Investors Business Daily has a great article reinforcing the point many of us have been making for a while: The Marxists and anti-globalization rioters and other left-wing extremists that have seemed awfully quiet of late have not disappeared; they have repackaged themselves as global warming activists, but their goals are exactly the same.
The driving force of the environmental movement is not a cleaner planet — or a world that doesn’t get too hot, in the case of the global warming issue — but a leftist, egalitarian urge to redistribute wealth. A CO2 tax does this and more, choking economic growth in the U.S. and punishing Americans for being the voracious consumers that we are.
Eco-activists have been so successful in distracting the public from their real intentions that they’re becoming less guarded in discussing their ultimate goal.
"A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources," Emma Brindal, a "climate justice campaign coordinator" for Friends of the Earth Australia, wrote Wednesday on the Climate Action Network’s blog.
In this case, redistribution would be handled by the Multilateral Adaptation Fund, an agency that would use the carbon tax receipts to help countries that are having to deal with climate change.
Since the "complete list of things caused by global warming" now exceeds 600 (see our "Chilled By The Heat" editorial, Dec. 13), there would be few if any limits on the U.N.’s ability to move riches from countries that have created and earned them to those that have done neither.
Still think this is all about halting climate change? We would go as far as to say that anyone who does is either naive or a dupe. Both the rhetoric and the behavior of the eco-activists back us up.
Protein Wisdom adds this:
The “Greens” are no more interested in clean air and water today than the Soviets were in liberty when they rolled tanks into Prague in 1968. We dismiss them as “silly” at our own peril.
“…punishing Americans for being the voracious consumers that we are.”
You mean for being the prodigious producers that we are, right?
Before one can consume, one must produce. It’s production that marxism attacks more than anything else.
In my younger days I spent a lot of time at intentional communities, where most people are instinctively leftist and often left-anarchist. I can “feel it” immediately when an argument (no matter how it is disguised) is coming from the leftist/social justice/anti-globalist/anti-western point of view.
The problem for the rest of us is that “global warming” and the other causes have become moral issues–science no longer matters. Because the media is on board for the moral crusade, the unthinking masses are pulled along. Because the K-12 government schools are on board the bandwagon, most children and youth go along for the ride.
If the major institutions of learning and information processing are pushing the moral cause, a cursory glance at the “bell curve” of IQ and executive function suggests that the majority will eventually float with the current. In a democratic society, that spells big problems for the future.
“Producers”, Bearster?
We off-shored that long ago. We’re a nation of lawyers and baristas who make a living selling our houses back and forth to each other.
Materialism and conspicuous consumption are making us [and everyone else] miserable.
In 2004 the United Nations University – World Institute for Economics Development Research (UNU-WIDER), published a study into possible scenarios for implementing a global tax. It states: “How can we find an extra US$50 billion for development funding? Our focus is on flows of resources from high-income to developing countries… Any foreseeable global tax will be introduced, not by a unitary world government, but as the result of concerted action by nation states… The taxation of environmental externalities is an obvious potential source of revenue. … Does this mean that the global tax should be levied at the same rate on all countries? To the extent that emissions impose environmental damage wherever they occur, the corrective tax should be the same. However, this needs to be moderated to take account of the unequal distribution of world income. Considerations of global justice point to poor countries bearing less of the cost burden, and may justify the tax being levied only on high-income or middle-income countries.”
See http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_History.htm for more details.