"China, all by its lonesome, burns just about as much coal as the rest of the world put together."
It is back. I just read another article a few days ago advocating for a carbon tax in our country. This is yet another one of those Utopian ideas which ring hollow in reality. It is fraught with unintended consequences. Yes, I am talking about how much it would change life in America. And how expensive everything would be. But who cares? The greenies say we would feel so "good" about ourselves. To that I say, CRAP!
Before I get into the boring details on how much things would change in our country, Dr. Raincloud here is going to give you a fact. Coal. The abundant fossil fuel which has been dubbed by our Administration as a tool of Satan, is still being burned like crazy on our planet. Only not as much here. China, all by its lonesome, burns just about as much coal as the rest of the world put together. They burn about 3.8 billion tons a year.
Here is the rub. China burns coal because it is abundant and cheap. They are trying to continue to develop as a global exporter, and using coal is a ticket for them to get there. However, they do not have the scrubber technology that we have in our coal plants. So they end up having "turn of the 20th century" London type air pollution. It is bad, and many Chinese are getting sick from it. But, they keep burning it (with lousy scrubbers) anyway.
The sanctuary city of Minneapolis just banned plastic bags from being used in the city. I can see the next thing banned will be cars. Park your car at the city limits and then walk the rest of the way. You know why - cars "pollute". And then Minneapolis will ban any kind of fire in a fireplace or fire pit. Next, the only kind of electricity that will be allowed in the city must come from renewable sources. What is going to be the bottom line? Loss of freedoms. Massive change of lifestyle. Erosion of jobs. And of course, sky high cost of electricity.
Here is the reality. Even though coal is being phased out in this country, it is not worldwide. According to a 2012 Time Magazine report, there are over 1,200 new coal plants in the planning stage worldwide. What does that mean? Regardless of what the United States does, if countries such as China and India keep building and using coal plants, there will be no difference in the climate. None. All we will do is punish ourselves. But the greenies will feel good. And that is the important thing.
Maurice Strong was a socialist & a standard bearer for the U.N. and Agenda 21. Here is a portion of his opening remarks in 1992. Thankfully he is no longer with us but the U.N. still is, and uses Agenda 21 as it's playbook and killing the coal industry is part of it.
ReplyDeleteHe told the opening session of the Rio Conference (Earth Summit II) in 1992, that industrialized countries have:
“developed and benefited from the unsustainable patterns of production and consumption which have produced our present dilemma. It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class — involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing — are not sustainable. A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmentally damaging consumption patterns.”
In an essay by Strong entitled Stockholm to Rio: A Journey Down a Generation, he says:
“Strengthening the role the United Nations can play…will require serious examination of the need to extend into the international arena the rule of law and the principle of taxation to finance agreed actions which provide the basis for governance at the national level. But this will not come about easily. Resistance to such changes is deeply entrenched. They will come about not through the embrace of full blown world government, but as a careful and pragmatic response to compelling imperatives and the inadequacies of alternatives.”
“The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. What is needed is recognition of the reality that in so many fields, and this is particularly true of environmental issues, it is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security.”
http://habitat.igc.org/agenda21/app.htm