Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, International Man of Hysteria, warned last week that "climate change is not something waiting to happen. It is impacting seriously the lives of many people around the world."  Annan stated that 300,000 people a year are dying from climate-related malnutrition, diarrhea and malaria.  99% of these deaths are in developing countries which are estimated to have contributed less than 1% of the world's total carbon emissions.

There is absolutely no data to support these wild suppositions.  Thoughtful people might consider that many of these deaths are largely avoidable via strictly man-made means.  For example, 50 million malaria deaths have resulted from bans on DDT (around the same number of combatants and civilians killed in World War II), inspired by a past environmental scare.  In fact, the U.N. itself has bowed to pressure, reversed its previous stance, and now wants to phase out DDT use worldwide by the early 2020s, if not sooner.  Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecies. 

One might also logically conclude something from the natural correlation between lack of carbon emissions and health.  OF COURSE 99% of deaths from malnutrition and disease come from non-industrialized nations that lack the technological advancements of industrialized ones.  If greens have their way in reducing those infrastructures in developed countries to lower carbon emissions, there will be even more deaths.  This is the essential paradox of modern environmentalism.

But in any case, Annan's fear-mongering is falling on increasingly stony ground, in spite of what George Will calls the "incessant hectoring by the media-political complex's 'consciousness-raising' campaign" for which there has been "no precedent for today's media enlistment in the crusade to promote global warming 'awareness'" (even my kids see right through the rote and tedious environmental wheedling on Nickelodeon and The Disney Channel by teen celebrities who fly on private jets.) 

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, the authors of "Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Seaving the Planet to Environmentalists," stated in a recent column in the National Review that the "green bubble" has burst.  Between January 2008 and January 2009, the percentage of Americans who told the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that the environment was a "top priority" dropped from 56% to 41%.  Gallup and Rasmussen have found similar results in the number of Americans who believe that global warming is a serious problem.  Apparently, the cooling global economy, coupled with cooling global temperatures over the past few years, has also cooled the public's ardor for massive, expensive and/or radical climate change solutions.  However, 48% of the group Rasmussen calls the Political Class (or in other words, the elite) continues to believe global warming is man-made. 

According to Nordhaus and Shellenberger, this should come as no surprise.  The current green movement was as much a reaction of the American Left to eight years of Dubya's Administration than anything else.  As they put it, "The green cultural moment, with its emphasis on redemption, harmony, and healing, was less a response to the fear of future ecological disasters than to present-day social ones."   The pointless gestures by greens of crusading against plastic grocery bags and styrofoam containers, turning off the electricity for an hour, buying Priuses, showering with a bucket to reuse water, taking the bus or riding a bike to work, and generally railing against consumerism originated as some sort of weird group therapy for sufferers of Bush Derangement Syndrome and a way for urban coastal liberals to affirm and demonstrate their status as an "elite."  The "living green" of Utopian environmentalism, is in fact, a pseudo-religious movement. As Nordhaus and Shellenberger point out: 

Nonetheless, it has become an article of faith among many greens that the global poor are happier with less and must be shielded from the horrors of overconsumption and economic development--never mind the realities of infant mortality, treatable disease, short life expectancies, and grinding agrarian poverty. The convenient and ancient view among elites that the poor are actually spiritually rich, and the exaggeration of insignificant gestures like recycling and buying new lightbulbs, are both motivated by the cognitive dissonance created by simultaneously believing that not all seven billion humans on earth can "live like we live" and, consciously or unconsciously, knowing that we are unwilling to give up our high standard of living. This is the split "between what you think and what you do" to which Pollan refers, and it should, perhaps, come as no surprise that so many educated liberals, living at the upper end of a social hierarchy that was becoming ever more stratified, should find the remedies that Pollan and Beavan offer so compelling. But, while planting a backyard garden may help heal the eco-anxieties of affluent greens, it will do little to heal the planet or resolve the larger social contradictions that it purports to address.

There is no question that we face many environmental challenges, not the least of which is energy independence.

But obviously, it is conservatives who are going to have to lead on this issue. Liberals are too obsessed with touchy-feely trivialities and a preening sense of self-importance to take responsible decisions based on fact and balance the needs of the planet with the needs of the people who dwell on it.

George Will is right: "Reengagement with reality is among the recession's benefits."