“We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

- Hillary Clinton

You will be told, if you haven’t already, that climate change is “the defining challenge of our age.” So says Ban Ki Moon, the United Nation’s Secretary General. Global warming is “really going to kill us all.” You will be told that it is our fault, that the sun has little to do with the warming.

You will also be told that global warming is “the first component of authentic global governance.” Then again, you might not, but it is the most likely.
Climate change is the key to controlling the masses now. And many are willing to submit:

Eighty-three percent of people polled in 21 countries said a change in lifestyle and behavior for their countrymen would be necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to the poll from BBC World Service.

The results of that poll are disturbing (not to mention suspect), and it makes me wonder what kind of changes our Green overlords have in store for us.

Population Control

One definite change is the size of our families. Population control is something the enviro-mafia has sought for years. In 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb,” which warned us all of impending doom. He preached to the masses that “in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” He stated later, “I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

Now it isn’t the lack of food that is going to result in millions of deaths. It’s climate change. And the massive population of the world contributes a huge amount of carbon to the atmosphere. It’s vital that we drastically reduce the amount of life on this planet if we want to live.

Some suggest a heavy tax on procreation. Well, not so much the act, but the results if successful. If you have a child, you need to pay a fee:

A WEST Australian medical expert wants families to pay a $5000-plus “baby levy” at birth and an annual carbon tax of up to $800 a child.

Writing in today’s Medical Journal of Australia, Associate Professor Barry Walters said every couple with more than two children should be taxed to pay for enough trees to offset the carbon emissions generated over each child’s lifetime…

It has yet to be suggested, but I would not be surprised to see abortions resulting in carbon credits. After all, “Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.” Or it might come to pass that newborns are just sold for meat. Lyall Watson told the The Financial Times in 1995, “Cannibalism is a “radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation.” After all, if the tyranny of Green succeeds, there won’t be much steak.

The Terror of Cow Farts

Cow. It’s what’s for dinner, for now anyway. But the Green mafia is aiming for the prime rib on your plate. Your menu is killing the planet:

The study says that people in wealthy countries should more than halve their daily meat intake – particularly red meat – over the next 40 years to stop emissions rising even further, with the long-term goal of cutting average meat consumption worldwide to 90 grams a day by 2050.

“People in wealthy countries.” Read: the United States.

See, the cows eat, and then they pass gas. There’s a lot of methane introduced, just so you can order one medium-rare.

“We are going to take the Monster Burger away from you on behalf of the common good.”

But it isn’t just beef. It’s poultry, pork and lamb. Meat is methane and you can’t have that anymore. But you could switch to kangaroo. Or moose.

For now, a switch to the vegetarian lifestyle is just being suggested. And people are being encouraged to raise the awareness of the danger of your diet:

Also raising the awareness of the climate impact of our behaviour as consumers is important. Organisations like the European Vegetarian Union can play an important role. Rather than any theoretical command and control policy by governments awareness of consumers plays a significant role in changing consumption patterns of agricultural products. In this respect I would like to encourage you to continue your work.

You and I both know it is a short walk from suggesting to mandating.

How You Get Around

Just about every red-blooded American male has thought about what it would be like to drive on the Autobahn. If you are one of them, you better book a flight to Germany soon. It’s under attack from the enviro-mafia:

Many stretches of German autobahn lack speed limits — traditionally a cherished freedom in a rule-bound country. However, the growing concern over carbon dioxide emissions is putting that tradition under renewed scrutiny.

“There are so many areas in which we waste energy in a completely senseless way and burden the climate,” Dimas told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

Maybe they could just introduce some type of government imposed speed governor on the cars in Germany. Then they could still drive as fast as the car could go, but it just couldn’t go that fast. That would at least be better than imposing CAFE standards on cars, resulting in the death of 7,700 people for every mile per gallon saved. Then again, if we raised the CAFE standards higher, we could really lower the population.

Air travel isn’t safe either. Suggestions have been made to tax air travel in order to save us all from our need for adventure:

[Tom Jenkins] pointed out that the UK Department for Transport had calculated that existing taxes on flight tickets, the air passenger duty, brought in about £900 million (US$1,800m) which already more than offset the cost of aircraft CO2 emissions. “Only three percent of all global CO2 emissions are caused by aviation. If we stopped all flying tomorrow it would not save the planet – it would cause massive disruption,” said Jenkins.

The fact that it would do more harm than good has not stopped environmentalists from advocating it.

In Your Home

No incandescent light bulbs. Big deal, right. Not really, but the big deal is that we no longer have a choice. That is a big deal to me. The government has restricted my access to the light bulb for my own good. I’m not really comfortable with that kind of control from on high. And now California has tried to take government control a step further:

Next year in California, state regulators are likely to have the emergency power to control individual thermostats, sending temperatures up or down through a radio-controlled device that will be required in new or substantially modified houses and buildings to manage electricity shortages.

Imagine yourself enjoying the air conditioner on a hot, summer day. you just finished mowing the lawn, you are hot and sweaty and you just want to stand there by that vent and cool off. Then your air conditioner stops. And you can’t control it.

It is best summed up in this very socialist statement by Dr. Arthur Rosenfeld: “If you can control rotating outages by letting everyone in the state share the pain,” he said, “there’s a lot less pain to go around.”

It doesn’t matter that you were not in pain before. We have to take away some comfort on behalf of the common good. In a state that wants to regulate the power generation of plants in other states, just because they dared to sell them electricity, maybe the problem isn’t global warming in California.

Even though the plan was rejected, we have to wonder: how big a deal is this lack of electricity or control of your thermostat?

Well, in 2003, 35,000 people in Europe died because of a heat wave. France lost 15,000 people. Read that again and ask yourself why?

European cities are virtually devoid of air conditioning in large part because the energy to run them is so expensive. And why is that? Pressured by vocal environmentalists, European governments have levied energy tax after energy tax, with the latest excuse being global warming.

The mathematics of this problem are terribly transparent. In order to meet their self-imposed targets from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, European nations already have taxed energy, but they have not done enough. Consequently, even more restrictions are being proposed, especially by the German government. Unaffordable air conditioning will become even more expensive, killing more and more Europeans the next time the temperature reaches what passes for a few degrees above what is normal in Dallas.

Europe has effectively imposed a continuous blackout on air conditioning, and now it is paying the price.

Meanwhile, the Greens are talking about global warming being a killer and how it is going to get so much worse. I believe you. I think it is going to get worse. More people are going to die because of policies like this that keep air conditioning from the poorest populations, resulting in heat related deaths by the thousands.

Nice work.

What’s Left

Great Britain has taken too big a bite. Death by a thousand cuts means you don’t run up and stab someone. But, like California’s thermostat plan, they skipped the cut and went for the impalement:

Every person in Britain would be given a “carbon limit” under radical government plans to limit emissions, it was announced today.

Everybody could be issued with a “carbon credit card” which they would swipe when buying petrol, paying their utility bills, purchasing food, or travelling.

People with lifestyles that are damaging to the environment – such as frequent fliers, motorists who drive gas-guzzling vehicles or people who live in large homes with poor insulation – would have to buy more carbon credits from greener individuals.

They just tried to run a catch-all program that covered every part of a Brits life. Every aspect, covered by a card that will force you to live a greener life. Or pay.

How long before that type of idea finds a foothold in America’s governing body? It would start on the state level maybe, a few states try it out like a fresh pair of shackles. Then the federal government likes what it sees and makes it national. Rather than try to regulate this or restrict that, they cover all the bases with, ironically, a little piece of plastic. Now, you can’t buy everything you wanted like before without it costing you. Your freedom is no more. You have become a part of the collective.

Instead of “Give me liberty or give me death,” we have “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

Common good dressed in green, that is.