Eco-Enslavement

Slowly - but oh so surely - the lid is being peeled of the "stop global warming" movement, and the hideous stench of political elitism is the first thing, naturally, to seep out. Via James Taranto's Opinion Journal (which I am having trouble linking directly to at the current moment), we get this tale of horrific hypocrisy from across the pond:

In [the London Times article] it was revealed that the leader of the UK Conservative Party, David Cameron, offsets his carbon emissions by effectively keeping brown people in a state of bondage. Whenever he takes a flight to some foreign destination, Cameron donates to a carbon-offsetting company that encourages people in the developing world to ditch modern methods of farming in favour of using their more eco-friendly manpower to plough the land. S o Cameron can fly around the world with a guilt-free conscience on the basis that, thousands of miles away, Indian villagers, bent over double, are working by hand rather than using machines that emit carbon.

Welcome to the era of eco-enslavement.

The details of this carbon-offsetting scheme are disturbing. Cameron offsets his flights by donating to Climate Care. The latest wheeze of this carbon-offsetting company is to provide "treadle pumps" to poor rural families in India so that they can get water on to their land without having to use polluting diesel power. Made from bamboo, plastic and steel, the treadle pumps work like "step machines in a gym," according to some reports, where poor family members step on the pedals for hours in order to draw up groundwater which is used to irrigate farmland. These pumps were abolished in British prisons a century ago. It seems that what was considered an unacceptable form of punishment for British criminals in the past is looked upon as a positive eco-alternative to machinery for Indian peasants today.

What might once have been referred to as "back-breaking labour" is now spun as "human energy.

Amazing. We should live in the dark, turn in our SUV's, and mow our lawns with a rusty pocketknife, so that "green" politicians can travel guit-free in their GulfStreams.

What a scam, and I pity the fools that have fallen so head-over-heels into the cult of global warming...