You’ve got to admit, liberal are masters at describing every initiative
they launch as “the moral thing to do.” Their campaign for draconian energy regulations
and a new global warming treaty is no exception. Protecting people, wildlife
and ecosystems from climate catastrophes is the greatest moral cause of our
time, alarmist scientists, activists, politicians, bureaucrats, clerics and
journalists insist. Rubbish.
It has nothing to do with morality. It’s all about money, power and
control. It narrowly defines “morality” to ignore the incredible benefits that
fossil fuels and electricity bring to people everywhere – while dismissing the
enormous harm their policies will wreak on families and ecological values that
they profess to care so much about. And it makes no mention of the fact that
they will rarely, if ever, be held accountable for their falsehoods and
fraudulent science, or the damage and deaths they cause.
On March 31, President Obama promised to slash
America’s carbon dioxide emissions
28% below 2005 emission levels by 2025 and 80% by 2050, taking us back to Civil
War era emission levels, 150 years ago. He wants U.S. taxpayers to contribute
our “fair share” to a new UN $100-billion-per-year UN slush fund to help poor
countries adapt to and mitigate rising seas, storms and other climate change
disasters that our plant-fertilizing CO2 emissions allegedly cause. He
instructed his federal agencies to implement a host of new rules prior to the
December 2015 United Nations climate conference in Paris.
Mr. Obama’s EPA will use “Clean Power Plan” and other regulations to
shutter more coal-fired generating plants, issue new methane rules for
landfills and natural gas production, funnel countless millions of dollars to
activist and propaganda groups, and use sue and settle lawsuits to impose even
tighter restrictions. FEMA will require that states use CO2-based computer
models to determine how manmade climate change threatens communities, if they
want disaster preparedness funding.
The Council on Environmental Quality will require that all applicants
for federal project permits fully evaluate greenhouse gas emissions and
potential impacts on climate change, to the satisfaction of bureaucrats and
litigious Big Green pressure groups. The Department of Energy will issue new
efficiency standards that double the cost of pickup trucks and appliances, and
spend more taxpayer billions on wind, solar and biofuel loans and subsidies.
The Interior Department will close more federal lands to drilling, and exempt
more wind and solar projects from endangered species and other environmental
laws.
The Overseas Private Investment Corporation and World Bank will refuse
to lend money for coal-fired power plants, and even most gas-fueled generators
and hydroelectric facilities, in developing countries.
These actions will have disastrous consequences. According to the
Heritage Foundation, NERA economic consultants and other experts, EPA’s actions
alone will cost hundreds of thousands of jobs and a $100-billion loss in gross
domestic product. By 2030, America’s electricity output will drop by nearly 10%
even as we add 54 million people to our population. Brownouts and blackouts
will occur regularly, and we will be told to get used to using expensive
electricity when it’s available, instead of when we need it.
Poor, minority and blue-collar families will have to find thousands of
dollars a year for soaring electricity, vehicle and appliance costs. Small
businesses will have to find tens of thousands of dollars to keep the heat and
lights on. Factories, malls, school districts, hospitals and cities will have
to pay millions more.
Millions of middle class workers will get laid off – in coal mines,
power plants, factories, shops and other businesses. Entire families and communities
will be impoverished. Bread winners lucky enough to find work will be forced to
work multiple jobs, commute longer distances, and suffer severe sleep
deprivation.
Families will have to cope with more stress, depression, drug and
alcohol abuse, spousal and child abuse. Nutrition and medical care will suffer.
More people will have strokes and heart attacks. More will die. But the White
House, EPA and other federal agencies studiously ignore these impacts. The only
moral issue they want to talk about is alleged impacts fromexaggerated and fabricated manmade
climate change.
Two-thirds of Florida’s endangered manatees survive cold
winters by huddling in warm waters that flow from coal-fired power plants.
EPA’s plant closures could cause hundreds of them to die, while millions of
birds and bats will be slaughtered every year by proliferating wind turbines.
Meanwhile, thousands of elderly people perish
every winter from hypothermia, because they can no longer afford to heat their
home properly, due to soaring electricity costs under Britain’s climate
policies.
In poor countries, millions already die every year from lung and
intestinal diseases, because of polluted air from open cooking fires, filthy
water, spoiled food, substandard hospitals and squalid living conditions –
because billions still do no have access to electricity. Imagine your life
following hurricanes or other natural disasters that make electricity and safe
water unavailable for a week or month. Then picture living that way for decades
on end. White House, World Bank and OPIC policies will save people from
“climate disasters” decades from now by killing them tomorrow. This they pass
off as morality.
In the years since EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus banned DDT in
1972, tens of millions of Africans and Asians died from malaria. Now his
daughter is promoting similarly deadly policies, as lead author for the
National Climate Assessment, which hypes every exaggerated and imaginary
climate scare imaginable. Other Big Green and Climate
Crisis radicals oppose GMO crops and chemical fertilizers, and insist that
starving, energy deprived families limit their living standards to what is
dictated by climate activists and supported by wind, solar and biofuels. The
death tolls continue to mount.
African Development Bank’s president Donald Kaberuka says
poor nations will no longer tolerate these hypocritical, lethal policies. His
bank will continue loaning money for coal-fired generating units. But in a
perverse irony, the absence of World Bank and OPIC money means those projects
will not have sufficient funding to install modern, readily available pollution
controls. So millions of families will finally have electricity and won’t be
sickened by wood and dung fires, but new pollutants will needlessly afflict
them.
Japan is also financing coal-fired power plants in Japan, India and
Bangladesh – often using Green Climate Fund money! It points out that these
high-efficiency units burn coal with less pollution and fewer carbon dioxide
emissions than older plants – and stresses the importance of helping
impoverished countries get reliable, affordable electricity to create jobs, improve
living standards and save lives.
China, India, Germany, Poland and other countries are also building
coal-fueled power plants at a steady clip. And Russia says it will “comply”
with any new treaty primarily by emphasizing CO2 reductions due to absorption
by forests. At this rate, the United States will soon be the only nation that
strangles its economy and imperils people’s health and welfare in the name of
stopping climate change.
But the Obama Administration is imposing its authoritarian policies anyway
– and justifying them by falsifying temperature data and ignoring the reality
that: (1) rising carbon dioxide levels are improving crop and tree growth; (2)
temperature, hurricane, sea ice and other trends contradict climate models and
manmade disaster hysteria; and (3) any human influences on the climate are
drowned out by the sun, deep ocean circulation patterns and other powerful
natural forces. No wonder alarmists won’t debate skeptics.
Earth’s climate and weather will continue changing, because the forces
driving them are always in flux. We simply have to adjust to them. But Obama
prefers the Lewis Carroll approach to climate and morality.
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither
more nor less,” Humpty Dumpty told Alice,“The question is, whether you can make
words mean so many different things,” Alice replied. No, Humpty responded. “The
question is, who is to be master, that’s all.”
We the People must not let Obama & Co. be our master. Congress can
and should refuse to ratify any climate treaty. It can and should defund these
totalitarian initiatives. The next president can and should review and revoke
every one. States can and should challenge them in court and refuse to knuckle
under.
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