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Socialism Forges An Alliance With The Environment Movement Beginning on the Road to Kyoto By Perry Hicks Part IV in a Series In my younger days, I often wondered why underdeveloped countries, witnessing America’s phenomenal success, would not try to emulate us by establishing governments similar, if not identical, to the U.S. Constitution. Invariably, they adopted some other form of government and just as invariably saw no improvement in their condition. What I didn’t understand was that for democracy to work, the society implementing it must have a culture of honesty. The old Soviet Union’s constitution did, in fact, read much like the U.S. Constitution, to include the freedom of speech. However, communism, corrupt from birth, ignored these guarantees. Tens of millions died in the gulags. The Soviet Union was arguably the most repressive, corrupt, and dangerous regime in modern history. Socialism is no better because any differences with communism are only one of degree. Consider this quote from John Strachey, former British Minister of War, and both a member of the British Communist Party and a high official of the Socialist-Labor Party: "You cannot move directly from capitalism to communism. Socialism is a necessary stepping stone to communism and hence all communists should work for socialism." Left alone in a vacuum, communism may have continued on oppressing the Russian people for centuries. However, direct confrontation with free market societies led to communism’s downfall. The Soviet Union collapsed of its own weight. Seeing a similar fate if it did not reform, Communist China made a lateral step to the right: today, it may be argued, the People’s Republic of China is actually a fascist state. The rigid, highly vertically integrated, bureaucratic, organizational structure of communism was no match for the more fluid, more horizontally integrated, business model of the west. The west’s free enterprise created wealth in abundance and these economic blessings were not held in reserve just for the rich; prosperity trickled down to the comparatively poor. I say comparative for as one of my students, an African from Cameroon, once asked me, “Why do these people complain? Even your poor have cars and air conditioners!” Indeed, the rise of the affluent middle class is largely due to the invention of the corporation. Today, any American may own shares of even the largest corporations and so profit, not just from wages, but the fruit of capital. Hence, the distinction between the rich owners of capital and the workers is blurred. It is no coincidence that the nations formally aligned against the west have moved in some significant degree toward open trade and free enterprise. Trade and free enterprise works. However, that doesn’t mean that dictators have abdicated power. They have only loosened the chains of slavery. Nor have the true (communist) believers ceded that their beliefs have been wrong. Like some kind of zombies from the “Night of the Living Dead”, they never give up, but keep on coming, over and over and over again. The 1972 Stockholm Conference On The Human Environment "In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt In June 1972, a United Nations Conference on the Human Environment convened in Stockholm, Sweden, Ingemund Bengtsson was elected President. The remaining officers came from Brazil, Central Attican Republic, Egypt, France, Guatemala, India, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Philippines, Pakistan, Peru, Romania, Senegal, Sudan, Swaziland, Turkey, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, United States of America, Uruguay, Yugoslavia, Zambia, and Zaire. In attendance were also representatives from intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations (environmental groups). The goal of the conference was to develop and promulgate an action plan to improve the “human environment”. Like the goals of Gorbachev’s Green Cross organization that came twenty years later, the action plan intertwined social-political and environmental concepts. During the debate period, some of the delegate’s concerns were for: · Broader international distribution of industrial capacity · New concepts of (national) sovereignty · “New codes of international law which the era of environmental concern required” · “New means of dealing with environmental conflicts” · “New international means for better management of the world’s common property resources” · “New approaches to more automatic means of financing programmes of international cooperation, which could include levies, and tolls on certain forms of international transport or on the consumption of certain non-renewable resources.” (read new world taxes) · “Until the gap between the poor and the rich countries was substantially narrowed, little if any progress could be made in improving the human environment” · a No-Growth philosophy was deemed to be unacceptable Owing to the above points, it should be no surprise that “considerable emphasis was place on speakers from developing countries.” Nor should it be a surprise that many of these speakers claimed their nation’s natural resources were being exploited by the developed countries. To no surprise, there were also some specific complaints about multinational corporations. One of these concerns was that the nations that “caused” environmental concerns (the democratic industrialized nations) might raise product prices in order to pay for the cost of environmental reforms. The complaint went on- and I am not making this up- it would be unacceptable if the polluting nations expected “others” to meet the cost of reform. There were also concerns raised about marine pollution, world population, and the need for conservation. Several speakers also expressed concern that supersonic jet aircraft was harmful to the planet. In analysis, broadly speaking, the world’s environmental ills were the fault of the developed nations and so they must pay and not pass those costs along to their customers. Obviously, these delegates were not well acquainted with the pioneer economist, Adam Smith (1723-1790) who, in his famous book, “Wealth of Nations”. Smith described economic dynamics as being like “an invisible hand” and so conceptualized the idea of a free market economy. Economic laws are just as powerful and just an immutable as the laws of physics. Use them wisely and you will prosper. Break them and you are doomed to poverty. Although Stockholm was able to take a broad array of socio-political and ecological concerns and condense them into an action plan, this conference was only intended to be a beginning. It is considered to be the basis for almost all later “cooperative” environmental developments. 1972 Stockholm Conference Recommendations Because of the conferees backgrounds, it should be expected that of the nearly 100 recommendations that came out of the debate, many had to do with addressing the plight of the third world. Much of the recommendations had to do with marine concerns, providing clean fresh water, improving housing, and better stewarding natural resources to include fisheries. There was also the expression that much more research and data gathering must be done to better understand the world’s eco-systems to include wildlife. There were also recommendations for developing and delivering environmental training programs, to include college degrees. Overall, the language was one of conciliation and cooperation. And, while the recommendations are far too numerous to comment on here in any detail, there are some points merit reporting.
Although CO2 is mentioned as an environmental concern, the argument for its impact on global warming was very weak. Remember that a slight global cooling trend had been on-going since about 1940. And while computer models did predict that atmospheric CO2 would contribute to global warming, too many assumptions about the effects of cloud formations, particulates, and other parameters were plugged into the equations. Ironically, as these models were continually refined with these assumptions, the predicted greenhouse effect of CO2 was actually diminished! The principle outcome from the 1972 Stockholm Conference was the establishment of the United Nations Environmental Programme as well as coordinating the efforts of certain other national and international organizations. All of the recommendations were fairly specific and it took many years before the U.N. was able to get to the point where the next step could be taken: effecting remedies through international treaties. That doesn’t mean that the environmental community was dormant. Stockholm put a lot of work on the environmental dinner plate and it would take a considerable amount of time and money to work through all the recommendations. It should be noted that non-governmental environmental groups had been the catalyst for the U.N.’s foray into the environment in the first place; the Sierra Club, for example, formally became an advisor body to the United Nations as early as 1967. In 1985, another convention was held in Vienna, Austria for the protection of the atmosphere’s ozone layer. This convention led to the Montreal Protocol two years later. The Montreal Protocol resulted in an international treaty by which certain compounds believed to be responsible for a deterioration of atmospheric ozone. R12 refrigerant was the most controversial and widely debated compound to be phased out of production but there were others: halons, the solvents carbon tetrachloride and methyl chloroform. In 1992 came the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil informally called the Earth Summit. Although continuing to build on the Stockholm Conference, the tone here turned dramatically more shrill, more demanding, and far, far, more dangerous to national sovereignty and individual freedom. In the next installment, we will see how the radical left takes up global warming as a club to beat down the industrialized nations.
Part III - Just What Temperature Should The Planet Be? Environmentalists Seek So Much Authority Over Our Everyday Lives, Fears Are Rising That The Real Agenda Is All About Power And Control - By Perry Hicks Perry Hicks is a former Mississippi Coast resident and was a correspondent for the old Gulfport Star Journal. He has appeared on Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor.” Perry has also hosted his own radio talk show on the auto industry with a mix of politics, and is a former Ford Motor Company technical trainer. He currently works as an Associate Professor of Automotive Technology at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College in Richmond, VA. Contact the Author: royalenfieldcrusader@hotmail.com |
