In his celebrated novel “1984” George Orwell wrote about Emmanuel Goldstein – a despicable – and fictional – enemy of the people created by the state to justify the perpetual war against an imaginary enemy being waged as a device to justify it’s Draconian dictatorship.
There’s a new Emmanuel Goldstein in the process of being created by Congressional Democrats and the Obama Administration to frighten Americans into accepting a measure that would impose crippling economic costs on the American people – it’s called CO2 and unlike Goldstein it’s real and omnipresent.
We are told that this invisible gas is a dangerous pollutant and greenhouse gas largely responsible for alleged global warming. Moreover, it is wreaking its havoc on the planet because evil humanity is producing dangerous amounts of CO2 and lofting it into the atmosphere and creating a threat to the future of the planet. More and more students
are studying to get a Green MBA to counter this growing problem.
We are warned that unless it is controlled by governmental fiat we’re all doomed to be parboiled sometime in the future. This is a much more important issue than some of the news that comes out of pop culture or even vanity concerns. Too many young men and young women are more concerned with themselves than the world. When some are busy searching through breast augmentation photos or the latest football stats, many others are putting their time to good use.
Now pending in the House of Representatives is a bill – the 648-page American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 co-authored by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Cal)and Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass), and better known as the Cap and Trade bill. If enacted it would impose crippling restrictions and substantial costs on the American people.
It is estimated to increase the typical family’s energy costs by a minimum of $3,100 a year and over a span of 20 years result in $7 trillion in reduced economic output and vast unemployment according to the Orange County Register.
Even the Environmental Protection Agency has warned that U.S. Regulation of so-called greenhouse gases such as Carbon Dioxide “is likely top have serious economic consequences.”
All of this economic disruption in an effort to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and thus halt global warming.
So just what is this atmospheric pollutant we call carbon dioxide? Is it a deadly greenhouse gas much of which we’d be well rid of?
Hardly.
Without it we’d all be dead. Plant life would vanish, and with it all of humanity.
Simply put, plants inhale CO2, convert it into sugars that enable them to grow and thrive, and exhale oxygen – the stuff that keeps us alive. According to Dr. Tim Ball, a renowned environmental consultant and retired professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg, plants require CO2 to exist as we require oxygen to exist.
As the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increases the plants grow more vigorously. Current levels of atmospheric CO2 is 385 ppm but research shows that plants grow most vigorously at 1000 to 1200 ppm which is why commercial greenhouse pump that much into their atmospheres.
Some pollutant!
Dr. Ball warns that if we reduce CO2 levels down to about 250 ppm from the current level of 385 ppm the plants start to die and 150 ppm they are all dead – and so are we.
Says Dr. Ball, “One could cynically argue that this is the goal of extreme environmentalists and the streak of anti-humanism that pervades their thinking.”
Aside from the fact that instead of being a pollutant, CO2 is vital to our very existence, what is happening now is disproving the false allegation that rising levels of CO2 increase global temperatures. Those levels have been shooting up over the past decade yet temperature levels have been falling for the past ten years. Some climatologists are now warning that the world may well be heading into an elongated period of cooling or even the advent of a new little ice age, or even a big one.
Those are the facts, but facts don’t seem to matter to the global warming alarmists now pushing the ruinous Cap and Trade legislation. They remain bound and determined to grind down the economy in pursuit of a will of the wisp agenda that demonizes a substance vital to our very existence and imposes crippling economic damage to the average American family’s budget.
Be warned: the House of Representatives is about to pass the ruinous cap and trade bill and impose a new tax on us. Don’t say I didn’t tell you.
Welcome to the 21st century, Emmanuel Goldstein.