Greenhouse effect or politics?

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Green Housekeeping

FrontPageMagazine.com | June 13, 2001

by Lowell Ponte

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THOSE WHO LIVE IN A GREENHOUSE shouldn’t throw stones.

But as President George W. Bush makes his first official tour of five European nations this week, we can learn much by examining the stones thrown at him – and us – because of his refusal to embrace what he rightly calls the "fatally flawed" Kyoto global climate treaty.

Mr. Bush must ratify this treaty, demanded French President Jacques Chirac three months ago, because Kyoto represents the first component of an "authentic global governance."

And make no mistake. When a European leader speaks of "global governance," it carries the presumption that Europe will set the terms of and will dominate that governance.

At most, Kyoto has been a European attempt to regain control over all its lost colonies like the United States – to again impose control over their economies and politics. Kyoto was a way to herd the rest of the world into a European-run prison disguised as a greenhouse.

At least, Kyoto has been a way for Europe, with its economies bogged down in socialism and its parliaments hamstrung by Leftist political "Greens," to force free market competing nations such as the United States into the same economic and political stagnation.

Kyoto’s sky-high taxes on industry and tight global environmental controls would erase most of the competitive advantages that nations such as the U.S. today have over Europe.

Either way, the Kyoto treaty was Europe’s way of restoring its former colonial power and influence over the rest of the planet.

Lots is at stake here. Among the prizes to be grabbed are these:

Europe needs something like Kyoto to gain economic survival and regain political dominance in the world. No wonder its socialist sympathizer The New York Times sniffs that "Across Europe there is little love of America’s new President and a growing perception that the United States, under his leadership, is looking out only for itself…."

(Contrast this with the ruler who cynically told his fellow European heads of state during World War I that he was "prepared to fight to the last American" to win the war. Europeans have always been willing, and often eager, to sacrifice America to serve their own selfish interests.)

Third World nations can use a Kyoto-like treaty to gain redistribution of a larger share of global wealth. This can come both from the selling of "pollution credits" to nations like the U.S., as Russia has done, and from industries these nations will gain that must flee new environmental strictures in nations like the U.S. (The world’s second biggest emitter of "greenhouse gases," China, is exempted from Kyoto pollution limits, as is another top polluter India.)

The United Nations will become much more powerful under "global governance" and will use pollution taxes as a foot in the door for "taxes" to be paid directly to the U.N.

(Note, by the way, that a unifying Europe is not planning to give up separate seats in the United Nations for its various vanishing nations, retaining seats for France, Germany, Italy, etc. – and neither is it proposing to give the United States separate U.N. seats for each of our 50 "states," for California or New York or Texas, etc., many of which have far larger populations than some European nations.)

Most politicians everywhere thrill to any new pretext for imposing massive new taxes to transfer wealth from individuals and private companies to the coffers of the government and the control of politicians. Call this "greenhouse robbery." In England more than 80 percent of the enormous cost per gallon for gasoline is taxes. The Kyoto crisis policies to cope with global warming would have caused one of the biggest wealth transfers to governments in world history.

And, of course, many in Europe, the Third World, and the United Nations have seen Kyoto as a way to depose the United States as the world’s preeminent economic and political power.

Before Europe can regain the center of the world political stage, where it was the colonizing star only a century ago, the United States must be removed from the spotlight. Kyoto would have done this, by bleeding the American economy of an estimated $400 billion per year in added costs by 2010 and by putting international controls on American industry.

That is why the Europeans and their socialist allies have been willing to bend environmental science into pretzels to justify what is really a political power grab.

A few months ago even the Chinese minister at one treaty gathering remarked that it seemed the political conclusion about climate had been reached in advance – and then the scientific data had been tailored to fit the desired conclusion, that global warming required global governance.

So is there really greenhouse warming of Earth’s climate? And even if so, is it a crisis that warrants global political control and "carbon taxes" that could force Americans to pay $5 per gallon for gasoline?

A recent National Academy of Sciences report supported the projection of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – that by year 2200 our world’s average temperature likely will warm by between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius. Is this crystal ball foreseeing the future accurately? And what might such warming mean?

"The reason that the National Academy report looks a lot like the U.N.’s," writes University of Virginia climatologist and Cato Institute fellow Patrick J. Michaels, "is that it was produced by a microcosm of the same people, and with the same process: groupthink. To produce whatever you want, all you have to do is select the right people."

Dr. Michaels describes his own participation on a similar climate panel, chaired by one of the 11 scientists who also shaped the latest NAS report. He and one fellow dissenter from the global warming dogma for several hours "raised a number of objections concerning facts and uncertainties about climate change. Finally the chairman announced that if we didn’t stop objecting he was going to stop the meeting. This is how legitimate scientific dissent was handled…. The process by which we assemble ‘consensus’ (the new report being the latest example) may be fundamentally biased."

The token dissident among the 11 scientists on the latest NAS panel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorology Professor Richard S. Lindzen told Wall Street Journal readers on Monday that "the full report [made] clear that there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them." But the press distorted this, noted Dr. Lindzen, with CNN reporting that the NAS analysis represented "a unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse, and is due to man. There is no wiggle room."

"This," wrote Lindzen, "is simply untrue." And the New York Times was just as misleading, writing on June 7 of the NAS report that "11 leading atmospheric scientists, including previous skeptics about global warming, reaffirmed the mainstream scientific view that the earth’s atmosphere was getting warmer and that human activity was largely responsible."

The "mainstream" view among climatologists remains that in theory, all else remaining equal, the addition of human "greenhouse" gases to the atmosphere should cause global temperatures to rise slightly. Whether we have enough evidence to validate that theory remains in dispute, as do questions about other confounding factors – like natural climatic cycles and slight variations in the output of the sun.

One of the prime climatologists Al Gore relied upon while writing his loony screed Earth in the Balance, Dr. James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, as this column was virtually alone in reporting last September, now says his previous analyses were wrong.

Earth’s climate is still warming, Dr. Hansen now finds, but the prime reason is not carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. Much bigger factors, he says, are actually methane, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and black carbon (soot) in the atmosphere.

Kyoto was based on the assumption that carbon dioxide was the major cause of global warming. Its policies were aimed primarily at restricting CO2. But now one of the most famous climatologists in the field, Dr. Hansen, says carbon dioxide is not the main villain. Interesting, isn’t it, how silent the national press has been in calling this to your attention?

So let’s pretend that global warming is a disease about to fever our world – to create global dustbowls, devastate us with giant hurricanes, and submerge Holland and the world’s coastlines with sea levels rising by 400 feet as the ice atop Antarctica melts.

Even if a real threat – and virtually no scientist sees this in our immediate future – why are we trying to treat this disease without certainty about its cause, and hence its cure?

The medicine prescribed by Kyoto, remember, itself will have terrible side-effects. It will cause massive economic dislocations and could devastate the American economy.

And for what? As Dr. Michaels notes, the evidence now suggests that even if we are warming, it will be at the bottom of the NAS/United Nations prediction, about 1.4 degrees C. over 100 years. Much of this warming will come in nighttime, not daytime, temperatures. Seacoasts will not flood. Growing seasons in places like northern Europe, Russia and Canada would grow slightly longer – thereby reducing the risk of global famine and disease.

So why take desperate measures, like Kyoto, if further research might show we are not facing a real crisis at all? To that end, President Bush is proposing to continue America’s commitment to do more climatological research than all the nations of Europe combined, and to encourage voluntary measures to curb the emissions of greenhouse gases. Several multinational corporations, such as Alcoa formerly headed by Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, have been almost too eager to cash in on global pollution credits and other narrow advantages they can gain for themselves under this terrible treaty. Mr. O’Neill has reportedly lobbied the President for a revised treaty that could cap CO2 emissions by 2012 and eliminate them by 2025 for developed nations – a time far enough in the future that Bush and O’Neill would be in comfortable retirement. Anyway, Mr. Bush’s real agenda in Europe is missile defense, and if the price of this is a vague, long-term offer on climate policy it might be acceptable.

Keep in mind, President Bill Clinton and his enviro-kook Vice President Al Gore signed the Kyoto protocol in 1997 but never took it to the U.S. Senate for ratification. A procedural vote on the treaty in 1998 drew a unanimous bi-partisan vote of 95 Senators opposed to Kyoto and zero supporting it.

As Mr. Bush tours Europe, none of the nations where he will be criticized have ratified the Kyoto treaty either. Only one nation on the planet has, Romania. The rest support it mostly with hot air. Truth be told, other leaders know that its implementation would be an economic disaster for their advanced nations too. This treaty might have hurt the U.S. more than it would our European allies, thereby giving them comparative advantage, but it would have damaged all of us.

The United States, with only four percent of the world’s population, produces 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions but 25 percent of global GDP. The rest of the world produces 80 percent of greenhouse gases, with the largest share coming from nations such as China and India exempted from Kyoto Treaty controls. Even if it wished to, the U.S. cannot solve hypothetical global warming. And even if fully implemented worldwide, the Kyoto Treaty by some estimates might have lowered the world’s temperature by 7/1000ths of a degree C. It was a ridiculous treaty from the outset for these and more reasons – and its real aim was always more political than environmental.

European leaders are almost certainly secretly relieved that they can blame Kyoto’s disintegration and re-writing on President Bush, who has proven himself a genuine world leader by his courageous stand.



-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), June 17, 2001

Answers

do madcow fart's count???????

-- al-d. (dogs@zianet.com), June 18, 2001.

Why wouldn't this make it into the mainstream media? Oh that's right, the mainstream media is unbiased and this obviously is a biased piece.

Thanks Unk, I enjoyed it.

-- Maria (anon@ymous.com), June 18, 2001.


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