Climate Hoax, “clear and unmistakable threat to the public welfare” Wolf Heads and Carbon Credits

When I was in secondary school I had a teacher who proclaimed, "The New York Times is the best newspaper in the country."

Why not the world?

Anyway, I later discovered that this teacher's proclamation came from his best source in the country, The New York Times.

Where ever you go, there you are!

Central Planning knows best, according to central planners. ♘

Wolf Heads and Carbon Credits | The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty

Paul Schwennesen 5-9-11

Today Is Different

Well of course, you say, that was a darker, dumber era now firmly behind us. We ought now to rest easier, allowing officials license to focus their efforts on solutions to today’s clearly pressing concerns to the public welfare. Things like carbon pollution. Since the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has deemed carbon emissions a “clear and unmistakable threat to the public welfare” and since an awful lot of experts seem to agree on this point, why buck the facts? Oh sure, there are a few misgivings by a few cranky troglodytes, but there are always some crackpots who won’t get with the program. I mean, when was the last time a panel of experts was wrong? Ignore for the moment Galileo’s interrogation proceedings, eighteenth-century European naturalists on the new world’s “stunted” growth, the Royal Society’s views on geologic superposition, the science of eugenics, socialism as a masterpiece of human happiness, the Population Bomb and Snowball Earth madness of the 1970s, Y2K, and more. There were probably even a handful of skeptics who claimed that killing all the wolves was a bad idea in 1816. Imagine.

Plans to reduce (and eventually eliminate) carbon dioxide emissions are not all that different from the plans to reduce (and eventually eliminate) wolf populations. A reward, of sorts, is given for each unit of reduction—be it a cash bounty for wolf heads, or a “credit” to keep a carbon emitter from having to pay a stiff fine. These credits, under a veneer of “free-marketism,” can be traded or sold to someone else who wasn’t as successful at reducing emissions as they were told. In Lincoln’s era, it was optional to hunt wolves, but today we are approaching a point where we are all coerced into the hunt for carbon credits. Even if you don’t happen to be a large-scale carbon emitter yourself, your consumption of things (electricity anyone?) will inevitably draw you into the chase.

Whether wolves or carbon, activity is being driven by central decision-makers as to what constitutes the proper way to handle things.

Again, it is not my intention to argue that carbon emissions aren’t important, or even to question whether or not they represent a public menace (they may well be as threatening as wolves!). My only purpose is to cast a jaundiced eye on the proposed solutions to the crisis du jour. The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, now has the power to regulate carbon emissions and by all indications appears intent on restricting the output of the dangerous stuff. Does anyone else feel another “survey” coming on?

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