An illuminating real-world example of this phenomenon has recently occurred in the governmental entity in which we live.  Ostensibly proposed to the Arizona state legislature as a means for fighting urban air pollution (an undeniably noble cause), a program designed to foster conversions of vehicles to accommodate alternative fuels that (supposedly) produce less of what fouls the air was passed (a seemingly logical action).  This measure provided that people who bought new cars and had them modified to run on alternative fuels by a certain date could receive generous rebates, very generous rebates, soooo very generous, in fact, that what originally was expected to cost the state a "mere" $3,000,000 was estimated just weeks later to be likely to cost $480,000,000; and in today's local newspaper (East Valley Tribune, 18 November 2000), it is reported that the governor's office claims that it is actually likely to cost state taxpayers something on the order of $682,000,000.  That's right.  Over 227 times more than originally estimated.

It goes without saying - but we'll say it anyway because it's so obscene - that the state budget cannot handle this incredible unanticipated drain on its finances; and many important programs will undoubtedly suffer as a consequence.  So desperate is the situation, in fact, that the governor of the state has called the legislature into special session to try to stop the monetary bleeding.  Once unleashed, however, it is difficult to close the floodgates of avarice that drive normally good citizens to take from some (the taxpayers as a whole) what they (a small part of that group) perceive to be owed them, which in this case is a really knotty problem, as the law does indeed state the program participants are owed what they claim.  Furthermore, many of them took advantage of the program with nothing but the best of intentions.  In fact, they were urged to take advantage of it by the very fact that the legislature created the program and made it so lucrative (although many elected officials have subsequently pled ignorance of what the words they ratified really mean).

It could well be asked, however - and indeed has been - if the intentions of the originators of the plan were as innocent or noble as those of some of the program's participants.  Already, in fact, one rising political star has crashed and burned.  The Speaker of the House of Representatives - a Republican who was the most vocal proponent of the bill and who appears to have taken extreme personal advantage of it - was ousted by a Democrat in his bid to move into the state Senate by a lopsided two-to-one vote in a predominantly Republican district; and he is now the subject of an ongoing investigation by the state Attorney General.

This spectacle, however, is truly small potatoes compared to the debacle that would result from the end game envisioned by those who press for adoption of the Kyoto Protocol and all that would ultimately follow its ratification.  Think of it: power to regulate the economic affairs of all the world concentrated in the hands of a group of environmental zealots who believe they are destined to save the planet from humanity itself.  And those are the good guys!  Behind them is a group that supports and encourages the movement for entirely different reasons, reasons that are rarely innocent and typically far from noble, as would appear to be the case in the Arizona alternative fuels fiasco.

In addition to the seminal danger of the potential emergence a powerful Planetary Management Authority, which sooner or later would end up being controlled by less than savory characters (as we said before, we're only human), another negative of the ongoing push towards Kyoto is that earth's biosphere will likely suffer from neglect of many real and serious problems that truly do beset it, as we fixate on the dubious threat of CO2-induced global warming.  As but one example of this phenomenon, Pockley (2000) reports from Bali, Indonesia in the 2 November issue of Nature that many delegates to the recently concluded Ninth International Coral Reef Symposium are concerned that the issue of potential reef bleaching due to global warming will push less exotic problems into the background.  He notes that blast and cyanide fishing (Schrope, 2000), for example, are claimed by some to be "indisputably the biggest threats to coral reefs" and that some reef specialists fear these more pressing and proven problems are in danger of being totally overshadowed by the more "'sexy' issue of global warming."

Although most people on both sides of the global warming question likely have good intentions, the best laid plans (of even the world's best minds) for dealing with the issue - and especially schemes designed to alter the climate of the entire planet by altering the activities of everybody living on it - are apt to deviate significantly from their stated objective.  They also are apt to cost a heck of a lot more than anticipated.  When, for example, a single state nearly self-destructs over a single program designed to accomplish such an obvious good as reducing urban air pollution, it raises a serious warning flag about attempts to tackle an infinitely more complicated problem (so called) that is so poorly defined as to have its very existence in doubt (see our Editorials of 15 June, 1 July, 15 July and 2 August 2000), as well as its cause (if it truly exists, which we sincerely doubt).  Clearly, the world would do well to heed the implications of the unfortunate experience currently confronting the citizens of Arizona.