And once again we have the big circus of Republiwimps and Demobrats clawing, elbowing, kicking, and stamping their way to the 2% of places that may become available at the trough. New this year is the pledge, by some, to avoid "negative campaigning," the equivalent of a cannibal's pledge to take his food only with napkins and finger bowls. The wise politicians have just voted to cut government revenue
¾an unavoidable consequence of in-creasing taxes, and a clean demonstration of both the greed and the dim wits of the incumbent irremovables.Their sham-environmentalist agenda includes a further tightening of the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency) Act: every auto company is to raise the average fuel efficiency, sales-averaged over its models, to 40 miles per gallon by the year 2,000. Due to a technicality, the bill did not make it this year, but it will be back in 1991.
As pointed out by the Council for a Competitive Energy, CAFE leads to smaller, lighter and less safe cars; it provides energy conservation by death on the highways. But even more threatens. Who is to make the decision, the man who buys the car and risks his own life or the Washington central planners who decree what Detroit shall produce? What is at stake here is whether you are to be the guardian of your own neck, or whether your neck is Washington's property. "If you are worried about safety," write the greenish-yellow journalists, "you should use the bus, not waste energy." They have already made their choice: for they regard the energy that is wasted as "society's," the energy that "belongs to all of us." The red in the water melons is oozing out.
In Amherst, Mass., the city council decreed that all trash must be in see-through plastic bags so the citizens' recycling chastity can be inspected by trash-hauling ecology officers. The Clean Air Act will spend $350 billion over the next decade on eyewash like improving the filtration of auto emissions from 96% to 98% and reducing the SO
2 emissions by power plants to 5 lb in every 10,000,000 lb. California is voting on the "Big Green" initiative to kill industry with impossible standards as protection from non-existent dangers. Judges rule that children must not play under power lines, and fear-crazed suburbanites prohibit transformer stations on property that is not theirs. The Holy Order of the Sierra Club is suing to protect the spotted owl at a cost of 60,000 loggers' jobs and $95 million (in killed timber business) per pair of owls. All over the country manufacturers are being harassed for perceived pollution and for insufficient respect for the Green Church's scares that have replaced the by-gone hoaxes of pre-vious totalitarians.Remember when in 1979 German nuke-baiter Jungk scared us with the "Nuclear State" in which civil liberties would be lost? They are being lost all right; but to Jungk's scare tactics, not to a benign energy source.
The elections to Congress have become exhibitions of fervor in defending the ozone layer from disintegration, the globe from warming, and endangered species from extinction; not unlike bygone times when politicians promised to defend Germany from the Jews and the Socialist Motherland from imperialist agents.
They have good reason to do so. Last year the National Demoblican Parties received a paltry $100 million contributed by 2 million Republicrats, whereas the top 15 Green organiza-tions have an annual operating budget of $250 million and 11 million members. But money alone no longer guarantees power; today's absolute, unchecked, and responsibility-free power resides in the media, and the Green priests have those in their pockets, too. Your Congressman is a nobody in comparison. It doesn't matter much whether he fails to report a passenger drowned in his car or has a homosexual prostitution ring operat-ing from his apartment; the major criterion by which the power wielders judge him is the fervor with which he crusades against industry and technology to stave off the allegedly impending death of the planet.
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Vol. 18, No. 3
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 18, No. 3 Date: December 01, 2004 04:00 PM Title: Threatened: Environment or Liberty?
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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