By John Tamny for RealClearPolitics
The light came on at roughly midnight, at which time Ms. Tutunjian “said a prayer of thanks and got up quickly.” Why was she getting up when most would be going to sleep?
According to New York Times reporter Raja Abdulrahim, Ms. Tutunjian “did not know how much time she had before she would be plunged back into darkness.”
This is life in Beirut at the moment. Amid an economic crisis born of government error (the redundancy of all redundancies), the electricity that powers modern living standards is intermittent. Ms. Tutunjian operates with great speed in the middle of the night because that’s when the odds of electricity access are greater.
In the words of Abdulrahim, upon getting up Tutunjian “stripped the sheets off the bed – soaked with sweat from Beirut’s stifling and humid heat,” only for her to start “the first of as many loads of laundry as the electricity would allow.”
Please stop and think about the misery they’re presently enduring in Beirut. Please think about it in terms of what global warming alarmists would like to foist on others. It’s surely others simply because vanishingly few of us in the more developed parts of the world would willingly suffer as Ms. Tutunjian does nightly for the alleged “greater good” of energy starvation.
Thinking about this more specifically, John Kerry is a big believer in the supposedly looming horrors of global warming, but does any reader seriously think that he wakes up to sheets soaked in sweat during Washington, D.C.’s unbearable summers? The question answers itself, after which there will be no writing about Kerry’s presumed hypocrisy.
Instead, this write-up will cheer Kerry and the comforts he doubtless enjoys. Let’s call those comforts progress, and they signal what the whole world will enjoy if economic freedom triumphs over the government error that has sadly wrecked a Beirut that was once referred to as “the Paris of the Middle East.”
If the earth is indeed “warming” as Kerry theorizes, how brilliant that technological advances have made it possible for more and more of us to maneuver around brutal summers thanks to air conditioning and other fruits of profit.
To the above, some will respond that the air-conditioning comforts are the source of warming itself. In other words, if people in the relatively rich parts of the world would turn off their ACs, the summer nights that are presently unbearable for Ms. Tutunjian wouldn’t be so awful. It’s a nice thought to imagine that we created the repressive heat, but also an absurd one.
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As anyone with even minute understanding of history is well aware, man has been trying to cool his surroundings for as long as man has existed. More modernly, it’s no coincidence that parts of the U.S. known for extreme summer heat (think Arizona, think the deep south, think Washington, D.C.) have become more populated as the former luxury that was air conditioning became a common market good.
It’s a simple reminder that extreme heat well predates the proliferation of automobiles, electricity, and other advances that have brought about staggering increases in living standards.
While it’s a trite statement, it’s certainly true that the more we work together, the more that we can accomplish. When we humans divide up work we specialize, and when we specialize our productivity soars. This specialization that among other things rendered food abundant, is what freed mankind for pursuits that included the invention of air conditioning, and even better, the mass production of air conditioning.
Thanks to this mass production, we’re now able to mitigate the worst effects of heat that is natural as sunlight itself. And this isn’t nothing. As anyone who lives in New Delhi, Karachi, and – yes – Beirut would confirm, a lack of air conditioning is incredibly unhealthy. Which means a lack of electricity is inimical to positive health outcomes.
Applied to the warming alarmists in our midst, to say they for the most part won’t live their alarmism is a statement of the obvious. Washington, D.C. is dense with humans who attend the proverbial church of Warming, but it’s also dense with houses, apartments and businesses in which air conditioning runs all day and all night in the summer. No soaked sheets here, and also no accusations of hypocrisy.
Instead, let’s embrace the fact that the global warming alarmists in the 1st World (a multiple redundancy) don’t live their worries about the planet.
Even if it’s true that the ubiquity of heat mitigation is warming the earth, how exciting to imagine what mankind will mass produce in the future to not just make the developed world more livable, but that will also bring comfort to the Ms. Tutunjians of the world who are presently very uncomfortable.
Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.
John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets, Vice President at FreedomWorks, a senior fellow at the Market Institute, and a senior economic adviser to Applied Finance Advisors (www.appliedfinance.com). His next book, The Money Confusion: How Illiteracy About Currencies and Inflation Sets the Stage For the Crypto Revolution, comes out on October 18th.
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