The collapse of the global warming treaty negotiations in The Hague last week illustrates the folly of the Clinton-Gore globalists who want to give a consortium of foreigners the power to regulate the American standard of living. The conference ended with a cream pie in the face, literally, of U.S. representative Frank E. Loy, and egg all over the faces, figuratively, of the Clinton-Gore globalists who have been promoting this treaty for years.
Called the Kyoto Protocol, the proposed treaty was agreed to in Japan by 175 countries in 1997, and The Hague conference was supposed to fill in the fine print with rules and penalties. Al Gore attended the Kyoto Conference, agreed to the treaty, and later signed it in New York.
The treaty would commit the United States and three dozen industrial countries to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions by the year 2012 to at least 5 percent below their 1990 levels. This would require a tremendous reduction in our use of energy.
The ideology behind this radical objective is to subordinate our standard of living, which is largely based on the use of fossil fuels, to the supremacy of global ecology. Or, as Al Gore says in the title of his book, force us to put "Earth in the Balance."
There is nothing "balanced" about the ideology or the treaty. The ideology is the new religion of worshiping Mother Earth, and the treaty would codify newly invented and manifestly unequal global regulations devised by the environmental extremists.
Developing countries, including China, India and Mexico, and oil exporters including Saudi Arabia, seek enforceable global rules from which they would be exempt. China and India were so adamant about refusing to initiate climate-protection programs that this wasn't even on the agenda.
Any successful agreement for a global commission to regulate personal and industrial use of energy would have to be based on a community of purpose and interests by the signers. The Hague conference displayed the hopelessness of this venture and the passionate diversity of the participants.
What the United States stands to gain, if anything, by the treaty is unclear. The dominant interest of Third World countries is their demand for the United States to finance their dictators in a lifestyle to which they would like to become accustomed.
The poor nations are demanding that the U.S. build projects in their countries for climate protection, pollution cutting, "clean coal," and forest protection, but are even unwilling to allow us any "credits" for these handouts in meeting our emissions goals. As an envious Nigerian declaimed, "They have caused the problems, they have made the whole world unsafe."
Curdling beneath the surface were the demands of countries with diametrically opposed interests. In some nations the climate is too hot and they don't want it any hotter, while other nations hope global warming will make their crops more abundant.
Some countries, such as the United States, can meet emission- reduction goals because their large forests function as a "sink" to naturally absorb the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide coming from our tailpipes and smokestacks. America's vast forests absorb up to 300 million tons a year of carbon dioxide and could get us halfway toward the treaty's goals, but other countries reject this as a "free ride."
Regulations are opposed by countries that are completely dependent on politically incorrect coal or oil and would be devastated by the new regulations. Regulations are favored by low-lying countries that worry about the rising of the seas that is predicted if the earth warms and land ice melts.
Some countries have already subjected their industries to heavy socialistic regulations and want to impose the same on the rest of the world. Other countries value their freedom from regulations.
To facilitate the redistribution of U.S. wealth to Third World dictatorships, The Hague conferees proposed a plan to allow rich nations to "buy" emissions credits from poor nations, presumably the small countries which usually gang up against U.S. interests. However, the biggest poor country is Russia, whose economy is so devastated that it can't afford industrial production to produce emissions anyway.
The collapse of the Russian economy has produced a windfall of possible pollution "credits" that Russia can sell to countries unwilling to reduce emissions. Translated, that means the U.S. taxpayers would pay tribute to Russia in order to be allowed to maintain our current standard of living.
Nuclear power, which produces energy without greenhouse emissions, is another sticking point. The environmentalists have prevented the construction of modern nuclear plants in the United States, but other countries have no such restrictions and France relies heavily on nuclear plants for its electricity.
No one was satisfied. The only agreement was to meet again in May in Germany and in October in Morocco.
A Canadian said he was so ashamed of his country that he burned his passport. We'd all be better off if the Clinton-Gore representatives burned their passports, too, and didn't come home.
