In a new Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review article entitled, The Extra-WTO Precautionary Principle: One European 'Fashion' Export the United States Can Do Without, international trade and regulatory lawyer Lawrence Kogan documents how America's Blue Party is quietly assisting our transatlantic cousins to reform the common law foundations of America's unique constitutional and free enterprise systems in Europe's continental civil law image."The unfortunate reality is that green-socialist Europe is increasingly governing the American way of life, that is, re-colonizing America through 'soft (law) power'. This will continue, unless our political leaders 'put country first' and act aggressively to reverse this trend", emphasizes Kogan.
"Protectionist Europe has long sought to undermine U.S. product design, process and manufacturing methods by imposing on American global supply-chains and small businesses its costly, non-science-based and WTO-inconsistent environmental requirements which are also promoted globally by the politically unaccountable institutions of the United Nations."
According to Kogan, "European governments and like-minded U.S. politicians have strongly criticized America for refusing to ratify European-crafted UN environmental treaties, and now call for fundamental domestic 'change' to rehabilitate America's image abroad." To facilitate this transformation, "Mostly Blue Party legislators and executives have opened up the doors of U.S. statehouses and regulatory agencies to Europe's collectivist, communitarian model of rulemaking, thereby placing America's individual rights-based federalist system and Americans' constitutionally guaranteed exclusive private property rights at considerable risk." "Furthermore", notes Kogan, "This sovereign incursion threatens to tilt the ongoing global competition between Anglo-American (negative-rights-based) and Continental (social-redistributionist) capitalism" in Europe's favor.
This raises many questions to which the American electorate deserves clear and unambiguous answers. For example, "Will our current and future leaders defend, at the federal, state and local levels, America's founding principles which have enabled the U.S. throughout its history to remain a nation without peers? Or, will they simply decide, on political correctness grounds, to broad-brush these traditions away for the sake of 'global solidarity'?" This ITSSD study is accessible online at: http://www.itssd.org/Kogan%2017[1].2.pdf .
[A DRAFT VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE ACTUALLY SERVED AS AN INSPIRATION FOR THE SYMPOSIUM ULTIMATELY CONVENED BY THE POLITICAL & CIVIL RIGHTS LAW REVIEW (CPLR) ON OCTOBER 20, 2007. See: http://www.itssd.org/Temple%20Political%20and%20Civil%20Rights%20Law%20Review.mht ; http://www.temple.edu/law/tpcrlr/2007brochure.pdf ].
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[The above press release and accompanying law review article challenge Thomas Friedman's thesis that "Americans can prosper by 'outgreening' everyone else," which is a recipe for mutually destructive trade protectionism. Unfortunately, as the book review below reveals, Mr. Friedman is large on words but light on data.
While reducing U.S. energy dependence on foreign sourced-oil and gas is critical to maintaining America's future prosperity and sovereignty, adopting a very expensive top-down European regulatory model that impairs the exercise of exclusive private property rights, rather than a market-based approach that recognizes and protects private property rights to achieve this objective would be tantamount to committing economic suicide. Furthermore, highlighting the urgency of linking energy security to anti-climate change green policy objectives establishes a strawman /false dichotomy. They are mutually exclusive issues. The U.S. currently has available many of its own energy resources & technologies which can be exploited using American labor and know-how to secure greater energy independence, including oil, natural gas (including liquified natural gas) clean-coal, nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, hydroelectric, , etc. ]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/09/05/ST2008090501795.html
COVER REVIEW
A Climate for Change
Tom Friedman says Americans can prosper by "outgreening" everyone else.
Washington Post
Sunday, September 7, 2008; Page BW03
Book Review by Joseph S. Nye Jr.
of
HOT, FLAT, AND CROWDED: Why We Need a Green Revolution -- And How It Can Renew America
By Thomas Friedman,
Farrar Straus Giroux. 438 pp. $27.95
Like it or not, we need Tom Friedman.
The peripatetic columnist has made himself a major interpreter of the confusing world we inhabit. He travels to the farthest reaches, interviews everyone from peasants to chief executives and expresses big ideas in clear and memorable prose. While pettifogging academics (a select few of whom he favors) complain that his catchy phrases and anecdotes sometimes obscure deeper analysis, by and large Friedman gets the big issues right.
Almost a decade ago, in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, he celebrated the arrival of "globalization." Three years ago, in The World is Flat, he warned that borders, oceans and distance no longer protect us from the information revolution that is leveling the global economic playing field and relocating our jobs. Now he updates and expands this diagnosis by showing how population growth, climate change and the expansion of the world's middle class are producing a planet that is "hot, flat, and crowded." Unchecked, these trends will produce dangerous instability; but Friedman remains guardedly optimistic that we can stave off this nightmare, particularly if the United States changes its wasteful energy habits. In this important book, Friedman says we can survive, even prosper, by going green.
Of course, rousing a full-bellied nation, groggy from decades of energy overconsumption, is no small task. As the current election debate reminds us, the United States has proven inept at developing a serious energy strategy. Our approach, says one expert quoted by Friedman, is "the sum of all lobbies"; we have energy politics rather than energy policy. In the aftermath of 9/11, George W. Bush ignored calls by Friedman and others for a "USA Patriot Tax" of $1 per gallon on gasoline. Instead, the president offered tax cuts and urged us to shop. Rather than stimulating the economy to move toward fuel-efficient vehicles and renewable energy, we became more dependent on China to finance our deficit and Saudi Arabia to fill our gas tanks. Americans wound up paying even more for gas in 2008, but we enabled OPEC to be the tax collector instead of using the revenues ourselves. Friedman calls this a "No Mullah Left Behind" policy and quotes former CIA director Jim Woolsey: "We are funding the rope for the hanging of ourselves."
Friedman believes we need to become "green hawks," turning conservation and cleaner energy into a winning strategy in many different arenas, including the military. ("Nothing," he writes, "will make you a believer in distributed solar power faster than having responsibility for trucking fuel across Iraq.") We should stop defining our current era as "post-Cold War," he says, and see it as an "Energy-Climate Era" marked by five major problems: growing demand for scarcer supplies, massive transfer of wealth to petrodictators, disruptive climate change, poor have-nots falling behind, and an accelerating loss of bio-diversity. A green strategy is not simply about generating electric power, it is a new way of generating national power.
[WRONG, MR. FRIEDMAN. LET'S BE HONEST. BEING 'ENVIRONMENTALLY 'GREEN' IS NOT AS MUCH A MOTIVATOR AS BEING FINANCIALLY 'GREEN' - i.e., FLUSH WITH ECONOMIC SAVINGS AS THE RESULT OF GREATER ENERGY INDEPENDENCE. THIS MEANS REDUCING THE COST OF FILLING UP ONE'S GAS TANK, WHICH, BY THE WAY HAS INCREASED, IN PART, DUE TO THE FEDERALLY MANDATED 10% ETHANOL COMPOSITION OF GASOLINE. SINCE ETHANOL DOES NOT BURN AS EFFICIENTLY AS GASOLINE, IT NOW TAKES MORE $$ TO FILL UP THE GAS TANK THAN IT DID BEFORE TO DRIVE FEWER MILES - APPROXIMATELY 10%-20% REDUCED MPG. IN ADDITION, THERE IS ALSO THE FINANCIAL BENEFIT OF REDUCING THE COST OF HEATING & COOLING ONE'S HOME OR BUSINESS VIA OFF-GRID RENEWABLE SOLAR & TECHNOLOGIES, BUT FOR THE SIGNIFICANT PRICE DISCREPANCY BETWEEN SUCH RENEWABLE SOURCES and CONVENTIONAL FOSSIL-FUEL (OIL, GAS, COAL) & ALTERNATIVE-BASED ENERGY (NUCLEAR) SOURCES. HOWEVER, ENVIRONMENTAL EXTREMISTS and U.S. BLUE PARTY POLITICIANS ARE BLOCKING ANY EFFORT TO EXPLOIT THESE AFFORDABLE and READILY AVAILABLE RESOURCES, AND WISH TO PENALIZE THOSE PARTIES WHICH GENERATE OR RELY ON THEM TO OPERATE THEIR BUSINESSES AND HOUSEHOLDS. PROMOTING THE USE OF SOLAR & WIND TECHNOLOGIES IS IMPORTANT, BUT NOT AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHER BUSINESSES AND CONSUMERS. FURTHERMORE, THE FAILURE OF POLITICIANS TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT OUR CURRENT ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE IS OUTDATED AND UNABLE TO EASILY ACCOMODATE GRID-CENTRALIZED SOLAR & WIND GENERATED ENERGY, WITHOUT SIGNIFICANT NEW INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENTS AND HIGHER ENERGY COSTS FOR BUSINESS & CONSUMERS, CREATES A FALSE PROPHET. IT IS ALSO BOTH DISINGENUOUS and DISHONEST.]
Incremental change will not be enough. The three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the New York Times scoffs at the kind of magazine articles that list "205 Easy Ways to Save the Earth." In the 1990s, global carbon dioxide emissions rose 1.1 percent annually, and many nations (not including the United States) signed the Kyoto Protocol to try to curb those emissions. But from 2000 to 2006, growth in CO2emissions tripled to 3 percent per year.
Friedman cites an estimate by Royal Dutch Shell that it typically takes 25 years for a new form of energy to capture 1 percent of the world market. Shell predicts that if we do things right, renewable energy will provide 30 percent of global needs by 2050, but fossil fuels will still provide 55 percent. Friedman says we need to do better than that. "Carbon neutral" is not ambitious enough; companies and institutions should seek a "carbon advantage" over rivals. This will require innovations in clean energy; greater energy efficiency (including the use of information technology to create smart grids and smart buildings); and a new ethic of conservation. Friedman argues that rather than costing too much, such initiatives can create investment opportunities, new jobs and global leadership for the U.S. economy. Here one wishes he had provided more evidence from some of the pettifogging academic economists.
[WE ALSO WOULD LIKE TO SEE THE NUMBERS/ FIGURES UPON WHICH HE RELIES FOR THIS THESIS, WHICH HE WOULD BE HARDPRESSED TO FIND...]
Friedman is skeptical of treaties, and he argues that "a truly green America would be more valuable than fifty Kyoto Protocols. Emulation is always more effective than compulsion." He makes a good case that "outgreening" other countries would contribute to America's soft power as well as our hard power. "We are still the city on the hill for many Chinese," he notes, "even though they hate what we've done at times at the top of the hill." But the problem of China could overshadow what we do at home. In 2007, China surpassed the United States as the world's leading emitter of carbon dioxide. Chinese argue that on a per capita basis each of their citizens is responsible for only one-fifth the emissions of an American, and that developing countries should not have to cut back until they reach rich countries' CO2levels. This is a formula for global disaster. As Friedman says, "Mother Nature isn't into fair. All she knows is hard science and raw math."
[ACTUALLY, SHOWING HOW MARKET MECHANISMS CAN FILL IN THE SIGNIFICANT PRICE GAPS NOW EXISTING BETWEEN THE COST OF PROCURING, DISTRIBUTING & USING CONVENTIONAL FOSSIL & ALTERNATIVE FUELS AND THE COST OF PROCURING, DISTRIBUTING AND USING RENEWABLE SOLAR, WIND, BIOMASS, ETC. IN ORDER TO FACILITATE OUR NATION'S ENERGY SOURCE SHIFT AT A REASONABLE PRICE FOR BOTH SMALL BUSINESSES & CONSUMERS, AND AT THE SAME TIME, and HOW MARKET MECHANISMS CAN LEAD TO NEW SUSTAINABLE GREEN LABOR, SERVICE AND TECHNOLOGY JOBS THAT CANNOT BE OUTSOURCED OR SUBJECT TO ACQUISITION & LAYOFFS, WOULD CONTRIBUTE MIGHTILY TO AMERICA'S 'SOFT' & 'HARD' POWER.]
No comments:
Post a Comment