Derb On The Science Guy: "Nye Lied, I Sighed."

By John Derbyshire

05/21/2015

My weekly column at Taki’s Magazine is up: "Nye Lied, I Sighed."

(For the rhetorically challenged, that’s a case of assonance, the agreement of vowels — actually, in this case, of diphthongs — not to be confused with alliteration, the agreement of consonants.)

The "Nye" there is Bill Nye the Science Guy, who gave a commencement address to graduates at Rutgers University on Sunday.

What did the Science Guy have to say to the Rutgers graduates? Well, he warned them of the horrors of climate change, which he linked to global inequality.

"We’re going to find a means to enable poor people to advance in their societies in countries around the world. Otherwise, the imbalance of wealth will lead to conflict and inefficiency in energy production, which will lead to more carbon pollution and a no-way-out overheated globe."

Uh, given that advanced countries use far more energy per capita than backward ones — the U.S.A. figure is thirty-four times Bangladesh’s — wouldn’t a better strategy be to keep poor countries poor? We could, for example, encourage all their smartest and most entrepreneurial people to emigrate to the First World … Oh, wait: we already do that.

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