Dec 13 2007
The New Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Pollute– part 2
The cartoon of Global Warming persists despite all. So much so that the EU is risking an all out trade war with the US.
“The Association of European Airlines (AEA) has warned that implementation of this plan [to impose a carbon-dioxide charge on flights that cross EU airspace] could lead to a trade war between the US and the EU, according to the Times.
In late October, the new High Level Group presented a report urging the European Commission and EU member states to act against the countries with the highest carbon dioxide emissions. US President Bush has repeatedly emphasized that the international agreement would hurt the US economy, and the US delegation in Nairobi also emphasized that Washington did not intend to ratify the Protocol.
It seems the EU has gotten tired of the consistently defiant attitude displayed by the world’s major environmental culprit.”
The world’s major environmental culprit?. The EU seemed to have conveniently forgotten that China has surpassed the US in the level of pollution earlier this year.
Isn’t funny how China is treated as the golden child who can do no wrong? They enslave millions of people in concentration/ labor camps. They are more destructive to the environment in their attempts to catch up to the US than any other country in the world. And I’m not just talking about CO2 emissions. Personally, I think it’s because the EU (and the US for that matter— Can you say leaden toys?) has sunk their billions upon billions into China and they don’t dare threaten China with a burp and a pointy stick for fear of losing that investment.
It seems whatever their intentions, the environmentalist’s every proposal means punishing America and it means the decimation of the American middle class. There is just no getting around it. Europe will remain at their status quo level of prosperity. Despite signing the Kyoto Treaty, the Mediterranean Sea is becoming stagnant from all their pollution and the corral reefs around the Aegean are dying.
Also, I’m not sure, but I’ll wager that most of the provisions under the Kyoto Treaty are not rigorously enforced in any of the signed nations. Oh, I’m sure that the state can fine a company into oblivion for violating the treaty, but it doesn’t really have to. It’s only if a company strays from the party line, you see, or if they want something inconvenient done. Under ordinary circumstances, it would be called extortion, except in this case it’s called saving the environment.
The more I read about it, the more it sounds like a global shell game to hide who’s blowing who.
Once the Kyoto Treaty is ratified, the signed countries “have no obligation beyond monitoring and reporting emissions,” which makes them feel terribly good about themselves and their good deed, but it doesn’t actually tell them to do anything.
Kyoto also has one of these peculiar provisions:
Kyoto includes “flexible mechanisms” which allow Annex I economies to meet their greenhouse gas emission limitation by purchasing GHG emission reductions from elsewhere. These can be bought either from financial exchanges, from projects which reduce emissions in non-Annex I economies under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), from other Annex 1 countries under the JI, or from Annex I countries with excess allowances.
To those uninitiated into the complexities of the English language and the coarser beauties of strict legalism, this means that the rich can toss money at the poor to make themselves feel better about themselves. Or to put it in another way, this system will eliminate any and all competition in the marketplace. A wealthy, prosperous company can coerce a smaller company to sell it’s “GHG emission reductions” to the larger company. The larger company can squash the competition and feel all the bubbly emotions of a clear conscience. Kind of like Al Gore’s “off-setting carbon credits”, but on a global level.
We have words for this kind of behavior. Oppression. Tyranny.
But, hey don’t take it from me. Take it from Czech President Vaclav Klaus.
He was one of the leading figures in the former Czechoslovakia. When the Iron Curtain was falling and the Soviets were starting to implode, there was a mass demonstration, and probably within earshot of Red Troops, Vaclav Klaus stood up in the middle of the town square and shouted at the top of his lungs in English, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal!” The crowd roared.
Close to 20 years later, he became the President of the Czech Republic and he said this of our environmentalists:
“… the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants. Communism was replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism.”
“This ideology,” Klaus said, “wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central, now global, planning of the whole world.”
The Czech President is strongly opposed to environmentalism, which he calls a “religion based on political ambitions rather than science,” and accuses environmentalists of using “sophisticated methods of media manipulation” to spread “fear and panic”.
Sadly, for the EU, imposing their ideologies and regulations on member states is nothing new. President Klaus, in another context, complained that: “Every time I try to remove some piece of Soviet-era regulation, I am told that whatever it is I am trying to scrap is a requirement of the European Commission.”.”
If Europe decides to jump off the deep end in a fit of CO2, I don’t think we should follow them down the rabbit hole. Whatever their pretensions of economic and military autonomy from the United States, the truth is we’re still footing the bill for their silly social democratic way of life. We protect them, the children that they are, so that instead of paying for the expense of defending themselves, they grant themselves extended vacations and four-day work weeks. They are living off America.
I think we should respond to their “pollution tax” on us with an immediate automatic 200 percent tariff on all their products. Their actions, whatever the motivations, is a declaration of a trade war with the United States. It’s not called a trade war, but that’s what it is. They are using Environmentalism as a rational to deep-six us, but I don’t know if this problem will even be addressed.
As incredible as this might seem to the casual observer, our enemies are attempting to roll back the only successful revolution in the history of the world: The American Revolution. Whether our enemies are the atheists of Europe and Asia or the Radical Islamicists, they mean to smoother the first and, now, last remaining light of freedom in the modern world.
Our entire modern conception of freedom and liberty issues from the American Revolution, that all men were created equal under God Almighty, that it is the sovereignty of individual men to decide their own fate. In the period from our revolution on, there has been an explosion of creativity, innovation and wealth. Personal liberty, fairness, and justice was afford for all men, not just for the wealthy. A land baron answered to the same laws as the peasant.
All this is threatened to overturn. By our enemies… and by our leaders. Whether by inadvertence or design, our leaders have opened the floodgates. We are being dragged into the Global world order, and as that movement swells, our national sovereignty withers. The curious and appalling part of it all is that they are using “Saving the Environment” as the main instrument of attack against our liberties and freedoms, and Americans are buying it root and branch.
I’ll leave off with a comment by C.S. Lewis:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those
who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”