A couple in Laval, Que. has sparked a fierce debate over how far schools should go to teach children about environmental responsibility after their six-year-old son was shut out of a kindergarten draw to win a stuffed animal because he had an environmentally unfriendly sandwich bag in his lunchbox.

Marc-André Lanciault said he hadn’t heard of the school’s draw or any environmental policy until his wife, Isabel Théorêt, was making their son Félix a sandwich and he begged them not to put it in a plastic bag.

“He said, ‘No mommy, you can’t do that. Not a Ziploc,’ ” Mr. Lanciault said.

Through tears, the boy told his parents that the school had held a draw to win a stuffed teddy bear and only children who didn’t have any plastic sandwich bags could enter. The family normally uses Tupperware, but it was all in the dishwasher, and so they had packed their son’s ham sandwich in a plastic bag.

When Mr. Lanciault questioned his son’s teacher, she confirmed the school had staged the draw at a lunchtime daycare and that any student with a plastic sandwich bag was excluded. “You know Mr. Lanciault, it’s not very good for the environment,” the teacher told him. “We have to take care of the our planet and the bags do not decompose well.”

Every do-good leftwing fad is followed up with another equally pointless save the planet craze. The left whined that too many trees were cut down to make paper products, so plastic bags were created. Now, the left has some dupes in a tizzy over the alleged harmfulness of plastic bags.

Here’s a secret: your grocery bag makes no difference to the planet. In fact, just about everything you do has no effect on the planet.

Hyperventilating hypochondriacs have claimed that the human population is exhausting the earth’s resources. They claim that the ‘population bomb’ is ready to explode. In reality, overpopulation is another myth. The simple truth is that every person on the planet could live, comfortably, on a piece of land the size of Texas.

Of course, the crown jewel of enviro-lunacy is the hoax of global warming. Charlatans on the Left have convinced people that the very act of breathing pollutes the planet. Anthropogenic global warming is an outright lie built on junk science, intimidation tactics, and a suppression of countervailing data. The acts of human beings, over very short period of time that we have existed, have not effect our planet.

However, environmentalist proselytizers have demonized any who dare oppose them for decades. Instead of examining contrary arguments, the environmentalist Left casts aspersions on their enemies. Due to their campaign of intimidation, today, children are indoctrinated at every stop, forced to sing from the green hymnal. When it has gotten to the point where children are afraid to bring plastic bags to school, perhaps the Left has taken this latest nonsensical fad a bit too far.

Charlton Heston put the entire environmental movement is perspective in this great reading from Michael Crichton’ Jurassic Park:

In a publicity stunt to raise awareness for global warming, the Maldivian Parliament met underwater last year:

The fearmonger lobby on the Left would have you believe that the Maldives will be swallowed by the ocean, due to increased water levels, caused by anthropogenic global warming. By that standard, the havoc resulting from Australia’s flooding was also caused by global warming, right? Not quite.

Christopher Booker of the UK Telegraph examined the effects the belief in global warming had on the flood in Australia:

…far from being an unprecedented “freak event”, the latest flood was nearly a foot below the level of one in 1974 and 10 feet below the record set in 1893.

For years, Australia’s warmists have been advising the authorities that the danger posed to the country by global warming is not floods but droughts: not too much rain but too little. One result, in Brisbane, was a relaxation of planning rules, to allow building on areas vulnerable to flooding in the past. As long ago as 1999, this was seen as potentially disastrous by an expert Brisbane River Flood Study (which was ignored and for years kept secret). Instead of investing in its flood defences, Australia spent $13 billion on desalination plants. (Queensland’s was recently mothballed because of the excess of rain.)

Last week’s most disturbing revelation, however, was the contribution to Brisbane’s flooding by the South East Queensland Water company’s massive release of water from its Wivenhoe dam upstream from the city (for details see “Brisbane’s Man-Made Flood Peak” on the Regionalstates blog). Instead of controlled releases through the previous week, the company allowed the level to rise to within a few inches of the top of the dam before releasing a vast volume of water, with devastating consequences for Brisbane 36 hours later.

Last spring, Queensland’s prime minister, the drought- and warming-obsessed Anna Bligh, ordered the water company not to allow any releases from the dam because water was such a “precious resource” that none must be wasted.

So there you have it; a fervent belief in global warming is directly responsible for the deaths of at least 30 people.

Unfounded global warming paranoia has disastrous results. People of faith in the environmentalist religion advocate the wholesale destruction of economies, all in an effort to fight a non-existent problem. Now there is evidence that not only are economies in the (figurative) crosshairs of the enviro-Left, so are human lives.

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Ten years ago, global warming ‘experts’ fretted that “snowfalls are just a thing of the past” in the UK. Dr. David Viner, from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research unit (CRU) lamented that “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” That’s the same CRU that was exposed in climategate.

Well no need to worry, because yes, Virginia, there is snow on the ground in the UK. Reports of winter’s demise were highly exaggerated.

Global warming myth perpetuaters having been strikingly consistent in their faulty forecasts. On the other hand, meteorologist Piers Corbyn has been incredibly accurate in his long term predictions. Corbyn has been documented to be right nearly 85 per cent of the time. His predictions are catching on – farmers and other weather dependent businesses are looking to Corbyn’s predictions regularly.

Instead of endless government grants and experimental new theories, Corbyn uses a rather simple system:

He looks at the flow of particles from the Sun, and how they interact with the upper atmosphere, especially air currents such as the jet stream, and he looks at how the Moon and other factors influence those streaming particles.

He takes a snapshot of what the Sun is doing at any given moment, and then he looks back at the record to see when it last did something similar. Then he checks what the weather was like on Earth at the time – and he makes a prophecy.

The global warming crowd tells us that humans are raising global temperatures and this will lead to a catastrophe. They confidently make claims about the climate for the next 100+ years, and they cannot get the weather right tomorrow, next week, or next season.

A meteorologist with a laptop makes more accurate predictions. By looking at the sun, Piers Corbyn can accurately predict the weather, and climate trends. Who would have thought that the sun played an important role in temperatures in our solar system?

In case you missed it, GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX! Humans have zero effect on the climate, or close to that. Forget the sun, when volcanoes erupt they belch out more pollution than humanity can produce.

The AP made the Gulf of Mexico oil spill the story of the year. We were warned that the ecosystem would never recover. In a few months, the damage done by the oil spill is all but gone. Natural petroleum seepage puts more oil in the gulf every year than the spill did.

Humans are but a part of a very complicated ecosystem, and solar system. The power that humans have to seriously change this planet is massively overblown by  hysterical hypochondriacs on the Left.

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Wall Street Journal: Liberalism: An Autopsy
By: R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

In the tumultuous history of postwar American liberalism, there has been a slow but steady decline of which liberals have been steadfastly oblivious. The heirs of the New Deal are down to around 20% of the electorate, according to recent Gallup polls. Conservatives account for 42% of the vote, and in the recent election the independents, the second most numerous group at 29% of the electorate, broke the conservatives’ way. They were alarmed by the deficit. They will be alarmed for a long time.

Liberalism’s decline might appear, at first glance, to have begun with the 1961 inauguration of President John F. Kennedy—when historians noted the first glimmerings of what was to become liberalism’s distinctive trait, overreach. Kennedy’s soaring oratory was infectious and admirable and even impressed a later generation of conservatives. But it was a bit dishonest. There never was a missile gap with the Soviet Union, as he claimed, or any other cause for histrionics. On the domestic side, the oratory set in motion President Lyndon Johnson’s catastrophic War on Poverty.

JFK’s stirring language represented a break with the Burkean understanding of President Dwight Eisenhower. Ike, whether he articulated it or not, wanted to put the Great Depression and the dangerous confrontations of the early Cold War period behind us. He wanted to return to normalcy. Yet Kennedy’s inaugural put America on a different path, one that led to the Cuban missile crisis and ultimately to Vietnam. It fixed America’s stance in the world, and with that stance we were on the road to Iraq and Afghanistan. Domestically it set us on the path to a behemoth big government.

Still, in tracing liberalism’s decline, one cannot ignore an earlier event: the civil war that broke out in the aftermath of World War II. The conflict pitted what we might call the radicals led by Henry Wallace against the advocates of what Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. would call in his book, “The Vital Center,” more practical liberals like Hubert Humphrey, Joseph L. Rauh and Walter Reuther. They were hard-headed and patriotic, and their desiderata were reasonable by comparison with the radicals’ utopian ideas about the Soviet Union.

The practical liberals won in the late 1940s, but in 1972 civil war broke out anew. This time the radicals won. In the meantime, LBJ’s Great Society caused even some liberals to warn against the “unintended consequences” of government programs. These were to be the first new recruits to modern conservatism. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol and, for a time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, were in Kristol’s words liberals “who were mugged by reality.” The radicals were seeking refuge from reality in a self-regarding fantasy. Only a crisis in the leadership of President Richard Nixon, Watergate, allowed them to hide from the American electorate their fantastic delusions.

Conservatives have had Edmund Burke and the Founding Fathers as their cynosures. Sometimes they have provided discipline; sometimes conservatives have followed their own star. The problem for liberals is they have been denied a cynosure. Some had looked to the British Fabian Socialists and some to Karl Marx, but since the late 1940s liberals became coy about their intellectual mentors.

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National Review: Can Republicans Talk?
By: Thomas Sowell

The biggest battle in the lame-duck session of Congress may well be over whether or not to extend the Bush administration’s tax cuts, which are scheduled to expire in January. The fact that this decision has been left until late in the eleventh hour, even though the expiration date has been known for years, tells us a lot about the utter irresponsibility of Congress.

Neither businesses nor individuals nor the Internal Revenue Service will know what to do until this issue is resolved. In a stalled economy, we do not need this prolonged uncertainty that can paralyze both consumer spending and investment spending.

Republicans want the current tax rates to continue, and Democrats want only the current tax rates for people earning less than “the rich”– variously defined — to continue, with everyone making more than some specified income to have their tax rates rise next year.

What makes predicting the outcome of this battle very difficult is that Republicans won a big majority in the House of Representatives in the recent election, but the tax cuts are scheduled to expire before the new members of Congress are sworn in — and the Democrats have a big majority in both houses of Congress in the lame-duck session, where this issue will be decided.

Theoretically, the Democrats could win, hands down, since they have the votes. But Congressional Democrats are well aware of how they lost big in the recent election, and some Democrats don’t want to gamble their own jobs in the next election by going the class-warfare route.

Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats can afford to have all the tax rates go up in January because they couldn’t get together and pass a bill to prevent that from happening. But the nature of that bill matters, not just for politicians but — far more important — for the economy.

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Americans for Prosperity: Obama: Miles Away from Reality

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Weekly Standard: Quantitative easing won’t solve our deeper problem.
By: Lawrence B. Lindsey

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke concedes that, while necessary, a new large purchase of government bonds by the Fed to help cover the deficit will not completely solve our problem of slow growth. Many in the markets and around the world express the same sentiment in a more negative way—saying this latest round of “quantitative easing” won’t work. Only time will tell, and our best guess is that, because it is only modestly effective by itself, quantitative easing will probably be part of Fed policy for quite some time. One reason we must hope that quantitative easing is not too successful is that its near term success would mean a catastrophe for government finances.

By the Fed’s reckoning, a successful quantitative easing policy will return us to a more normal economic environment with fairly low but stable inflation, similar to the inflation environment of the last two decades. But a normalization of inflation will also mean a normalization of interest rates. And normalized interest rates will mean much higher interest payments, especially by the world’s biggest debtor: the government of the United States.

Consider the math. This year the government will pay $200 billion in interest on debt held by the public (i.e., non-U.S.-government institutions) of $9 trillion. The average interest rate paid on the debt is 2.2 percent.

To simulate what will happen going forward, assume for the sake of argument some moderate reductions in future deficits from ending higher-end tax cuts, limiting the growth in discretionary spending to the rate of GDP growth, and cutting defense. Under these assumptions, the debt held by the public will rise to $13.1 trillion by 2015 and $16.7 trillion by 2019.

But if interest rates remain at current levels, interest payments will still be relatively manageable: $290 billion in 2015 and $355 billion in 2019.

Now suppose quantitative easing is “successful” in the way the Fed intends, taking inflation close to the average 2.4 percent rate of the last two decades and government borrowing costs back to their two-decade average of 5.7 percent. To get an idea of what happens to the budget, assume this transition happens over three years, so that by 2013 interest rates are back to “normal.” This “return to normal” will mean the government’s interest costs will rise to $847 billion by 2015 and $1.15 trillion by 2019.

The increase in annual interest costs in 2015 alone—$557 billion—is nearly six times the additional revenue that is supposed to be collected by letting the higher end of the Bush tax cuts expire, the centerpiece of the current fiscal policy debate in Washington. The increase in interest costs in 2019—$795 billion—is two-and-a-half times the value of all the Bush income tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 that are due to expire. On the spending side, just the extra interest cost from a quantitative easing “success” would swamp, say, the entire defense budget for the rest of the decade. No plausible increase in taxes or reduction in spending could fill a gap of that magnitude.

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Washington Post: The case for engaged justices
By George F. Will

“The powers of the legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the Constitution is written.”

- Marbury v. Madison (1803)

Debates about judicial review concern the propriety and scope of judicial supervision of democracy and involve the countermajoritarian dilemma: How to square the principle of popular sovereignty with the practice of allowing appointed judges, accountable to no contemporary constituency, to overturn laws enacted by elected legislators?

A case destined for the Supreme Court concerns the health-care law. The Constitution establishes a government of limited and enumerated powers. Which one empowers Congress to force individuals to purchase health insurance and to punish those who do not?

Supporters of the mandate answer: the power to regulate interstate commerce. Opponents reply: Unless that power is infinitely elastic, it does not authorize Congress to forbid the inactivity of not purchasing a product from a private company. If the power is infinitely elastic, Congress can do anything – eat your broccoli, or else – and America no longer has a limited government.

Fortunately, a Texas judge recently wrote an opinion that provides pertinent clarity about the tension between judging and majoritarianism. The Texas Supreme Court, on which Don Willett sits, struck down a law for violating the Texas Constitution’s prohibition of retroactive laws. The law immunized one company from a pending lawsuit by a man dying of asbestos exposure. The question was: Should the court blindly defer to the Legislature’s judgment that its police power – its general authority to protect the public welfare – trumped the constitutional ban on retroactive legislation?

The court said no. What Willett said in his concurring opinion is pertinent to the health insurance mandate.

Has the U.S. Supreme Court construed the commerce clause so permissively that Congress has seized, by increments, a sweeping police power that enables it to do virtually anything it wants? Willett’s words, applied to the Obamacare mandate debate, highlight this question: When does judicial deference to legislative majorities become dereliction of the judicial duty to discern limits to what majorities are lawfully permitted to do?

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We The People:

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Human Events: The Fiscal Commission And Conservative Tax Policy
By: Michael Avari

When asked about the Bush tax cuts, Milton Friedman, in characteristic piercing style, remarked, “I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible. … [T]he big problem is not taxes, the big problem is spending. … The only effective way I think to hold it down, is to hold down the amount of income the government has. The way to do that is to cut taxes.”

While many have preemptively dismissed the Fiscal Commission draft report, the influence of conservative members on the commission—Sen. Tom Coburn, Sen. Judd Gregg, and Rep. Paul Ryan—is evident on taxes, where, as Friedman suggested, things should begin.

Friedman is perhaps best known on fiscal policy for proposing that a single flat-rate tax on personal income replace all taxes, deductions, and loopholes. Disarming the government of tax manipulation as a tool to guide economic behavior would unleash the creative spirit that drives capitalism.

Coming tantalizingly close to Friedman, the Commission’s report recommends abolishing the alternative minimum tax (AMT), eliminating most exemptions and deductions, and consolidating personal tax rates into three lower brackets.

The report offers some useful purposes. First, it ventilates all that is wrong with our current tax system: a complexity that breeds uncertainty and that discourages entrepreneurship and investment. Details about exemptions and deductions should not obscure the fundamental principle that what is to one man a deduction is to another man a subsidy.

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Orange County Register: Jay Ambrose: Good motives can produce bad results
By: Jay Ambrose

Good intentions will get you if you don’t watch out. That’s true of the invasion of the body scanners, of minimum-wage laws, of some welfare programs and – please don’t forget it – a supposedly altruistic push by federal agencies and politicians to put low-income families in their own homes.

Again and again, the government throws us lifesavers that aren’t lifesavers at all, but weighty, entangling devices that ensnare us, sink us, drown us.

Because body scanners won’t detect bombs in body cavities, they’ll do no good even as they humiliate airline ticket-holders on a scale only a world power could devise.

As literally dozens of studies have proven, minimum-wage laws invariably cost workers jobs because employers cannot afford the new standards.

And those mortgages the government insisted banks bestow on those who could not afford to pay them? All they did was contribute mightily to a rash of foreclosures, the worst financial crisis in decades and a recession wrecking the lives of millions of people.

To learn the real lowdown on how good motives can produce bad results, it helps to heed the writings and speeches of Jay Richards, a Princeton philosophy-theology Ph.D., author of “Money, Greed, and God,” and someone whose thoughts I recently took in at a speech at Colorado Christian University.

“Piety is no substitute for technique,” he said, quoting the Christian philosopher Etienne Gilson and adding this by way of explanation in the book: “What he meant is that having the right intentions, being oriented in the right way, doesn’t take the place of doing things right.”

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National Review: Let the States Go Bankrupt
By: Michael Barone

We won’t be able to say we weren’t warned. Continued huge federal budget deficits will eventually mean huge increases in government-borrowing costs, Erskine Bowles, co-chairman of Barack Obama’s deficit-reduction commission, predicted this month. “The markets will come. They will be swift, and they will be severe, and this country will never be the same.”

Bowles is talking about what the business press calls bond-market vigilantes. People with capital are currently willing to loan money to the federal government, by buying U.S. bonds at low interest rates. That’s because interest rates are generally low and because Treasury bonds are regarded as the safest investment in the world.

But what if they aren’t? What if investors suddenly perceive a higher risk and demand a higher return? That’s what Bowles is talking about, and there are signs it may be starting to happen. The Federal Reserve’s second round of quantitative easing — QE2 — was intended to lower the interest rate on long-term bonds. Instead, the rate has been going up.

The federal government still seems a long way from the disaster Bowles envisions. But some state governments aren’t.

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Sen. Tom Coburn on Returning to the Values of the Founders:

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National Post: Beyond Cancun, a fossil-fuel world
By: Terence Corcoran

The UN climate-change war machine, on the brink of self-destruction in Cancun, Mexico, keeps cranking out scenarios, reports, research and propaganda on the evils of a carbon-based economy. No stat or concept is too trivial to be manipulated and hyped into a news item or factoid of alleged proof of past or coming disaster. “Britain’s salmon at risk from ocean acidification,” “2010 on track to be warmest year for Canada,” “Climate change to worsen food security, UN talks told.”

That’s just some of Friday’s offerings. Never mind the other headlines (Deep freeze kills 30 in Poland; Britains up to knees in snow). It’s all part of a never-ending stream of material that is intended, presumably, to galvanize nations and negotiators meeting in Cancun into signing a replacement for the absurdly impractical Kyoto Protocol carbon-emission targets. The Cancun meetings still have a few days to go, which means the next week will consume increasing amounts of media attention and produce volumes of overheated rhetoric about the need to slash fossil-fuel use and dramatically reduce global carbon emissions by some impossible target date.

Meanwhile, back in the real economy, the world is moving in the other direction. Global availability of and demand for fossil fuels — oil, gas and coal — continues to climb and there isn’t a realistic outlook for future energy use that shows any signs that carbon-based energy sources are about to decline. At the same time, as Lawrence Solomon summarizes elsewhere on this page, the green energy bubble is bursting in Europe as nations slash their subsidies to solar and wind projects, the alleged alternatives to fossil fuels.

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Human Events: Cutting Obama’s Monster Deficits Down To Size
By: Donald Lambro

There’s something for everyone to hate in the deficit-cutting plan by the co-chaimen of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, but there’s also a lot to like, too.

Whether or not the plan receives the supermajority 14 votes from President Obama’s 18-member commission may be irrelevant in the end. It contains the seeds of some much-needed tax cut proposals to grow the economy, suggestions to slow down the growth of Social Security and other entitlements, and a way forward to place a “tight” cap on the growth of domestic discretionary spending and eliminate 200,000 workers from the federal payroll.

While the national news media’s focus has been on the panel’s mission to come up with spending cuts, one of its strongest deficit-fighting proposals takes a page out of Ronald Reagan’s supply-side book to cut the top marginal income tax rate to between 23 percent and 29 percent — and the 35 percent corporate tax rate down to 28 percent — by eliminating corporate welfare and other tax breaks.

Not only would the commission’s plan sharply cut the corporate tax (the second highest corporate rate in the industrialized world), it would stop taxing overseas profits of U.S-based global companies.

These tax reforms, as U.S. economic history has shown, would unlock a tsunami of capital investment, business expansion, jobs and higher incomes that will significantly boost tax revenues which will reduce borrowing and help to shrink and eventually eliminate the deficits.

House Republican Leader John Boehner, who is in line to become the House speaker, and other GOP conservatives, have embraced the idea of closing loopholes in the tax code to bring down the tax rates and simplify the monstrously complex tax system.

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National Review: Rumblings of Discontent — on Palin
By Mike Potemra

When I see the fervor of Sarah Palin’s fans — and by no means just those who swell the adoring crowds who go to her public appearances — I am convinced that the question is not, “How can she win the GOP nomination?” but “How can she not win it?” When you have anywhere between five and fifteen GOP candidates, all expressing basically the same conservative views, how can anyone other than the only one with the passionate fan base possibly win? And yet: Reading between the lines of what conservative-movement people are saying and writing, there is a great deal of worry about the prospect of a Palin nomination. I would summarize the GOP political writers’ consensus as follows: She must never be criticized, and she must never be nominated.

The most basic underpinning for this view is the notion that she can’t beat Obama, and I think this is a profoundly mistaken assumption. It is based on a too-abstract understanding of the qualifications for the presidency: It holds Palin up against an ideal presidential résumé, and finds her inadequate — which is true enough, but neither fair nor quite relevant. It’s important to remember that in a 2012 general election, she would be confronting not an ideal presidential profile, but an all-too-human flesh-and-blood opponent. The choice between Palin and Obama, phrased in the least flattering (to Palin) possible way, is a choice between a woman who may turn out to be seriously inadequate to the job and, therefore, become a failed president; and a man who has already convincingly demonstrated that he is seriously inadequate to the job and, therefore, already is a failed president. This rather changes the “electability” issue, doesn’t it?

I talked to a savvy GOP politico early this evening, who told me that he believed the Palinmania of her backers — which, as I said above, I consider the gamebreaker for the primaries — will peter out once she goes to Iowa or New Hampshire for the umpteenth time. At that point, he said, she will be seen as just another candidate, and therefore judged on a more even playing field.

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National Review: The U.N.: Symptom of Global Chaos
By: Conrad Black (Strictly Right interview with Conrad Black)

The conduct of the United Nations seems to be becoming more and not less bizarre and outrageous. The human-rights performance of both the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly has confirmed that, more than ever, the U.N. is a ludicrous playpen for the failed states and most odious despotisms of the planet. They gleefully and churlishly revile the serious powers, as if in doing so they somehow reversed the balance of strength, moral stature, and civic merit. A numerous U.S. delegation arrived to participate in the Council’s deliberations, ending a long boycott, and each American speaker earnestly proclaimed it an honor to be present. There followed a piling on of the world’s most disreputable regimes, accusing the U.S. of massive civil-rights violations.

The American delegates sat like mute defendants in a show trial while their country was arraigned by the delegates of Cuba, China, Libya, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and many others — including Egypt, a dependent of U.S. aid that has just declined to admit American inspectors to observe its current farcical elections. Unfortunately, they all had a legitimate argument, as they mentioned the failings of American criminal procedure, the racial imbalances and inhumane conditions in the prison system, and various other more or less well-founded complaints. But it does not lie in the mouths of spokesmen for such infamous regimes to condemn the shortcomings of American legal and social justice.

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(there is no actual nudity in the video)

What does taking (most of) one’s clothes off have to do with global warming? Your guess is as good as mine. Give them some credit, at least they weren’t blowing up children this time.

(H/T The Blast)

As the world meets in Cancun, Mexico for the latest round of United Nations talks on climate change, the influential academics called for much tougher measures to cut carbon emissions.

In one paper Professor Kevin Anderson, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said the only way to reduce global emissions enough, while allowing the poor nations to continue to grow, is to halt economic growth in the rich world over the next twenty years.

This would mean a drastic change in lifestyles for many people in countries like Britain as everyone will have to buy less ‘carbon intensive’ goods and services such as long haul flights and fuel hungry cars.

Prof Anderson admitted it “would not be easy” to persuade people to reduce their consumption of goods

He said politicians should consider a rationing system similar to the one introduced during the last “time of crisis” in the 1930s and 40s.

This could mean a limit on electricity so people are forced to turn the heating down, turn off the lights and replace old electrical goods like huge fridges with more efficient models. Food that has travelled from abroad may be limited and goods that require a lot of energy to manufacture.

“The Second World War and the concept of rationing is something we need to seriously consider if we are to address the scale of the problem we face,” he said.

MAN MADE GLOBAL WARMING IS A FRAUD! From Thomas Malthus to Paul Ehrlich, the Left has claimed that the sky is falling. In reality, human beings have not exhausted the earth’s resources, the population is not too big for the planet, and we do not control the weather.

Global warming is the latest environmentalist ploy being used by the Left to control every last facet of your life. Using junk science, the Left wants to tell you what food you can eat (and not eat), what utilities you can use and when, what cars you can drive, what light bulbs you can use, ad nauseam ad infinitum.

However, while the profits of scarcity dictate that the hoi polloi ought to live with less, how does the other half live? Americans for Prosperity released the following video, showing attendees of the aforementioned UN Climate Hoax Summit in Cancun, Mexico (alternate junket name: soon this will feel like spring break):

These anonymous bureaucrats have the gall to tell everyone else to live hand to mouth, while they go on vacations in Cancun (paid for by taxpayers (most likely American taxpayers, who cover an overwhelming percentage on the UN’s operating budget)). Why don’t they lead by example? In order to reduce carbon emissions, hows about canceling the next tropical socialist sojourn?

(H/T Hot Air)

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