Free Republic

"Representative democracy" has failed; the private sector is "inept"; and only bigger government - led by China and the US - has the power to save the world from climate change. So says Bill Gates in a dogmatic but somewhat confused interview with The Atlantic in which he simultaneously pours scorn on green tech solutions but insists that more of them are needed - on a scale bigger than the Manhattan Project - if we are to deal successfully with a problem whose nature he admits may well have been exaggerated by environmentalists.

(Snip) Klein says she "spent six years wandering through the wreckage caused by the carbon in the air and the economic system that put it there." Clearly, it is her goal to shatter the free-market system. The climate? It's just a vehicle, a pretext for uprooting the only economic system in history that has brought prosperity and good health. Klein's statement is perfectly in line with Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of United Nation's Framework Convention on Climate Change, and in fact is almost an echo. Figueres acknowledged earlier this year that the environmental activists' goal is not to spare the...

Economic Systems: The alarmists keep telling us their concern about global warming is all about man's stewardship of the environment. But we know that's not true. A United Nations official has now confirmed this. At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.