Understanding the Kyoto Treaty and Greenhouse Gas Regulations
Almost a thousand years ago, superstitious medieval peasants (and equally illiterate nobles) thought the King could do anything. King Canute educated them to the contrary by lining them up on the shore while he sat in his throne and commanded that the tide was not to come in. Needless to say, despite Canute’s most imperious commands, the tide advanced to drench everybody who believed that the King could hold it back. Canute then said, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings. For there is none worthy of the name but God, whom heaven, earth and sea obey.”
The Earth similarly goes through warming and cooling cycles. The Finger Lakes in New York are mementos of glaciers that once advanced that far south, and anthropogenic greenhouse gases were not necessary to cause them to recede. On the other hand, Greenland was once warm enough to support Viking settlers. There is very little that human beings can do to stop these natural warming and cooling cycles, although there is no lack of frauds, charlatans, and medicine show proprietors who are eager to exploit the dirt-ignorant medieval superstition that prevails even in the 21st century. Al Gore has made himself the high priest of this phony and self-serving religion, with corporate profiteers like members of the Climate Action Partnership (CAP, aka Corporate Association of Profiteers) piling on as acolytes to stuff their own pockets at the expense of working Americans.
Greenhouse gas regulations are as likely to do about as much about global warming as King Canute’s futile command that the tide not come in–or Aztec human sacrifices to make the sun rise every day, noting that the proposed measures will sacrifice real people’s jobs. Here is some elaboration on the latter concept. Don’t tell these guys “My heart goes out to you” because they are likely to take you up on it.
Some Kyotoists want to go even further:
Bette Hileman, “Greenhouse Gases: U.S. population growth complicates CO2 reduction and policy decisions,” Chemical & Engineering News, 16 September 2002, page 21. Here are the highlights of the article’s opinion on the source of the “problem,” and some of its proposed “solutions.”
1. Americans should drive dangerous, low-performing economy cars and live in shoebox apartments
* The article complains that the fuel economy of American passenger vehicles has gone down during the past decade, and “…the average size of single-family homes has risen greatly since the 1970s.”
2. American population growth is the “problem.”
* “…every year, the U.S. must provide transportation and heating and electricity for the equivalent of another large city, all of which add to its burden of greenhouse gas emissions. …if the U.S. is ever to get serious about reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, an important part of the public policy debate will have to be about the consequences of immigration and fertility rates.”
3. The government should use noncoercive–that depends on what you mean by “noncoercive”–policies to discourage large families. Noncoercive in comparison to China’s one-child-per-family policy (enforced with abortion of subsequent children), perhaps.
* “It [the government] could curtail or zero out dependent tax exemptions for families with more than two children. It could cut off college aid for large families. It could take many other less drastic measures to encourage people to have small families.” Note that doing this, however, would bring about the collapse of the Social Security pyramid scheme even sooner.
4. Immigration should be reduced
* “Politicians who dare to advocate a sharp cutback in immigration or incentives to motivate families to have fewer children would be stepping into a minefield. …But a national debate over these issues is necessary…”
Now let’s take a look at the self-serving entities that intend to profit from this massive fraud.
The Climate Action Partnership (CAP), aka Corporate Ripoff Association of Profiteers (we leave the acronym to your imagination)
If the Cap Fits: Why our CEOs are warming to Kyoto.
Wall Street Journal ^ | 1/26/07 | Kimberly Strassel
Democrats want to flog the global warming theme through 2008 and they’ll take what help they can get, even if it means cozying up to executives whose goal is to enrich their firms. Right now, the corporate giants calling for a mandatory carbon cap serve too useful a political purpose for anyone to delve into their baser motives.
The Climate Action Partnership, a group of 10 major companies that made headlines this week with its call for a national limit on carbon dioxide emissions, would surely feign shock at such an accusation. After all, their plea was carefully timed to coincide with President Bush’s State of the Union capitulation on global warming, and it had the desired PR effect. The media dutifully declared that “even” business now recognized the climate threat. Sen. Barbara Boxer, who begins marathon hearings on warming next week, lauded the corporate angels for thinking of the “common good.”
…DuPont has been plunging into biofuels, the use of which would soar under a cap. Somebody has to cobble together all these complex trading deals, so say hello to Lehman Brothers. …GE makes all the solar equipment and wind turbines (at $2 million a pop) that utilities would have to buy under a climate regime. GE’s revenue from environmental products long ago passed the $10 billion mark, and it doesn’t take much “ecomagination” to see why Mr. Immelt is leading the pack of climate profiteers.
Then there is the matter of selling “carbon emission credits,” which even Hileman (see above) compared to the medieval practice of selling indulgences for people’s sins.
Kyotoists force Mexico to reintroduce Aztec human sacrifices
Tortilla Facts
By MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY
Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2007; Page A16
Mexican President Felipe Calderón has been making an all-out effort to fight the U.S. war on drugs. But now he will have to redeploy forces against a new brand of Mexican criminal: the corn hoarder. Anyone caught stockpiling the ancient Mexican grain can get 10 years in jail.
…The sharp increase in Mexican corn prices, which fueled the tortilla price spike, followed big price increases for corn on international markets over the past year. The main cause, according to most commodity analysts, was the U.S. decision to subsidize ethanol made from corn. Growers who previously marketed their harvests to food and livestock companies suddenly have new demand from ethanol producers, who are also armed with a subsidy to make their bids more attractive. The increase in demand from government-subsidized ethanol producers pushed up prices.
To Build a Fire, Part 2
with due credit to Jack London (1908) for the original, which is in the public domain due to age, and to Al Gore, who actually made the indicated remarks in the middle of the worst winter in recent history.
It was January 15, midwinter in early 2004, when the man turned aside from the main Northeastern USA trail. The Hudson River lay a mile wide and hidden under three feet of ice. His mittens made it hard to work and the display of his palm computer was frosted over but he wanted something to read, so he clicked on MoveOn.org.
As he turned to go on, he spat speculatively. There was a sharp, explosive crackle that startled him. He spat again. And again, in the air, before it could fall to the snow, the spittle crackled. It seemed strange that Albert Gore, former Presidential candidate and author of Earth in the Balance, was giving a speech on global warming.
“In essence,” Gore was saying, “these scientists are telling the people of every nation that global warming caused by human activities is becoming a serious threat to our common future. I am also troubled that the Bush/Cheney Administration does not seem to hear the warnings of the scientific community in the same way that most of us do.”
At the man’s heels trotted a dog, a big Siberian Husky. The animal was depressed by the tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time for travelling. It didn’t understand when the man read from Gore’s speech, “I don’t think there is any longer a credible basis for doubting that the earth’s atmosphere is heating up because of global warming. The evidence is overwhelming and undeniable. Global Warming is real. It is happening already and the anticipated consequences are unacceptable.” The dog, despite its thick Arctic-grade fur coat, felt overwhelming and undeniable evidence to the exact contrary. It couldn’t figure out what was unacceptable about a little warming; it had learned fire, and it wanted fire, or else to burrow under the snow and cuddle its warmth away from the air.
“Yet in spite of the clear evidence available all around us, there are many who still do not believe that Global Warming is a problem at all. And it’s no wonder: because they are the targets of a massive and well-organized campaign of disinformation lavishly funded by polluters who are determined to prevent any action to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, out of a fear that their profits might be affected if they had to stop dumping so much pollution into the atmosphere.” The man was so engrossed in reading Al Gore’s speech at MoveOn.org on his palm computer that he wasn’t paying attention to where he was putting his feet. And then it happened. At a place where there were no signs, where the soft, unbroken snow seemed to advertise solidity beneath, the man broke through.The water underneath was not deep but he wetted himself half-way to the knees before he floundered out to the firm crust.
It was as though he had just heard his own sentence of death. He had to build a fire and there could be no failure. Even if he succeeded, he would most likely lose some toes. His feet must be badly frozen by now. The irony of Gore’s words, “The problem is that our world is now confronting a five-alarm fire that calls for bold moral and political leadership from the United States of America” could not be more cruel. A five-alarm fire, or any fire indeed, would be very welcome right now.
A certain fear of death, dull and oppressive, came to him. This fear quickly became poignant as he realized that it was no longer a mere matter of freezing his fingers and toes, or of losing his hands and feet, but that it was a matter of life and death with the chances against him. This threw him into a panic, and he turned and ran up the creek-bed along the old, dim trail. The dog joined in behind and kept up with him. And at the same time there was another thought in his mind that said he would never get to the camp and the boys; that it was too many miles away, that the freezing had too great a start on him, and that he would soon be stiff and dead. “With such leadership, there is no doubt that we could solve the problem of global warming,” Gore’s MoveOn.org speech continued.
Wait! What was that next to the trail? The truck’s radiator had frozen and the driver must have abandoned the vehicle and hiked to safety, but several cartons had spilled from the trailer. The man had trouble opening them because his hands were mostly frostbitten but the contents spilled out: dozens of copies of Al Gore’s book Earth in the Balance and a complete press run of the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty.
All right; the man’s hands were frostbitten, but he still had his mouth and he was determined to stay alive to vote against John Kerry in November. He got the stick of a strike-anywhere match between his teeth, rubbed the tip across the box, and let the burning match fall. It landed among several crumpled copies of the Kyoto Protocol, which promptly burst into flame. Soon the entire consignment of Earth in the Balance was burning as well.
The Siberian Husky nestled comfortably against the man as he thawed his frostbitten limbs and watched the carbon dioxide from Earth in the Balance and the Kyoto Treaty spiral merrily upward toward the clouds.
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