Unraveling Consensus on Climate Change?
Posted December 11th, 2008 at 10.59am in Energy and Environment.
That’s the case made in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal today, which takes specific aim at the “green jobs myth” citing evidence from recent blue-collar worker protests in Europe, and the lack of progress coming out of UN climate talks in Poznan, Poland:
In Brussels last week, some 11,000 metal workers clogged the EU quarter to protest global-warming policies. They worry that their industry could be harmed and their jobs forced overseas; some of them carried coffins as props. Most of the marching workers were from Germany, where auto makers are also still fuming over new emissions standards. Audi and BMW and other carbon-using industries have argued both for shallower emissions cuts and a longer phase-in period.
…
This is certainly a new tune for the Europeans, who have lectured Americans for more than a decade to sign Kyoto because the planet is in peril. Their happy talk of a painless 20% reduction in emissions by 2020 has been mugged by reality. Carbon emission regulations come at a high price in lost jobs and lost competitiveness.We hope the incoming Obama economics team is paying attention to the worker and industry backlash in Europe. Mr. Obama is still embracing the line from Greenpeace and the Environmental Defense Fund that cap and trade can generate five million “green jobs.” If you throw enough tax subsidies at something, you’re bound to get some new jobs. But if the money for those subsidies comes from higher energy taxes — and a cap and trade regime would amount to as much $1.2 trillion of new taxes — millions of jobs in carbon-using industry are also going to be lost.The Europeans once believed the “green jobs” myth too. Now, as blue-collar workers take to the streets, they have learned that climate-change legislation means green unemployment.
The Journal’s editorial appears just as Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) touches down in Poznan for the remaining two days of ”high-level” talks. But as the Boston Globe reports, although Sen. Kerry continues to express hope the conference will stay on track, even a number of enviro-left groups have dampened their expectations.
Mr. Bell is a U.S. Fulbright Fellow to Austria, and MPA student at Seattle University.
- Author: Patrick Bell
- Interact: Sphere
- Share This
December 12, 2008 Mike Sheahen, Hickory, North Carolina writes:
We Conservatives must realize that what we face in the form of the Leftist dominated “environmental movement”, (which is the new home of International Socialism, with Mikhail Gorbachev [an unrepentant Communist/Socialist] and Al Gore [a Leftist/Socialist] as two of their most prominent leaders), is Socialism; Socialism itself amounts to a religion which replaces, supplants, and subserviates everyone and everything else with a collectivist Leader and collectivist State as its objects and ideals for devotion), and today it has as one of its “articles of faith and devotion” such a mindless, unquestioning devotion to and parroting of their myth of “anthropomorphic (man-caused) Global Warming”, for which they are willing to go to any and every end, including assault against private property and anyone who dares question or challange their myth and religion.
As even Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and a National Socialist named Hitler all knew, “it is (to quote Hilter) easier to defeat arms, than it is to defeat religion”.
We’re supposed to ignore the historically and consistently disasterous results of both Collectivism/Socialism, including the evidence of the fact that such regimes have been and are the most abusive of the environment, but I, for one, refuse to “put the blinders on” and submit to any so-called “inevitable march of history” in any form of Communism/Socialism.