, take over entire economies, and, of course,
raise taxes on all of us who pollute because we live and breathe.
Left to my
own devices, I'd be an environmentalist. My first political activity was
membership in Zero Population Growth; I believed the Earth would be
better off with fewer people. I still think so, but I haven't figured
out how to determine who gets to stay, or where the others will go.
I'm
concerned about endangered species, and would rather save tigers and
whales than, say, the hypocrites who are flying on their private jets
from their mansions to Copenhagen. I worried about birds flying into
windmills until the Mass Audubon Society supported Cape Wind and I read
that most birds have learned to avoid them off Denmark. I think photos
of nature look better without people in them — though, of course, I
value the photographer.
It's just
that the professional environmentalists are so annoying! All that
preaching makes me think of the Beautiful People who drive large SUVs in
circles around farmers' markets looking for a parking space so they can
"buy local."
I honestly
don't know if the globe is warming or heading for another ice age as we
were told in the '70s, in both cases by experts who want to scare us for
reasons that seem to have something to do with an urge to control us. I
don't pretend to understand this urge, but I see it in government
activity every day.
Some of us
are so busy resisting the effort to control that we forget what we'd
likely be doing if left alone — trying our best to take care of our
planet and its varied species, avoiding waste and compulsive
consumption, and creating a green revolution.
I want to
save wonderful Copenhagen, from either rising seas or another ice sheet
like the one that covered it and also New England, long before mankind
polluted anything. I want an honest, non-manipulative conversation about
climate change.
Until I get
it, I'll refuse to play the "sky is falling, sea is rising" game and
just write irreverent columns like this one.
