I love Mark Steyn. Yes, he does take his views to the extreme, but the point I really take from this article, and what I whole-heartedly agree with, is that for every knee-jerk reaction to the crisis-of-the-moment, there are unintended and potentially disastrous consequences.

The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death. –Mark Steyn

Feed your Prius, starve a peasant

Okay, so I know that’s taking it a bit–a large bit–far, but I do wonder what the consequences, both nationally and globally, are for our current hyper-reactivity to the global warming “crisis.” I don’t think there is should be any argument that our climate is changing. It’s always changing. Every year, every century, the Earth’s climate changes. I mean, we had snow yesterday… in late April! What I find very troubling about all the chatter on global warming is that not too long ago–perhaps 30 years–everyone was convinced that the world was headed straight for another ice age. Just exactly how much more advanced is our understanding of how climate change occurs now? The debate on the issue is just not settled. And anyone who is not willing to at least engage in a discussion obviously has some other interests to protect. (At least that’s what it seems like to me.)

Is reducing the amount of pollution we put into our atmosphere a good thing? Yes. Is investing in alternative energy sources a good investment for our future? Absolutely. But we need to be responsible in our approach. To me, responsibility means taking time to analyze new technologies and what impact large-scale utilizations of them will have. Next year at about this time, I imagine the polar ice caps will still be more frozen than not, and the ice on our beloved lakes will have gone out as usual. My point being that we have time to figure it out. This is not a “crisis” that needs to be “solved” in the next decade, especially when the potential solutions could have consequences much more immediately harmful than the problem.