Linda Goldthrope: The Global Warming Agenda

The Global Warming Agenda

By Linda Goldthorpe
July 9, 2008

I commented earlier on a disturbing advertisement that featured Newt Gingrich alongside Nancy Pelosi to promote the website wecansolveit.org, a website that promotes leftist solutions on climate change.  (link).  That blog entry was more concerned with Republican politics, but I’d to elaborate my opinion about global warming for those who are curious.

I am not going to pretend to be a scientist and opine on matters I’m not an expert about.  I will, however, note the definite lack of consensus among scientists as to the degree that human civilization is a factor in climate change, and the inability of the U.S. Congress to determine and implement the solution.

Marc Morano of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works lists fourteen major climate activist scientists that have completely reversed their positions on climate change (found here), and many more never believed it to begin with.  The founder of the Weather Channel called global warming “the greatest scam in history,” and the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project (linked here) has many more.  For those of you unfamiliar with scientific arguments that contradict those made by Al Gore, here is a good overview that is not overwhelmingly technical.

Whether or not you are persuaded one way or the other, let’s focus our attention on national legislation, because it’s what my role would be.  In a free society with a free market, natural supply and demand laws regulate the market.  Renewable energy will invariably replace non-renewable energy, because as the supply of non-renewable energy diminishes, its price goes up, and sooner or later, the price of scarce, non-renewable energy such as oil will exceed the price of renewable energy.  There is, for instance, the Fischer-Tropp method, which converts just about any organic material into diesel.  There is nuclear energy, which is far more efficient and cleaner than coal.  And of course there is wind, solar, geo-thermal, and hydroelectric energy.  As human civilization develops, we will doubtless discover new techniques to improve it further.  That’s the nature of the free market.

Likewise, clean energy will replace polluting energy.  “But Linda, a company will do anything to make a buck, even if it means polluting people’s land!”  Yes, but if they pollute someone else’s land, the recourse for that lies in the judicial branch, not the legislative.  When laws are passed to help or hurt business, we pay with taxes and red tape that discourages business.  “But Linda, if a company pollutes the air and water, harming nobody in particular but the general public, who can sue them?”  This is considered “externalized cost” and this is a problem, but by harming the general population, it also harms the people that run the company that live in the area.  Their concerns become market demand for clean energy.

If this sounds like some sort of crass defense of corporate greed, take a close look at the oil industry.  You can buy gas from Exxon, Shell, BP, and a variety of other companies.  If you have a preference, you don’t have to go very far to shop competitively; competing companies often have station across the street from each other.  The companies have varying environmental records; some are leaders in clean energy while others have caused major environmental disasters.  If the consumers care, they can put their money where there mouth is by supporting cleaner energy companies.  Most people today don’t think very much about this, but if environmental negligence makes things worse, consumer sentiments will get more volatile, and people will become motivated to shop thoughtfully.

If this still seems fantastical, consider how much worse pollution was thirty years ago.  When the price of oil went up, auto-makers immediately started making smaller cars.  Factories have gotten cleaner, and polluted cities were cleaned up.  This didn’t happen because of national legislation, it happened because in a free market, consumer demand is the law of the land.  And it worked.

The Democratical National Committee chairman Howard Dean issued an email about a year ago stating that environmental legislation would be the centerpiece of the Democratic Party’s 2008 campaign strategy, thus disproving Al Gore’s statement in his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” that this was not a political issue, but a “moral” issue.  Indeed, the Democratic Party has made climate change into a political weapon.  It is ironic that the liberals, who supposedly see with total clarity how George W. Bush’s 2004 Presidential campaign used fear-mongering to win votes, are now telling everyone “vote Democrat, or the ice caps will melt and we’ll all die!”  Sad, but ironic.

People need to understand two things about the federal government: it is extremely powerful, and it is extremely foolish.  Even when it acts with the best of intentions, the consequences are never forseen.  For example, a decade or so ago, the government wanted to require auto-makers to put dual airbags in every car.  Seemed like a reasonable effort to save lives.  The problem is that at the time, installing airbags added about $1000 to the cost of each vehicle, so fewer people could buy new cars, hence, people tended to drive older cars.  As it happens, the biggest factor in car safety is how long ago it was made–older technology, older parts.  So people that bought new cars were glad to have the airbags, but more people had to save money for them, and drive their older, more dangerous vehicles in the meantime.

So now look at proposals to solve global warming.  Last year, the governor of Florida signed executive orders requiring the state government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by ten percent by 2012 and forty percent by 2025.  Sounds great, but how can they achieve that?  They could fine companies that pollute, or levy taxes; they would need a body to supervise all of this.  So they would need more tax money for the bureaucracy, or they could collect it in fees from the offending companies.

If you own a company in Florida, all of this red tape and increased cost gives you an incentive to do business elsewhere.  So the environment is protected, but now Floridians will lose jobs and pay more taxes.  On the national level, it’s similar: companies that are aggravated by national policy have an incentive to move operations (and jobs) overseas.  On the international level, it’s absolutely frightening to imagine global organizations threatening to pull funds from Third World countries if they build a “dirty” power plant or too many cars or something similar.

And that’s what global warming is really about, the same thing “global” everything : centralizing power and control, always at the expense of the poor and middle class.  The United States America became the most prosperous nation in the world for three reasons: we enshrined and defended individual rights, we localized power, and we limited federal authority.  The USSR tried the opposite, and what happened?  Their union collapsed.  As have so many fascist governments over the years.

We owe it to ourselves to defend these principles that have brought such prosperity to our country, and that is why I am proud to sign the Americans for Prosperity pledge that promises not to demand one additional cent of taxpayer money for climate change reforms.