A Global-Warming Bureaucracy Is Born
The international effort to rid the world of its eternal habit of climate change began in earnest at the 1992 Earth Summit, officially known as the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. Politicians from more than one hundred fifty nations lounged in lush Rio de Janeiro to collaborate on how we the people should be allowed to pursue our happiness, such as the “proper” number of automobiles we drive; the kinds of fuels we use; the settings where we choose to live; and the industries in which we choose to work. Totalitarian ideology has rarely found so thorough an exposition as this, with reams of declarations operating on the unspoken presumption that the governments of the world have the unfettered right to micromanage human life. While most of this polluted verbiage amounted to mere political theater, the Earth Summit did produce a more noxious offspring: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (“UNFCCC”), a treaty calling for periodic such meetings into the future so as to devise ways and means of forcing us to obey the global-warming religion. Staying true to his amoral establishment credentials, President George H.W. Bush ratified the UNFCCC upon securing the Senate’s approval, likely because he saw political advantage in claiming that he was “doing something” about the environment.
Predictably, it did not take long for the perpetual UNFCCC gabfests to conjure up something even worse: the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. This proposed addition to the UNFCCC attempts to regulate and reduce the carbon1 output of entire nations, specifically those few designated under Annex I to the UNFCCC who are wealthy enough to afford the honor (i.e., the ones who have benefited from freedom so much that they are now capable of paying to snuff it out). Over one hundred seventy nations have rushed forward to ratify this suicide pact, but with only forty-odd of them obligated to drink the Kool Aid.
To its credit, the United States has thus far refused to join, despite furious denunciation from the decaying Western world. Canada recently grew a spine and withdrew in December of 2011. If the United States were to join, it would undertake to straitjacket American citizens so that our carbon-dioxide emissions are reduced to approximately 1990 levels (an entire generation prior). To accomplish that pointless and emasculating objective, the federal government would oversee our collective activities and submit a greenhouse-gas inventory each year to the U.N. in order to demonstrate Kyoto compliance. As an alternative to outright servility of this sort, the United States could opt for international welfare-statism by sending taxpayer money abroad to subsidize carbon reduction where it is cheaper to do so, thereby earning “carbon credits” from the bureaucratic benefactors at the UNFCCC. Better yet, the federal government might graciously allow us purchase “carbon credits” from one other, so that citizens who need to emit more carbon dioxide than normally permitted could purchase that ability from citizens who emit less than their allotted portion.
The UNFCCC is laying the foundation for a new protocol to succeed Kyoto, which expires this year, and it is apparent that the federal government plans to participate every step of the way. Having embraced the environmentalist religion, the federal government in February of 2007 signed the Washington Declaration with various other nations, agreeing to devise a mutually acceptable plan for imposing emissions controls on us. In June of 2007 the federal government announced that it was seriously considering a pact with Europe to cut our emissions in half by the year 2050. And in late 2007, a U.N. “climate conference” in Bali, Indonesia saw proposals for a global carbon tax, proposals that met with the approval of a former Vice-President of the United States.
Welcome to the future. Our experiment in limited government that sprouted for one brief moment in history – and which has already suffered major setbacks – is faced with oblivion as the United States marks the days until it adopts Kyoto or its kin as a pretext for massive new deprivations of life, liberty, and property. An American populace stripped of transcendence and schooled with the blunt implements of modern pedagogy stands spiritually and intellectually unequipped to do anything other than swallow environmentalism’s poetic lie. Mark Twain once observed that a lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. Let us hope that the truth gets its shoes on quickly.
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1. Technically, the Kyoto Protocol casts a net over multiple “greenhouse gases,” of which carbon dioxide is the most highly featured. Simultaneously, the Kyoto Protocol ignores water vapor, by far the most abundant greenhouse gas of all, but which is not man-made and therefore offers no political rewards.
The international effort to rid the world of its eternal habit of climate change began in earnest at the 1992 Earth Summit, officially known as the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. Politicians from more than one hundred fifty nations lounged in lush Rio de Janeiro to collaborate on how we the people should be allowed to pursue our happiness, such as the “proper” number of automobiles we drive; the kinds of fuels we use; the settings where we choose to live; and the industries in which we choose to work. Totalitarian ideology has rarely found so thorough an exposition as this, with reams of declarations operating on the unspoken presumption that the governments of the world have the unfettered right to micromanage human life. While most of this polluted verbiage amounted to mere political theater, the Earth Summit did produce a more noxious offspring: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (“UNFCCC”), a treaty calling for periodic such meetings into the future so as to devise ways and means of forcing us to obey the global-warming religion. Staying true to his amoral establishment credentials, President George H.W. Bush ratified the UNFCCC upon securing the Senate’s approval, likely because he saw political advantage in claiming that he was “doing something” about the environment.
Predictably, it did not take long for the perpetual UNFCCC gabfests to conjure up something even worse: the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. This proposed addition to the UNFCCC attempts to regulate and reduce the carbon1 output of entire nations, specifically those few designated under Annex I to the UNFCCC who are wealthy enough to afford the honor (i.e., the ones who have benefited from freedom so much that they are now capable of paying to snuff it out). Over one hundred seventy nations have rushed forward to ratify this suicide pact, but with only forty-odd of them obligated to drink the Kool Aid.
To its credit, the United States has thus far refused to join, despite furious denunciation from the decaying Western world. Canada recently grew a spine and withdrew in December of 2011. If the United States were to join, it would undertake to straitjacket American citizens so that our carbon-dioxide emissions are reduced to approximately 1990 levels (an entire generation prior). To accomplish that pointless and emasculating objective, the federal government would oversee our collective activities and submit a greenhouse-gas inventory each year to the U.N. in order to demonstrate Kyoto compliance. As an alternative to outright servility of this sort, the United States could opt for international welfare-statism by sending taxpayer money abroad to subsidize carbon reduction where it is cheaper to do so, thereby earning “carbon credits” from the bureaucratic benefactors at the UNFCCC. Better yet, the federal government might graciously allow us purchase “carbon credits” from one other, so that citizens who need to emit more carbon dioxide than normally permitted could purchase that ability from citizens who emit less than their allotted portion.
The UNFCCC is laying the foundation for a new protocol to succeed Kyoto, which expires this year, and it is apparent that the federal government plans to participate every step of the way. Having embraced the environmentalist religion, the federal government in February of 2007 signed the Washington Declaration with various other nations, agreeing to devise a mutually acceptable plan for imposing emissions controls on us. In June of 2007 the federal government announced that it was seriously considering a pact with Europe to cut our emissions in half by the year 2050. And in late 2007, a U.N. “climate conference” in Bali, Indonesia saw proposals for a global carbon tax, proposals that met with the approval of a former Vice-President of the United States.
Welcome to the future. Our experiment in limited government that sprouted for one brief moment in history – and which has already suffered major setbacks – is faced with oblivion as the United States marks the days until it adopts Kyoto or its kin as a pretext for massive new deprivations of life, liberty, and property. An American populace stripped of transcendence and schooled with the blunt implements of modern pedagogy stands spiritually and intellectually unequipped to do anything other than swallow environmentalism’s poetic lie. Mark Twain once observed that a lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. Let us hope that the truth gets its shoes on quickly.
_______________________________________
1. Technically, the Kyoto Protocol casts a net over multiple “greenhouse gases,” of which carbon dioxide is the most highly featured. Simultaneously, the Kyoto Protocol ignores water vapor, by far the most abundant greenhouse gas of all, but which is not man-made and therefore offers no political rewards.
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