Mark Steyn on Nobel and hereditary nobility

MS: Yes, I am. I think Copenhagen is essentially a kind of left wing Democrat view of government gone global. You know, I often make the point that if you look at what’s happened in the United States since the Roosevelt era, where the federal government has used the Commerce Clause as an all-purpose justification for the expansion of the federal government, the environment is a brilliant, a brilliant excuse for the all-purpose introduction and expansion of global government, because it’s one thing, the minute you start talking about the planet, there’s nothing you can do in terms of doing it at the municipal or county level. You’ve got to do it at this Copenhagen global bureaucracy level. It will be a disaster.

HH: I had Ann McElhinney on yesterday, one of the producers of Not Evil, Just Wrong. She’s in Copenhagen. 30,000 activists, and she cannot but comment on the irony of the fine meals they are sharing, the wine glasses they are clinking, and the robust good time they are having while condemning Western consumption.
MS: Yes, and I wrote a parody of this about seven years ago, that when the U.N. held a sustainability conference in South Africa, and they were all guzzling champagne, and eating caviar every night, that it is beyond belief the way these international junkets live. This head guy, Dr. Pachauri, the Indian guy who heads this Copenhagen fiasco, in the last eighteen months, he racked up 450,000 air miles, including a couple of trips from New York back to Delhi, in India, one time, just for the practice of a cricket match, not even for the match, but just for a practice. And this idea that there’s a…if you look at them, whether they’re Al Gore in his carbon offset palace in Tennessee, Al Gore, the world’s first carbon billionaire, by the way, that in itself testifies to the preposterousness of this, or the Prince of Wales telling us that we need to end of the age of consumerism and capitalism, right before he gets into his limo and orders the driver to take him back to his other palace. This is about, actually, strangling social mobility, and letting a global elite, whether hereditary like the Prince of Wales, or simply part of the global bureaucracy like Dr. Pachauri run the planet. And I say nuts to that.
Read more.