Dan

Calabrese

Read Dan's bio and previous columns here

October 17, 2007

Nobel is Swell, But Do You Realize What Al Gore Really Wants?

Al Gore can polish his Nobel Peace Prize and put it on his mantle to admire forever. OK by me.

What is not OK is what he really wants. That is not “awareness” of global warming. It’s not people riding bikes to work. Gore has an agenda, and as the news media has gushed all over his selection as a Nobel Laureate, you’d think they’d also do some reporting about what that agenda involves. But they haven’t.

If Gore’s agenda is ever implemented, America’s industrial economy will be destroyed. He knows this. It is the idea.

Gore has long roasted the Bush Administration for refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 treaty that called for mandatory reductions of greenhouse gases by all signatories. But Bush did not become president until four years after Kyoto was negotiated. Bill Clinton, whose administration helped negotiate Kyoto, never even bothered to submit it to the Senate for ratification. Clinton knew that it would be economic suicide for the U.S. to submit itself to Kyoto’s mandates.

It is unlikely the Republican Senate of 1997 would have ratified Kyoto, no matter who the president was, but if Al Gore had been the decision maker, the U.S. would have joined the treaty. Here’s what it would have done:

The United States would have been required – under penalty of the Kyoto Enforcement Branch, which is run by the UN – to reduce carbon emissions by 7 percent. The UN could have forced the U.S. to put in place “domestic policies and measures” to achieve this reduction. The Kyoto Enforcement Branch has teeth. The UN could appoint “expert review teams” to assess U.S. measures and determine if they are sufficient to achieve the 7 percent reduction. Failure to do so could result in stiff fines and other penalties.

Simply put, the U.S. government would be forced by the United Nations to impose draconian environmental requirements on U.S. manufacturers.

What kinds of requirements? Well, you’ll notice that none of the current Democratic presidential candidates are making the Al Gore environmental agenda part of their campaign platforms. That’s because you can’t get elected president by advocating economic suicide.

But U.S. Rep. John Dingell, D-Michigan, doesn’t want to be president, and couldn’t lose re-election in his district if he tried. He is one of the few people in Washington who is willing to publicly advocate the “Full Gore.” Dingell has introduced a bill that would include three astonishing measures: 1) A 50-cent-per-gallon increase in the gasoline tax, phased in over five years. That means you can add another $7 or $8 to your cost every time you fill your tank. 2) A $50 per ton tax on carbon emissions, also phased in over five years. 3) Ending the home mortgage tax exemption for homes larger than 3,000 square feet, to battle so-called “urban sprawl.”

First, the carbon tax. U.S. carbon emissions are currently estimated at 6 billion tons per year. At $50 per ton, that moves $300 billion from U.S. private industry to the federal government. It would be the biggest tax increase in world history, and would be levied directly on the production of goods and services – the one thing most directly responsible for economic growth.

As for the gas tax increase, leave aside for the moment the hit on your pocketbook. If it costs an extra $8 for you to fill your tank, it adds far more to the costs of truck fleets who haul most every kind of product – particularly food – across the country. The price of virtually everything you buy on a day-to-day basis will increase. Many producers will go out of business, along with many of their manufacturing brethren.

And remember, if the United States enacts all of this and still doesn’t achieve the 7 percent carbon reduction, the UN would have had the power under Kyoto to levy fines and force the U.S. to enact the policies it considers necessary to comply.

President Bush is now touting a plan by which individual nations pursue their own targets, but do so voluntarily, with no enforcement power being granted to the UN. The Gore greenies say this just won’t do. Only compulsory compliance is acceptable, and the Enforcement Branch at the UN is the preferred eco-police.

If global warming is real, and if human activity is contributing to it, industrious people in a growing economy will need to find a solution. A crippled economy that can’t produce wealth, can’t produce jobs and can’t get goods to market won’t solve a thing.

In an unguarded moment, Gore said last week of climate change: "It is the most dangerous challenge we've ever faced but it is also the greatest opportunity that we have ever had to make changes that we should be making for other reasons anyway."

Oh? What reasons would those be, Al? Maybe it bothers you that the U.S. economy is so dominant on the global scale, and you want to take it down a notch? Your plan would surely do that.

While the media are salivating with speculation about whether Gore will run for president, they should be telling America what life would be like if Gore’s plan to “save the planet” were actually implemented.

I’ll take my chances with global warming.

Click here to talk to our writers and editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.

To e-mail feedback about this column, click here. If you enjoy this writer's work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry it.

This is Column # DC117.  Request permission to publish here.