That's the fifty-cent lecture; my invoice will appear shortly.
Save it. I'm not interested in given MORE money to support scare tactics. I'm already getting raped enough as it is.
To some extent the Man Made Global Warming Threat is the scare of the week or year or until something else comes along.
Surely you can remember back to the advent of computers when everyone was going to get cancer from cathode ray tubes. Or everyone is going to get cancer from high voltage transmission lines. Or everyone is going to get cancer from cellphone radiation. Or 30 years ago when the big thing was global cooling.
Global warming comes and goes and has come and gone by varying amounts over varying periods of time. Fortunately since around 25,000 years ago the overall trend has been upwards with a few jiggles down every now and then. You would have to do one h*** of a lot of digging in ice to find Central Park if it hadn't.
Anthropogenic Global Warming, or at least the Man Made Anthropogenic part is probably 98% myth. Real Global Warming since the Little Ice Age a few hundred years ago certainly has happened. However it has not been a steady rise but has bobbed around a bit. If you carefully select which 'bobs' you look at, up or down, you can prove almost anything. Well you can't prove it but if you shout loud enough you can drown out the moderate voices pointing out that you have selected things to favor your conclusion. And once you have a lot of people with a vested interest in supporting your conclusions you become difficult to stop.
I think we should be more concerned with how legislation put into place by those who stand on the GW platform is going to affect us...It's not GW itself that is the real threat...it's all the junk that is going to come out of the GW crisis mentality that is going to hurt us all. 'All of us' being the 'we' that make a living with both our hands and our brains...more legislation, rules, licenses, certifications yada yada...It would be easier to just hang your head out the front door each morning and get choked all in one shot. This is just another example of problem-reaction-solution. The solution already exists ~ more legislation (which means money)...they have presented the 'problem' and are waiting for enough to rally together with their fear-full reactions to present the solution...which is the intended agenda anyway. (how many times can we fall for this?)
Most people can't think for themselves, and adopt the herd mentality because they don't want to be on the 'unpopular team' regardless of what is factually correct. "The nail that sticks up will be hammered down." It is unplausible to believe that more than a handful of people could come up with such a 'crisis' on their own without it being spoon fed to them via the media to get us to react or be fearful so they can step in and be the benevolent hero.
GW is the new 'empire approved' crisis of the moment...funny how totally screwed up everything else is and they choose to focus on events (real, perceived or concocted) that are mostly out of our control. How convenient. What many fail to realize is that the masses are never going to evolve to the point that you hope they will in your lifetime. You have to evolve on your terms at your pace...doing what you know is right, without needed to 'check in' with status quo when the street lights come on...
Furthermore, what the U.S. government is doing when it backs the global warming agenda, 'alternative energy', and CAFE rules, is to effectively ship the productive capacity wholesale out of this country and into countries that do not suffer from these restrictions.
I mean this literally. In my industry, (CNC Machining) scrapped machines are no longer melted down -- they are shipped to China, where they are being refitted and put back to work. Same thing with a lot of electrical motors. Just talk to the industrial scrap yards. Ask them why the price of scrap copper and steel is at historic levels.
As the domestic automotive industry coughs out its last gasps, having almost completely walked away from its domestic supplier base, you bet this affects the CNC machining community. In Michigan, over 200,000 manufacturing jobs are permanently gone -- this is a conservative estimate, because numbers don't get counted on all of them. (And multiples more jobs gone from the ripple effect.) Worst hit are the small employers, who are going bankrupt or closing up and retiring. Same for California, where companies are leaving in droves because they can't afford to do business here and be competitive with other countries or even other states.
And what strategy do we get from government? Increased taxes. Increased regulations. CAFE rules aiming to torpedo pickup trucks, the last refuge of customer preference for vehicles and the last dying hope of the teetering, clueless bureaucracies of the big 2.5. Increased health care costs, due directly to government intervention in the market. Increased environmental compliance costs at all levels. Energy policy that guarantees increased cost of energy. And promises of more, more, more of the same.
As always the blame will be placed on overseas workers who make a few cents per hour. Just ask any businessman who owns a manufacturing operation what percentage of the cost of his product actually makes it into the pocket of his employees, who are an order of magnitude more productive than anyone in a third world country. The answer is very little.
The costs are dwarfed by the taxes he must pay for the employees, the cost of complying with tax policy (90% of bookkeeping and accounting expense), complying with environmental regulations, fire regulations, OSHA regulations, disability regulations, family leave act, local building codes, and so on forever. The huge productivity value of our ability to gain economies of scale is being sucked out of every enterprise at every level, to the point where it is cheaper to make something overseas under appalling conditions and ship it halfway around the world, where it gets purchased with ever fewer locally generated dollars.
"Globalization" is not just a buzzword, it's a keyword -- it means get your assets out of the U.S. if you want your company to survive.
The ultimate perversion is that there is now more freedom to create wealth in COMMUNIST countries than there is in the United States of America. All of this can be laid at the feet of the nanny state and those who support it or don't loudly oppose it.
This movement will continue, because we have passed the tipping point where politicians can promise more unearned loot to more people than can oppose it. Of the remainder, they are intellectuuote]ally unarmed, powerless to argue against the majority opinions put out in the popular press in such Orwellian fashion. It will continue while we eat our assets (seed corn), until the assets are no longer ours.
More than just an economic crime, the wholesale destruction of our productive capacity is also a huge strategic national security blunder. As we overextend ourselves in the international intrigues our founding fathers warned us about, our ability to withstand calamity and overcome any mechanized force is being demolished.
Everything we are squandering was built out of the surpluses made possible by the freedom of a man to keep what he earned, and the ability of individuals to trade with one another on mutually agreeable terms without interference by any agent of force. As we whittled away at these basic tenets of our civilization, we likewise erased the huge productivity gains that came from it and briefly gave mankind the best standard of living in human history.
Now we have come to take the benefits for granted, while joining the intellectuals in sneering at such outmoded concepts as property ownership. We have a society that would probably lose up to 50% of its population to starvation, exposure, and disease within months of losing power, whose members are openly antagonistic to the energy supply that allows them to be so helpless about basic survival skills that they don't even know how vulnerable they are.
They have been brainwashed into thinking that everything including their energy supply would be better off run by government Al-Gore types than by greedy capitalists, having been deprived of the mental capacity to judge what kind of inventions, what standard of living ever came out of the governmental systems they pine for. They fall for the envy ploy, putting themselves at the mercy of those who would (will) control them. The man who has a gun and controls your heat, your electricity, your employment, your children's education, and your food supply, controls YOU.
Proponents of governmental control over energy usage (and this includes any 'carbon tax' scheme) or any other broad restriction on industry in general, cannot be given the benefit of the doubt as to their motives. Their aims cannot be realized without putting the man of productive ability under the gun of a man with no productive ability whatsoever.
That's my U.S.-centric, manufacturer-capitalist, totally biased view of the situation.
