Obama to Third World: Don’t Strive for More

President Obama took a strange message with him to Vietnam this week. At a town hall meeting sponsored by the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative, he lectured the country on the perils of following America’s industrial path.

“To some degree, this is not fair,” he admitted. “Because if you think about Western industrial development before we knew anything about climate change, they used enormous amounts of carbon energy.”

But he said that despite the inherent unfairness of it all, developing countries would just have to bite the bullet.

“The problem is that if a country like Vietnam or China or India took the same development path that the west did, we’re all going to be under water,” he said.

Just think for a second about how much audacity it requires to say something like this. Forget about how wrongheaded and delusional the whole anti-carbon movement is to begin with. Just assume for the sake of argument that the Climate Warriors are right. Even if that were the case, where does Obama get the gall?

But this is liberalism in a nutshell. The same worldview informs everything he does. This is “progressivism.” Whatever came before is bad. Whatever comes next (as long as liberals come up with it) is good. And with that in mind, they don’t just throw out the baby and the bathwater; they throw out the tub and the house as well.

Democracy, industrialism, capitalism, scientific advancement, technological growth – these systems are dependent on each other. Together, they have been responsible for the greatest exponential rise in our standard of life in history. Are these systems perfect? Far from it. But they are the foundation from which we can continually strive to make the world a better and better place.

And who knows? Maybe through continued study and advancement, we will find systems that make the earlier ones obsolete. Perhaps clean energy will get to the point where it really does eliminate the need for fossil fuels. Great! But we won’t get to that point by suddenly demonizing everything that would have gotten us there.

Progress is made by taking what works and building on it. Progressivism works by destroying the foundation and building something new in its place. Something untried, untested, and illogical.

If the third world resists this idiot path and America plunges down it, this planet is going to look very different in a hundred years.

And it won’t have much to do with water levels.