Today’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Dr. Roy Cordato, Vice President for Research and Resident Scholar at the John Locke Foundation. This is an edited version of a speech delivered at the Americans for Prosperity Hot Air Tour rally July 9.
At the present time the North Carolina Legislative Commission on Climate Change — co-chaired by Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, and John Garrou, lawyer, environmental activist, and husband of Sen. Linda Garrou, D-Forsyth — is considering a set of policy proposals that, if enacted, would dramatically reduce our freedoms and impact our prosperity. The alleged goal of these proposals is to change the climate a hundred or so years from now. The actual effect is to micromanage our lives today. If enacted, these mandates would, through regulations and taxes, attempt to tell the citizens of North Carolina:
• How we can travel and commute,
• Where we can live,
• The size homes we can live in,
• The amount of land we can live on,
• The size cars we can drive,
• How we can generate electricity,
• How much energy we can use,
• The kinds of appliances we can have in our homes,
• How we can light, heat, and cool our homes, and even
• How we can purchase automobile insurance.
And there is no evidence that these restrictions on our freedom, even if enacted by every country on the planet, will have any noticeable impact on the climate — not in 100 years, not in 200 years.
Let me point out that this list represents only a fraction of the 56 proposals that, if enacted, begin the process of remaking the lifestyles of North Carolinians in the image of environmental ideologues and extremists. As Al Gore has pointed out, the fight against global warming will require “a wrenching transformation of American society,” and as Barack Obama has warned (threatened?): “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on … 72 degrees at all times….”
This power grab is happening in the name of reducing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and fighting global warming — a warming that, according to all temperature records, stopped about 10 years ago. That’s right, there’s been no net warming this decade. And for the last 60 years warming has occurred for less than a 25-year period from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s. The real “deniers” in this debate are those who ignore these facts.
Carbon dioxide is unlike other regulated emissions. First, it has no toxic effect on human beings, unlike real pollutants such as lead or carbon monoxide. But more importantly there is nothing that humans can do, including breathing, that does not involve emitting CO2, and its presence in the atmosphere is essential for all life on earth. Without it we die, the plants die, and the earth freezes over. And yet the environmental zealots in and out of government have propagandized us into calling this life-giving gas in our atmosphere a pollutant.
In fact, their use of language would make Orwell proud. It is now fashionable to refer to anything that reduces atmospheric CO2 as “green” — green energy, green appliances, green homes. Yet, exactly the opposite is true. Without CO2 in the atmosphere nothing would be green, and the more CO2-enriched the atmosphere is the greener the planet will become. But when your true goal is social engineering, the truth is always seen as something to be manipulated.
The global warming hypothesis — that CO2 emissions are leading to the destruction of the earth — is the Holy Grail for socialists. Once this hypothesis is accepted as a policy guide, our lives and our property belong to the state. If you have the power to regulate CO2 emissions, then you have the power to regulate and control every aspect of human life. A government that has this power is indeed an all-powerful government. A society that accepts the premises of people like Al Gore, Barack Obama, Pricey Harrison, Marc Basnight, or, unfortunately, John McCain and Elizabeth Dole, will ultimately have to choose between free markets and socialism and between liberty and control.
Without any specific legislative authority and without waiting for any climate commission reports or recommendations, the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) plans to start requiring businesses to report their CO2 emissions to the state. The first steps have already been taken with the Environmental Management Commission giving its approval in early July to start the process by instituting a CO2 registry, or what the propagandists in the agency call a “climate registry,” as if companies would be reporting on what the temperature is or if it’s raining outside their offices.
DENR will surely claim that it is not regulating CO2 emissions, just measuring them. But no regulatory agency measures anything that it doesn’t plan on regulating. Furthermore, the regulators know that emissions cannot be regulated — only people can — and that’s what this is all about. If the citizens of North Carolina want to hold on to the freedom they now have, they should demand that DENR halt all actions that it is taking or about to take with respect to the regulation, control, or measurement of CO2 emissions.
But the pain and human suffering from alarmist activities is not all in the future. The high gas prices that we are facing are a direct result of the CO2 phobia that has driven Washington decision makers for the past two decades. Restrictions on drilling and exploration in our oil-rich nation have been justified by the propaganda of environmentalists, who argue that we have to eliminate our “addiction” to oil and other carbon-based fuels, like coal, for the sake of a cooler planet. We Americans aren’t addicted to oil or coal or any other kind of fuel. What we are addicted to is freedom and prosperity, and that is what the CO2 fearmongers really want to wean us off of.
Their war against inexpensive carbon-based fuels is not about global warming. This is a ruse. Their real war is against a lifestyle and a system of justice and morality that they simply detest. That is the morality of individual liberty and private property rights. And it is a morality that brings prosperity to more people than any value system ever devised. This is what they despise. This is what they are fighting against. And this is what we are defending.
In North Carolina the most recent assault in this war has been on consumers of electricity. It came in the form of the state’s renewable energy portfolio standard, Senate Bill 3, which was passed last summer. The bill requires that all North Carolina citizens buy expensive and unreliable energy generated from so-called renewable energy sources. In North Carolina this will primarily mean industrial wind turbines that are 40 to 50 stories tall, visibly located all along North Carolina’s coastline and mountain ridges. A 1,000-megawatt wind power plant needs to cover 150,000 acres, or about 234 square miles. These wind power plants are favored by the same people who argue vigorously, if not disingenuously, for the preservation of open space and oppose oil and gas rigs completely out of sight more than 40 miles off of the North Carolina coast. The bill also forces North Carolinians to cut back on their overall electricity usage — with no concern for the price of electricity or any impact on people’s lifestyles or overall comfort levels.
And just in case anyone thinks this is only the Democratic Party doing the bidding of the environmental lobby — the bill was passed overwhelmingly with bipartisan support. In fact, more Democrats voted against it than Republicans. S.B. 3 should be repealed. But this is not likely. One of the 56 proposals now under consideration by the Climate Commission is to expand these mandates, restricting freedom even further and forcing us all to tighten our belts even more.
I could go on, but let me close by saying that events like the Americans for Prosperity Hot Air tour are imperative. For too long we have been silent while environmental extremists have been making inroads into government agencies and bureaucracies, our education system, and our culture at large, all while the rest of us have just gone on with our lives. Finally, as gasoline and energy prices soar at the hands of our eco-oppressors, people are standing up and saying enough. I am so glad that AFP is taking this event across the country. Freedom needs a voice, and they are providing it. Thank you, Dallas [Woodhouse, AFP North Carolina state director], and thanks to Americans for Prosperity for your efforts and hard work.