Earth Day, Kyoto protocol
Environmentally, We’re Number One
As we approach the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union…opps, I meant Earth Day…it’s so easy to confuse the two because they occur, quite by coincidence I’m sure, on the same day. Anyway April 22 will bring forth an avalanche of the usual accusations that America is a sinkhole of pollution, et cetera. We are all supposed to feel guilty or angry or both for living in a nation that we are told is the largest “consumer” of, well, everything and, at the same time, a terrible steward of the land and such. There are two things that environmentalists hate, one is consumption and the other is the human beings doing it.
The only problem with these accusations is that they are, like virtually everything environmentalists tell us, wrong.
The Pacific Research Institute (PRI) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) just released the “2008 Index of Leading Environmental Indicators”, an annual report highlighting the significant environmental developments and milestones in the United States and worldwide.
As Steven F. Howard, a co-author of the Index and a PRI senior fellow, is pleased to note, “The U.S. remains the world’s environmental leader and will likely be so in the future.” For example, between 1997 and 2004, the last year in which comparative data are available, emissions from Kyoto Protocol participants increased 21.1 percent.
The U.S. refused to sign this United Nations inspired idiocy, but its emissions increased only 6.6 percent during the same time period, considerably less than the participants.
The Protocol is based on the lie that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are causing the Earth to warm, but the Earth is actually beginning to cool and CO2 constitutes a minuscule 0.038 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere.
The odds are that the United States is the only industrialized nation in which a decrease occurred in 2006. Europe, which is always wailing away about greenhouse gases (GHG) and is making progress toward eliminating anything that generates electricity other than the occasional lightning strike, has never been able to meet the Protocol’s limits.
As the Index points out, the United States last emitted CO2 at this level in 1910 when the population was only 92 million. All of which suggests that we are doing one hell of a better job at limiting GHG emissions than say, China or India. Oh, wait! They aren’t even Kyoto Protocol signatories. In fact, the Protocol exempts them. Which raises the question, if two of the world’s largest and fastest growing industrializing nations don’t have to limit GHG emissions, what’s the point of having a Protocol in the first place?
These days, crazed environmentals are calling for an 80 percent reduction of GHG by 2050. What they don’t tell you is that the only nations with emissions levels that low are appallingly poor. Don’t like GHG emissions? Move to Haiti or Somalia.
So, come Earth Day, if you are a dedicated environmentalist, don’t forget to get out there and wave your red flag with the Hammer and Sickle on it. I keep forgetting. I mean the green flag. Tell people that you are trying to save the Earth from horrible consumers of stuff like, ah, food.
Editor’s note: To download the 2008 Index, visit www.pacificresearch.org.
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