The Nation's Climate Change Solution: 'Make the Recession Worse'

A lefty magazine editor has come up with a list of brilliant solutions to the planet's purported climate change problem: make the recession worse, make goods more expensive, and restrict all intercontinental travel to blimps.

So said Emily Douglas, web editor for The Nation, who, when asked Wednesday how we could "reverse our culture of consumerism," replied immediately "make the recession worse."

She later claimed that her response was a bit "tongue-in-cheek," according to CNS News, but admitted that her magazine "never shies away from doomsday scenarios."

Reflecting what many consider to be the underlying logic of and motivation for the cap-and-trade legislation currently languishing in the Senate, Douglas told CNS News that "things should be more expensive and that would do a lot and certainly reflect the, you know, better reflect the price of their, their real, their real price."

Douglas is not the first to suggest that a half-decent standard of living is destroying the planet. Lord Stern, the UK economist who wrote the English government's review of the economic costs of climate change in 2006, wrote last month that "rich nations will have to forget about growth to stop climate change," according to a headline in The Guardian.

Of course we have our fair share of anti-growth alarmists on this side of the pond. Thomas Friedman wrote disparagingly last month that "When it comes to raising gasoline taxes or carbon taxes — at a perfect time like this when prices are already low — our politicians tell us it is simply 'off the table.'"

Global warming alarmism is running up against some stubborn (and convenient for Americans who, you know, don't want to pay more for everything) truths, many of which have been documented here at NewsBusters.

But even putting aside climate change, can the world really afford the massive hike in prices on all agricultural and industrial goods that increases in energy prices are expected to bring?

Does it bother Douglas, Friedman, and their fellow radicals that untold millions in the Third World could starve as a direct result of increased energy prices? Those who do not enjoy the steady and sizable incomes that Douglas and Friedman do may not appreciate their calls for increases in prices for, well, everything.