Originally Posted by Thead
yeah right ...
"It is well known that in 1997 under the auspices of the United Nations, delegates from 168 countries, assembled in Kyoto, signed a protocol to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases. Shortly after taking office in January, 2001, Bush withdrew the US adherence to the Kyoto protocol. Immediately indignation and even insults abounded, especially from Europe. Bush, it was said, cynically sacrificed our planet?s future to capitalist profit and in particular to the oil companies whose notorious puppet he is, as we were told. Unfortunately, the authors of this in-depth analysis neglected some facts that they could have easily researched. First and foremost, in 1997 under Clinton?s presidency, the American Senate had already voted against the Kyoto protocol by 95 votes to 0. Rightly or wrongly, this is another problem. The fact remains, however, that Bush was not responsible. Later, just before turning over his powers to his successor, Bill Clinton had signed an executive order re-establishing the American support for the famous protocol.
Good manners in a democracy dictate that executive orders issued by an outgoing president at the end of his mandate never deal with questions of high importance for the political future of the country. In this instance Clinton?s obvious intention was to pull a fast one on Bush and to leave him with a crown of thorns. Had he accepted the commitment, the new president would have had to confront the enormous difficulty of reducing gas emissions by 5.2 percent without painful and precipitous cuts in industrial production and energy consumption of individuals, which would have been an impossible challenge. A rejection, on the other hand, would unleash vociferous personal criticism from the whole world. This was what occurred. These criticisms were all the more hypocritical as their most vociferous authors who pilloried the US in front of all humanity in the name of ecological morals were most careful not to apply the same moral standards to themselves. In fact, by the middle of 2001, four years after the Kyoto conference, not a single one of the 167 other signatories and most prominently none of the European countries had ratified the protocol.
I have temporarily left aside the question whether the Kyoto protocol is realistic. Suffice it to say that some highly polluting countries, such as Brazil, China and India, demand that the US apply restrictions that they themselves do not feel obliged to respect. In a report published on 29 May 2001 the European Environment Agency observed a worsening of pollution in Europe, due mainly to a ?constant increase of transportation, especially those forms of transportation that are the least respectful of the environment (road and air traffic).? The agency also noted an increase in pollution due to home heating and of water pollution due to nitrates. Those who preach are definitely not showing a good example.
One could be tempted to take an additional step and to think that there is an anti-American psychopathology attempting to transform the US into the scapegoat for all sins committed by the rest of the world. The ecologists would refute that and observe that the US, with its approximately 5 percent of the world?s population, produces 25 percent of the planet?s industrial pollution. This may be true, though it should be added that it also produces 25 percent of the goods and services of this same planet. It must also be said that up to the middle of 2001 the 167 other signatories of the Kyoto Protocol had done absolutely nothing, collectively and individually, to begin to reduce their 75 percent of the pollution. We are in the middle of total incoherence. It was more important to excommunicate than to un-pollute.
Whatever criticism the American environmental policy deserves or does not deserve, one must realize that the core of the debate needs to be found elsewhere. The objective of the Western ecologists is to make the US, that is to say capitalism, the supreme and even the sole culprit of the planet?s pollution. Our ecologists are anything but ecologists. They are leftists. They are interested in the environment that they pretend to defend only as a means to attack free society. During the ?70s and ?80s they never denounced the pollution in the communist countries that was a thousand times more atrocious than in the West. It was not a capitalist pollution. They were silent when Chernobyl happened and they are silent now about the decrepit nuclear power plants that still exist all over the former Communist territories. They also remain silent about the hundreds of ex-Soviet submarines, armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, that the Russians sank as they were in the Barents Sea. To demand that humanity be freed of this mortal peril that will endanger it for thousands of years would be useless from their socialist point of view. Indeed, this tiring enterprise would not in any way strengthen their crusade against the scourge of globalization that they consider to be a much more formidable danger. In the past, especially in the ?70s and especially in the US, there was a sincere environmentalism. But it has long been since recovered and transformed by an environmentalism full of lies that has become the mask of old Marxist theories under a shade of green. This ideological environmentalism sees nature threatened only in those nations that practice economic freedom and above all in the richest of them all."
Jean François Revel
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