Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 11/15/2008 9:31:12 AM PST by I got the rope
European and American statists, including activist NGOs like the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), assert that the moderate climate warming that occurred until 2002 is a man-made catastrophe, and have embraced the dystopian fantasy that coercive policies for the elimination of fossil fuel production and usage can prevent or turn back the current warming cycle. They have, thus, made the "global warming planetary emergency" into the central plank of their ongoing campaigns for more centralized government.
Leftist commentator, Alexander Cockburn, put it this way:
“This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left's optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political programme. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice [liberal fascism].”
For decades environmental activists have insisted that capitalism is not a "sustainable" (sufficient to "save the planet") economic system. We now hear brazen declarations that democracy is no longer a "sustainable" political process. Al Gore lends a popular, philosophical/theological underpinning to collectivist impulses by casting the root of all environmental evils - real and imagined - in the scientific and industrial/technological revolutions. Put differently, for Gore and the EDF, the planetary environment, not human life, appears the supreme standard of value. Therefore, everything, most importantly Science and Economics, must be pried away from the benefit of man and pressed into total service of the State.
Given just a decade or two of such "sustainable" policies, bolstered by Gore's religion, the world will be well on its way to a new Dark Ages, and the human misery it breeds.
The American people who owe their long, comfortable and healthy lives to the accomplishments of modern industry, technology, medicine and affordable fossil energy ought to be outraged by activists' claims and policies. They should come to grasp the terrible costs and futility of the left's policies; they must understand that life lived as the left envision it for them and their children is baneful; life lived in submission to the hard natural forces of climate and disease, increasingly lived without labor-saving technology, without the fruits of sophisticated agricultural techniques, and without modern medicine, sanitation, electrification and transportation systems is, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Hobbes, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."
Economic growth requires energy growth, and restricting energy growth through self-interested international agreements such as Kyoto or domestic policies such as carbon taxes or cap-and-trade schemes is a recipe for global poverty and human deaths.
As Christopher Monckton has pointed out, the necessity of getting the "big" policy decisions right, applies with the greatest force to those fields of policy where wrong decisions could kill and/or impoverish millions. The international community, spurred on by "green" NGOs, "too often gets the big ones wrong, and kills tens of millions, and does not care much."
The moral dimension, Monckton ever reminds us, is crucial:
"The policies advocated to mitigate climate change would condemn the Third World to remain abjectly poor, for unless all other countries cut their carbon emissions atmospheric concentrations will continue to rise even if the entire West shuts down and goes back to the Stone Age, but without even the ability to light fires...It is the poor who have been the victims of unscientific but fashionable political decisions in the recent past; it is they who will die in their tens of millions if, yet again, an unscientific but fashionable political decision is taken by us and inflicted upon them. We must get the science right or we shall get the policy wrong. We have failed them before. We must not fail them again."
The destructive outcomes of policies advocated by the EDF for the non-problem of modest global warming will also be inflicted on Americans, and not only will it fail "them" in the Third World, but will malevolently fail us, too.
Robert Ferguson is President of the Science and Public Policy Institute.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/
The uncontrolled smokestack emissions of burning coal without any scrubber techniques in place, IS a crime against humanity. But now, carbon dioxide is being put in the same category as sulfur dioxide, mercury vapor, fly ash, cyanides, carbon monoxide, and particulate carbon. The consumption of coal as a fuel driving industry is close to being outlawed in this country by these fanatics.
There is no climate “cure”, because there is no climate “disease”. We rely on carbon-based fuel, and the excess carbon dioxide merely goes into accelerated and extended plant growth. So long as we encourage plant growth at every juncture, by cultivation and land management, the content of carbon dioxide shall never rise above about 0.05% concentration in the atmosphere.
The Minority Report calls for the removal of petroleum and coal as a source of stored energy to power our civilization. Sorry, can’t do it in ten years. Or twenty. Or a century.
Petroleum and coal are very compact and easily transformed energy storage mediums. We have built most of the infrastructure over the past century on the easy access to coal, petroleum and their derivatives, and to claim now that there is no way we can continue to use that really very plentiful and reliable source, is to say that we should retreat to the caves and trees, decimating our numbers in an endless struggle for declining access to the means to sustain ourselves.
We are not all self-abnegating ascetics and austerity freaks. Some of like to enjoy life just a little, and for an entirely different reason, pick up our messes after ourselves without endless nagging by self-appointed “morality” police. And really ignorant ones at that.
“For decades environmental activists have insisted that capitalism is not a “sustainable” (sufficient to “save the planet”) economic system.”
Actually, communists theoriticians have made the same claim. According to communist theory, capitalism should have lead to inevitable ‘race to the bottom’ where capitalist increasingly drove the working class into poverty and starvation. When the working class hit bottom, then the would be the revolution leading to socialism then communism.
When communism collapsed, these theoriticians couldn’t explain why capitalism triumphed while providing the highest standard of living on the planet. They reached the conclusion that this could happen only if the capitalists raped the natural resources of the planet in order to increase profits and living standards simulaneously. IOW, capitalism couldn’t do both and be sustainable. The obvious answer for the communists was to join the environmentalist movement constricting all access to resources in the name of sustainability thus forcing the ‘race to the bottom’, world poverty, starvation and the revolution.
The bottom line is that environmentalists and communists are natural allies and anyone who preaches ‘sustainability’ is only touting a path leading to poverty and communist revolution.
There is absolutely no way that the relative prosperity and standard of living of western democracies currently enjoy, can be maintained if the radical steps, the global warming hysterics want to impose, are actually enacted.
The negative economic impact of the policies Gore wants will, be immediate and effect everyone.
The first election after these negative economic impacts hit will most certainly go against the political party which sacrificed economic well being for pie in the sky environmental extremism.
Liberal politicians, realizing this, will argue that the public can not be allowed to put the future of the planet at risk just, because the public desires to maintain their high standard of living. It is the duty of the ecologically enlightened, to prevent the ignorant from voting against pro-enviroment candidates and programs. Thus extra legal, undemocratic authoritarian means must be employed to prevent the ignorant masses from destroying the planet.
And you are seeing exactly this. NGOs and government commitees (many of which are created by excutive order) are now doing exactly what you are writing about. I just saw a group on C-Span talking about social justice and the environment. The conference was about sustainability.
It's already prepared to include in the building codes. The latest LEED building standard puts CO2 reduction and saving the environment as the #1 priority in the point ranking and human health much farther down the priority list. In Ohio, all new schools will have to be certified LEED Silver. I thought everything was supposed to be "for the children".
Make no mistake, the radical left will sacrifice humans to "save the earth" from nothing.
Thus extra legal, undemocratic authoritarian means must be employed to prevent the ignorant masses from destroying the planet.
I believe this is their next step, and don't think they are not already planning it.
It's the ONLY way they could hang on to power after purposely ruining the economy.
This isn't going to be pretty. If they shutdown the coal power stations, it could come fast.
I saw these standards here in Florida too. I didn’t quite understand it. It’s bad enough we have to build stuff to withstand 180 mph winds. I’m not sure what the new “global warming” building codes do to the cost.
Gorbachav is now a leading voice in the sustainability crowd. Not all environmentalists are communists, but most communists are now environmentalists. Isn’t it ironic, that communism created the largest environmental disasters, and now their claim is that capitalism is the big threat to the environment. Of course, they claim that the capitalists made them do it.
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