One of the leading sources of anti-Americanism relates to America's supposed arrogance in failing to sign or ratify international treaties that the rest of the world endorses. This particular complaint arises from a failure to understand the role of treaties in the US Constitution and is not confined to the left.
2007
North Carolinians should question the process that’s leading to proposals for fighting global warming in the Tar Heel state. That’s the warning from a John Locke Foundation analyst who has monitored the process.
As he devoted countless hours to lifting weights, sculpting himself into a domineering bodybuilder, a young Arnold Schwarzenegger certainly understood the phrase, "no pain, no gain," or its Germanic equivalent.
The European Union approved a one-year extension of anti-dumping duties on imports of Chinese energy-saving light bulbs on Monday, despite protests from environmentalists, leading companies and several EU capitals.
Hu Jintao wants to make every Chinese twice as rich by 2020. He has done it once – in just five years, income per capita doubled to $2,000 (£983) – and the only obstacle in the Chinese President's path is the fuel needed to stoke the boiler in China's locomotive.
A world where there's not enough electricity. It is hard to even comprehend a world where you turn the switch and nothing happens. When I lived on a farm in Punjab, India, it used to amuse me. The whole world would go black and the only light in the village was my trusty laptop, with its blue glare. If any family in the village had an Akand Path going on, the sound of the Guru Grant Sahib would be abrubtly cut off as the speaker lost the power. It was amusing to me because it was novell, and almost incomprehensible.
Indians have the festival of Diwali, it is a light festival. There are lights everywhere, every edge you can place lights on, there are little terracotta bowls with mustard oils and wicks of rolled cotton. The brownouts fascinated me, and I used to speculate what would happen if the electricity went out on Diwali. I was assured this would not happen under any circumstance. It did not.
This story I found in the Philladelphia Inquirer this weekend is a view into where life will lead, eventually, if we keep preventing new powerplants from being built. Can you imagine getting up at 2 a.m. to do laundry, just because your washer might have enough electricity for a full cycle?
In a very short item at the bottom of page 6 (print edition), the Financial Times reports that, wedded to rationing, the European Parliament on Monday will endorse its next move in the chess game that is negotiations over a "post-2012" global warming pact. It will be a per capita quota scheme, allocated at the national level.
The level they will suggest remains unspoken, but past negotiations make clear it will be set well below the US emission level, but well above likely all of the developing world, with a global trading scheme (which still hasn't found its way forward under the 1997 Kyoto). This is in order to peel away Third World support from joining with President Bush's obvious momentum [China now being firmly in the US camp after the EU…joined by some Ds here…aggressively rattled the trade sanctions/border-adjustments saber].
This desperate effort to find something that the EU can still point to as theirs, if adopted, would ensure that Kyoto remains the most direct form of wealth transfer and off-shoring proposal, as opposed to a more growth-oriented, technology transfer type agreement Bush is pushing to set the table with as his term winds down.
As always, this twist on the "Brazil plan" allows us to identify what standard of living is associated with their quota, and tell everyone that Kyoto means, e.g., Malawi for you.
Senator Barack Obama informs us that “We've heard promises about energy independence from every single president since Richard Nixon, but we are actually more dependent on oil today than ever before.”
The only way that this statement is true is if Obama intends by it that we now use more oil in real terms, irrespective of per capita, rate of growth or its relative role in our economy, which would be a pretty simplistic-slash-disingenuous approach to the issue. Actually, we are in practical terms less dependent on oil now, such that the economy is much more resilient to oil shocks, not less, as Yale economist William Nordhaus has examined. Cato’s Jerry Taylor & Peter VanDoren address this issue here.
Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan also goes into it at length in The Age of Turbulence. Short version: between 1973 and 2006, US consumption grew, on average, by only .5 percent per year, far short of the rise in real GDP. In consequence, the ratio of US oil consumption to GDP fell by half, and “the ratio of world oil consumption to real GDP, the most general measure of oil use intensity, peaked in 1973 and has progressed steadily downward to the current level of less than two-thirds of where it was in 1973.”
As I was leafing through my Philadelphia Inquirer over breakfast yesterday, I had to do a double take on this quote. Losing your secret service detail means you have to fend for yourself?!
"Participant Productions – founded by eBay pioneer Jeff Skoll – came on board with financing, and Guggenheim immediately went to work. In many ways, what Guggenheim caught on film was troubling: He captured Gore's message, but also showed that the former vice president was very much alone on his mission.
He [Al Gore} had lost his Secret Service detail six months after losing his 2000 presidential campaign, and he was left to fend for himself. He took off his shoes and fumbled through his pockets at airport security checkpoints, and pulled his bag carrying his slide show behind him."
In my blog post Friday, I suggested that the old world politicians wanted some new world glamour in Oslo on December 10th. According to the Inquirer, the new world glam squad wants a taste of the old world glamour also…
If Al Gore harbors Presidential ambitions, he would be insane to run in ’08. In the parlance of campaign operatives, Al Gore ‘owns’ the global warming issue. Just as Google has become synonymous with surfing the web, Al Gore is coterminous with climate change. Which is why patience will pay for Gore. When everything under the sun is blamed on global warming (the heat, the cold, droughts, monsoons, disappearing lakes, rising sea levels, etc, etc), Al gets to stay on everyone’s radar, forever.
And what Presidential aspirant wouldn’t be well positioned to run after 4 (or 8?) years of near-continuous, fawning media coverage?
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