Our Best Hopes, Not Our Worst Fears

By Alan Caruba

I will be attending the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change March 2-4 and will be surrounded by perhaps 500 or more of the world’s leading skeptics of global warming. Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, scientists, economists, and policy makers will come together from many nations to share the facts that so clearly debunk this global hoax.

Generated out of the United Nations through its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the reports that underwrote the global warming hoax were from the beginning protested by many of the scientists and others invited to contribute to them.

It didn’t matter, though, because (1) the findings reported were based on flawed or deliberately false computer models and (2) the findings were preordained and determined by an inner circle of global warming propagandists for the purpose of creating a global crisis that would put more and more control of the world under the control of the UN.

The failure of its predecessor, the League of Nations, should have been a sufficient lesson to avoid the creation of the United Nations, but the world that followed the end of World War Two yearned for a way to avoid another one. What it got was a collection of the worst cynics who did the bidding of dictators most of the time while plotting to become themselves the greatest dictators in history. The United States was always the exception and, as often as not, the point of the sword when military action was required.

The world has always been a scary place. There are always people ready to commit the worst crimes against humanity in the name of some political, economic or religious doctrine. Despite that, more of humanity is freer now than it was at the beginning of the last century. It took a number of large, small, and Cold wars, but the outcome is brighter for millions because brave men and women made great sacrifices for freedom.

Always, too, there have been voices saying, “This is not our war” or “This war is a bad idea”, but freedom is a particularly American idea, even though it has been pursued by many people in many nations for many centuries. Born in the crucible of war, the American experiment has always been the standard, the lamp of liberty held high.

Part of being free is to be free of the lies and deceptions that are widely disseminated to convince people to give up their freedom for an illusionary security, for guarantees that government will take care of you from birth to the grave.

I was reminded of this while making preparations to attend a conference where scientific proof will be the measure of what is real or not. The conference is a confirmation of the freedom America provides to those for whom only the truth matters. This is a conference about what real science offers in the face of superstition and political subversion.

I was reminded, too, of something President Ronald Reagan once said: “Whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts. My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty’s lamp guiding your steps and opportunity’s arm steadying your way.”

The election that lies ahead for Americans must be about our best hopes, not our worst fears about the hobgoblin of global warming and the illusion of “energy independence.” Its outcome must be based on truth-telling, not vague promises of change or naïve beliefs that the nation can be protected by making deals with thugs or by not engaging them on the battlefield as so many Americans did in the past to preserve a future based on freedom.