Bob Ellis at The Dakota Voice:
The schemes being dreamed up by these apostles of doom are intended to take one person’s hard-earned money away from them and give it to someone else…while the middle-men line their pockets with most of it.
These schemes will make it much more difficult in the U.S. and worldwide to produce affordable energy. Our refineries and power plants will take it on the chin, and those costs will be passed along to the consumer-you and me.
This agenda will cost millions of jobs, plunging more people into poverty because they lost their jobs on the altar of a hoax.
It will push modern development backward, creating more poverty, disease and hardship-things we as a human race have been fighting our way out of for centuries.
The skyrocketing cost of energy (electricity, gasoline, etc) will cause food prices to soar, since food cannot be produced, transported or preserved without electricity and gasoline.
All of these consequences will have a devastating effect on the poorest of the people in the United States in the world. This is one of the things that makes this despicable purpose the most hypocritical: it is being pushed by people who claim to be advocates of the poor, yet they are hurting the poor more than could the indifferent wealthy.
Is it evil to perpetrate a hoax? Oh yes.
Is it evil to take something from a person that they have earned but you haven’t? Oh yes.
Is it evil to push those of us who have escaped poverty and disease back down several rungs of the ladder? Oh yeah.
Is it evil to push those who are barely ahead of poverty back down into the squalor of poverty? Oh yeah.
Is it evil to smack down those who were fighting to make it out of poverty and disease, imprisoning them in it with no hope of escape? Oh yeah!
Is it evil to do this based on the unproved fantasies of a problem that does not exist in the first place?
You’d better believe it is!
The notion that the Church of Chicken Little is hurting the poor isn’t a new one. Back in ’07, Mark Tooley at FrontPage expounded on the theme:
It’s wonderfully convenient for the Religious Left that Global Warming will be one more urgent reason for adding additional layers to the welfare state. Keeping the poor dependent on government transfer payments is politically useful. Reducing economic growth through climate change regulation will further reduce the poor’s ability to escape poverty. Newly empowered people who have escaped their poverty through economic entrepreneurship are always a political threat to the statism of the Religious Left.
…
Very few poor will have their economic situation “enhanced” by the draconian taxation and regulation that Global Warming activists demand. An increased welfare state in the wealthy West may spare Western poor from too much additional suffering.
But no amount of increased Western aid will spare the Global South’s paying a steep price for Global Warming activism’s deep hostility to economic growth. Upper middle class environmentalists in the U.S. and Europe believe that their Global Warming policies will simply result in slightly larger fuel bills, which they of course can well afford. And isn’t saving the whole planet worth the price of a few Lattes at Starbucks?
Unappreciated by Western environmentalists is that hundreds of millions in Africa and Asia will have to sacrifice more than their favorite espresso. Capping international economic growth means preventing industrialization in the Global South. It means Indians and Congolese and Chinese and Nigerians and Indonesians and Brazilians and countless others will not have refrigeration, or air conditioning, or easily potable water, or cleans ways to heat their homes. For the Global South, freezing the global economy in a ephemeral attempt at affecting the climate means permanent poverty, with reduced life spans, continued plagues, unsanitary living and working conditions, and diminished opportunities for education, for Western-levels of medical care, and for convenient and safe transportation.
It is one of the most maddening, most frustrating, of notions that those who deem to care so much for the poor are pushing an agenda that does more to harm them than to help them.
In my mind, Bob Ellis is correct.
It is indeed evil.
Crossposted(*).
