Monday, December 17, 2007

Bali Boondoggle

On its Saturday edition of All Things Considered, National Public Radio managed to air this nonsense, spoken in Bali Saturday, to the U.S. representative by Kevin Conrad, Papua New Guinea's ambassador for climate change: "If you cannot lead, leave it to the rest of us. Get out of the way." His gripe: The treaty that will replace the Kyoto mishmash was being opposed by the U.S. when a consensus was needed to end the lengthy conclave so everyone could just “get on home.”

At least part of the reason the U.S. gave for its demurral was the fact that the new treaty, as per the will of the Bali participants, will require absolutely no emission-controls from China, India, and Brazil, three nations contributing enormous amounts of greenhouse gases under the non-requirements of the Kyoto Treaty, most of it from the 40% of the world’s population in India and China, which by now is probably the world’s worst polluter, having passed the U.S., which has laws and technologies already suppressing huge quantities of emissions.

The new treaty is hoped for by the end of 2009 to cover emissions 2012-2016, but applying only to “deeply industrialized countries,” in which category China and India, both with nuclear bombs and huge productions of just about everything but airplanes, are not included. They are categorized as “under-developed,” so the rest of the world can “just eat cake.” India, China, and Brazil, by world (UN) fiat, may pollute to their heart’s content well past 2016, as if they wouldn’t do so anyway, while this country passes and enforces emission-control laws requiring conformance on scales incomprehensible to the Asians and driving up prices in this country to ever-increasing levels while enormously disadvantaging it competitively worldwide.

The reason for all this balderdash is that the world’s leaders have been sold on the fact – or at least claim they have – that the villainous United States, with some help from the Europeans, is changing the climate of the world, something that apparently they foolishly imply that populations could do during the ice ages and warming ages or at any time in recorded history when the climate went through its cycles. Today’s experts haven’t even discovered yet such a simple thing as how to make it rain, yet the IPCC gang has forecast the end of entire populations right away because men have discovered how to change the whole climate; however, the IPCC findings are being routinely nullified by serious non-political researchers now, so the question is actually moot. The slight warming is not manmade.

It seems that everything from shoes to textiles to toys to electronic equipment to autos is already coming from the three nations named above, having already outdone this country with their cheap labor and non-emission-controls, so the obvious intent of the whole Bali thing was to place this country at an even greater disadvantage in world trade. Reasonable people consider Gore and the end-of-time gang to be loony tunes, the Nobel Peace Farce notwithstanding. Bush won’t stand for this graft, but it’s a lead-pipe cinch that a democrat administration will bend to the wind.

Together, China, India and Brazil own a land area two-and-one-fourth times larger than that of the U.S. Collectively, the three countries own 44% of the world’s population, while the U.S. is comprised of only five percent. The relative pollution contribution of each is unmistakably obvious. All of these countries are now industrialized, no matter what the UN claims, with Brazil actually contributing massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere by just allowing the cutting of the rain-forests. Despite this, the squirrelly UN is determined to penalize this country for what…for just being what it is…that’s what. Climate-change is a non-issue.

In any case, these words from C.S. Lewis in his The Abolition of Man are appropriate: “At the moment, then, of Man’s victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely ‘natural’—to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man.” Man thinks he will control nature (climate), but he is thankfully mistaken. God will take care of that.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

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