Jonathan Tobin over at Contentions has this smart post on the latest in eco-crankery: You must jettison your air conditioners, lest poor people prosper:

The leftist critique of capitalism and all the improvements in the quality of life that it has brought remains what it has always been: the desire of intellectuals to dictate to the rest of humanity how they may live. Or even more to the point, how many of them may live at all. Thus, the latest New York Times feature about the evils of air conditioning and how the increasing demand for it in the Third World is unsustainable tells us a lot more about the left and its mindset than it does about the future of society.

The piece in the Sunday Review by Elisabeth Rosenthal at least is honest about why more air conditioning is needed. It is a major factor in productivity around the world. The economic boom in places like Singapore and other warm-weather cities was made possible in no small measure by air conditioning.

You can read the rest, which Jonathan pretty much sums thus: “Those plagued by Malthusian pessimism about the future of humanity have always underestimated human innovation. Instead of humanity being reduced in the decades after the first “Earth Day” to a “Soylent Green” nightmare of shortages and poverty in which scarcity of limited resources as swamped by a surplus of people, we have seen prosperity grow.”

One might also add that the more prosperous nations become, the fewer children families have. Which means fewer people running air conditioners and driving cars and, hopefully, reading the New York Times.

Allow me to lay my cards on the table here: I don’t care if climate change is a proven scientific fact or a leftist wet dream. I don’t care. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that it’s all true, every bit of it.

I say: Couldn’t happen to a nicer planet. Mother Earth? She’s not my mother. If she were, I’d be on the horn in two seconds to social services. Talk about abusive: earthquakes, hurricanes, twisters, cholera, malaria, drought, floods, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, landslides, blizzards, cyclones, the Chicago Cubs — millennia upon millennia of “natural” disasters.

As far as I’m concerned, climate change is payback. So burn, baby, burn!

As for me and mine, we’ll be tucked away in our hermetically sealed two-bedroom time-share survivalist shelter buried deep in the mountains of Tampa, Florida — with the air conditioning cranked to 11.

Who’s with me?! Metaphorically speaking! I did say two bedrooms!

*I have just been informed that there are no mountains in Tampa, Florida. I probably should have flown down there before mailing off that check. Damn Google Earth…