Give Me Liberty

In an excellent column on global warming, Charles Krauthammer puts the “cap and trade” debate into much better perspective than we usually get from the mainstream media. Environmental activists would have us accept that “the debate is over”, but as Krauthammer points out, Newton’s Laws of Motion stood up for over 200 years, until they were proven wrong by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. And climate is far more complex and less understood than Newton’s Laws. So before we destroy our own economy, and trap billions of third world citizens in continuing poverty, let’s make sure there will be a corresponding benefit. Cap and trade has been a complete failure in Europe, and the environmentalists’s own studies show only a minimal reduction in global temperatures even if carbon emissions were reduced to ZERO! And remember that scientists were still warning us of the coming Ice Age in 1977, 8 years after temperatures bottomed (in 1969) and reversed their 35 year cooling trend. We’re now 10 years past the warming peak in 1998, so it’s about time we reconize the hoax for what it is.

Just as the great global warming hoax appears to be unraveling (and I watch the snow piling up outside on the second day of Spring), the business community decides to jump on the bandwagon. Did you read about the Wall Street Journal conference last week? From what I’ve read, it sounded like hundreds of environmentalists and big business types getting together to figure out how to use big government to milk this fraud for all it’s worth.

The mainstream business community almost certainly realizes that the facts do not justify the catastrophic economic consequences being proposed. Yet some of them are all too willing to exploit the situation, in hopes of profiting from gullible politicians and government mismanagement. I spent thirty years in corporate America, fighting government regulation and taxation. Yes, government regulations do benefit some companies some of the time, but in the big picture, all companies, with the possible exception of defense contractors, are net losers to government regulation, as are we all as individuals, and the economy as a whole. The time for business to stand up to government, instead of getting in bed with it, is long overdue.