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03.14.2011 1

The Real Green Agenda

By Rick Manning

The logic of climate change-driven policy continues to elude anyone with a rational mind who is actually concerned about the environment.

Professional environmentalists continually bleat about how we only have one planet, and we have to save it from man-made pollution. They have even gone so far as to declare some penguin species, which live in Antarctica as “endangered” under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in order to use that law as a hammer to stop supposedly dangerous greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

While these advocates may or may not be well-meaning, the one thing we can be certain of is that their policies are actually increasing pollution around the world.

The United States and Western Europe have the most stringent anti-pollution policies in the world. This means that when a widget is manufactured in the U.S., the environmental impact is far less than when it is produced elsewhere in the world.

Additionally, when a theoretical widget is manufactured and sold in the United States, that widget doesn’t create other environmental impacts through the burning of fossil fuels as it is loaded and shipped across the ocean to the U.S. consumer.

Yet, the impact of various global warming policies is to force manufacturing overseas to those very countries which have the least effective environmental laws, not only creating more pollution per widget, but increasing that exponentially due to the transportation of said widget.

At the height of the cap and trade debate, economists at The Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analysis estimated that the movement of the manufacture of goods away from the U.S. due to this “greenhouse gas” proposal would cost 400,000 U.S. manufacturing job due to the projected increased costs, shifting manufacturing away from the clean U.S. environment to less clean ones around the globe.

Currently, Obama EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s global warming war on the U.S. industrial base is using the Clean Air Act as a cudgel against the domestic manufacturing base, discouraging U.S. production, and as a result, encouraging manufacturing in less environmentally friendly political regimes.

The obvious illogic of forcing the world’s cleanest manufacturers to offshore their production facilities to China and other less environmentally friendly causes one to question if a cleaner environment is truly the objective of the professional greens.

A simple Google search reveals that the real green agenda is to lower the standard of living in the U.S. to deal with something that they call – ecological debt – a concept developed by a group called the New Economics Foundation.

The theory is that mankind is consuming more from the earth on an annual basis than the earth can replenish, and hence there is an ecological deficit.

Of course, the United States is the guiltiest of the guilty, as the New Economics Foundation claims if everyone consumed at the level of the U.S., we would need more than five earths to sustain the current world population. Great Britain would only take just over three earths, and so on.

When you understand the mentality that capitalism and the standard of living created by the free enterprise system is viewed as the enemy of the environment, the Obama Administration green policies make perfect sense.

While they cannot say it and survive politically, they want America’s standard of living lowered for the sake of the world, and they will hide behind a cloak of green rhetoric to accomplish this agenda.

So, the next time you hear one of these government funded “scientists” railing about supposed global warming or climate change or whatever the next public relations iteration is, just remember that environmentalism is not at its core about cleaning up the environment. It is nothing more than an attempt to transfer wealth from the United States to third world countries around the world.

Perhaps the real genius of the green movement is that they have succeeded in putting a smiley face on policies designed to lower the standard of living of those who support them as they continue to push economic suicide.

After all, if they truly wanted less global pollution, the greenies would be pushing for eliminating corporate taxes on all items produced in the U.S., encouraging the manufacture of goods in a place where dumping waste in the streams and the air is frowned upon, instead of places where it is accepted and ignored.

Rick Manning is the Communications Director of Americans for Limited Government

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