Euro-elites make McCain blush

I've been speed-reading through the several half-finished magazines on my night-stand and came across this interesting anecdote about John McCain from a March issue of National Review, ("Fever in the Alps"--subscription required). Reporting on the global warming obsession at the 2007 World Economic Forum, Jay Nordlinger writes:

"Speaking of Brits, David Cameron, MP for Witney, is here. He is the new leader of the Conservative party, and thus a successor, in this sense, to Winston Churchill. And he is a firm, firm global-warming man (Cameron, I mean, not Churchill). He tells a group of us journalists that the “big question” is, “Are we going to act before it’s too late?” He believes that Americans are finally waking up to this threat, as evidenced by the reelection of Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. Obviously, Cameron is not a student of American politics, or at least of California. But Schwarzenegger is an American hero in Davos, because he has made all the right moves on global warming. Cameron further says that enlightened politicians are trekking to Norway, “to see the importance of climate change firsthand.” He himself has, and so have Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

As he continues with us, Cameron speaks of “green growth” and “green outcomes” and “gas-guzzling cars.” No one in this town — this pretty Swiss village up in the Alps — can out-climate-change him, and that’s saying something.

But the British prime minister, Mr. Blair, does fairly well. Giving a speech in the Congress Center, he calls global warming “a moral cause.” And he, too, praises Schwarzenegger, and also McCain, who is in attendance. McCain, says Blair, has “driven the agenda forward in the United States.” Soon, McCain himself is onstage, driving the agenda forward. He says, “I bring you good news” — and that news is that Congress will probably act quickly on global warming, and that the administration is coming along, too. “I freely admit to you that it’s very late and may not be enough, but I think that for the first time there may be some action on this very important issue.”

My sense is that McCain’s global-warming passion is almost enough to make Davos forgive him for the Iraq War. In this, he is not unlike Tony Blair.

Some days later, the lights go out all over Europe, but not in the way Sir Edward Grey meant: Frenchmen make the Eiffel Tower go dark, Italians make the Colosseum go dark, and Greeks make their parliament go dark, all in protest of climate change. I can’t help feeling we’re witnessing some large, end-of-the-world cult. The splendid British journalist Charles Moore, writing in The Spectator, has the same feeling:

Now and again, one reads little news stories about sects which, believing that the end of the world is nigh, gather on a hill in Montana or in a car park in Geneva to await the Last Day, and then, when nothing happens, rather sheepishly go home. The same embarrassment threatens those environmentalists who say that if we fail to reverse greenhouse gas emissions now, it will be too late (latest Sunday Times headline: ‘Last warning: 10 years to save world’). What will they do when the planet stubbornly refuses to die?

They will go on to the next cause, with nary a backward glance. Another Davos, another theme. "

(emphasis added)