WATER: A WARNING FROM MISSOURI

Greenie bureaucrats undermining democracy

The Missouri legislators who approved a water law (HB 1433) in the waning moments of last year's session no doubt thought they were creating something to help protect clean water in a nine-county area. That's what they were told by reputable employees of the state agencies and influential lobbyists from environmental organizations.

The new law created a nine-county district in which water policy would be developed and enforced by appointed – not elected – officials. None realized that the law they adopted was, in fact, an important step toward the implementation of a plan conceived more than 15 years ago by government officials and environmental organizations convened by, and systematically working through, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland.

The plan, generically known as "ecosystem management," is designed to manage natural resources on an "ecosystem" basis, rather than on the basis of arbitrarily drawn state and county political boundaries. Equally important is the transfer of management authority from elected officials to appointed officials. The "watershed" is the primary building block of every ecosystem. HB 1433 successfully designated nine Missouri counties as a watershed and created an appointed body to govern water, the essential ingredient in every ecosystem.

Proponents of the ecosystem management plan make strong arguments about the desirability of managing water resources to assure adequate, safe supplies for future generations. It is absolutely true that water flows are not restricted by political boundaries or property lines. It is easy for politicians to swallow these arguments if no one speaks up for costs and consequences that inevitably follow this kind of management scheme.

Local people are speaking up in Missouri. Russell Wood, head of the Ozarks Chapter of the Property Rights Congress, and Ray Cunio, president of Missouri's Citizens for Private Property Rights, are leading an effort to repeal HB 1433. More than 200 local citizens packed a restaurant where a meeting was held to discuss the merits of HB 1433 and the efforts to repeal it. State Rep. Dennis Wood, a proponent of the water district, explained that the legislation provided low-cost loans to people who would be required to upgrade their septic systems. An unidentified lady said in response: "Why can't you understand? We don't want your 'help.' We don't need your law! Why can't you get that?"

Aside from the particular regulations and fines imposed by the water district law, the larger question is one that faces virtually every community in the nation: Who shall govern – elected officials, or appointed professionals? The only way a government of, for and by the people can be controlled by the people is to throw the elected bums out of office when they enact laws or policies the people don't want. When policies that carry the weight of law are enacted and enforced by appointed professionals, the people no longer have the means to control their government.

Across the nation, watershed councils, historic districts, heritage areas, scenic highway commissions, rural development authorities, regional transportation boards, area planning councils and numerous other "multi-jurisdictional" authorities are emerging to diminish or remove policy-making authority from elected officials and transfer that authority to appointed government bureaucrats.

These agency professionals are often members of national associations of agency professionals that regularly participate in conferences convened by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Six federal agencies are dues-paying members of this organization, as are most of the national environmental organizations. The IUCN is the source of virtually every international environmental treaty in the last 30 years as well as the author of Agenda 21 and numerous other international environmental agreements and policies.

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LOMBORG ON THE IRRATIONAL COSTS OF THE KYOTO TREATY

When the Kyoto Treaty enters into force on February 16, the global warming community will undoubtedly congratulate itself: to do good they have secured the most expensive worldwide treaty ever. They have succeeded in making global warming a central moral test of our time. They were wrong to do so.

Global warming is real and is caused by emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). But existing climate models show we can do little about it. Even if everyone (including the United States) applied the Kyoto rules and stuck to them throughout the century, the change would be almost immeasurable, postponing warming for a mere six years in 2100 while costing at least $150 billion a year.

Global warming will mainly harm developing countries, because they are poorer and therefore less able to handle climate changes. However, by 2100, even the most pessimistic forecasts from the UN expect the average person in the developing countries to be richer than now, and thus better able to cope. So Kyoto is basically a costly way of doing little for much richer people far in the future. We need to ask ourselves if this should be our first priority.

Of course, in the best of all worlds, we would not need to choose our priorities. We could do all good things. We could win the war against hunger, end conflicts, stop communicable diseases, provide clean drinking water, improve education and halt climate change. But we can't do everything. So we must ask the hard question: what should we do first?

Some of the world's top economists - including three Nobel Laureates - answered this question at the Copenhagen Consensus last May. They found that dealing with HIV/AIDS, hunger, free trade, and malaria were the world's top priorities, where we could do the most good for our money. Moreover, they put urgent responses to climate change at the bottom of the list. In fact, the panel called these ventures - including Kyoto - "bad projects," because they cost more than the good they do.

As the economics of climate change has become ever clearer, warnings from the global warming community have become shriller. For example, the head of the UN Climate Panel says, "We are risking the ability of the human race to survive." Such statements make headlines, but they are nonsense. For example: At a recent meeting at Exeter in the UK, some participants warned of a 50-50 chance that the Gulf Stream winds could collapse within a century. Such a scenario looks great in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, but it is unsubstantiated. As one presenter at the conference summarized: "No models have shown a complete shutdown, or a net cooling over land areas. Hence a shutdown during the 21st century is regarded as unlikely."

Recently, a coalition of prominent environmental and development organizations claimed that malaria would increase in a warmer world. This has some theoretical validity, but ignores malaria's dependence on poor infrastructure and health care. Indeed, throughout the cold 1500-1800's, malaria was a major disease in Europe, the US, and far into the Arctic Circle. Malaria infections didn't end because it got colder (it actually got warmer), but because Europe and the US got rich and dealt with the problem. With developing countries getting richer over the century, malaria is similarly likely to decrease rather than increase.

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SOME ARE TAKING PUBLIC NOTE OF KYOTO TREATY FLAWS

But many liberal environmentalists have complained that even Kyoto is too weak to begin addressing their concerns about "global warming." The treaty will only have "symbolic" effect on the global climate, they concede. "I think that everybody agrees that Kyoto is really, really hopeless in terms of delivering what the planet needs," Peter Roderick of Friends of the Earth International told Cybercast News Service in December during the United Nations climate summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina. "It's tiny, it's tiny, tiny, it's tiny," Roderick said. "It is woefully inadequate, woefully. We need huge cuts to protect the planet from climate change."

Even without formal American participation in the treaty, many environmentalists are still seeking fossil fuel emission reductions in the U.S. But skeptics of the Kyoto Protocol, gathered at the recent media briefing on Capitol Hill, took aim at the treaty's scientific premise -- that man is creating greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet. "The science does not support the kind of apocalyptic vision that is offered by Kyoto advocates," said William O'Keefe of the Marshall institute, an organization that, according to its website, "encourages the use of sound science in making public policy." "The basic theory behind trapping gasses and then warming the earth has not been validated by satellite measurements because the lower atmosphere hasn't warmed," O'Keefe said.

U.S. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) added that "the science used to support Kyoto is collapsing." He also criticized the 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, which purports to show Arctic temperatures rising as a result of greenhouse gas emissions. The Arctic report is "a classic case of how to selectively use data," Inhofe charged. "There are numerous scientific problems with the report. It had no footnotes or citations, and worse, it focused only on Arctic climate over the last 30 years. "That's probably because Artic temperatures in the 1930s were higher than they are today," Inhofe said.

He also ridiculed global climate models used to project temperature increases over the next century. "As many in the scientific community know, these models are highly imperfect. They are incapable of replicating the present climate using known climate conditions," Inhofe said.

Ebell noted that while the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997 during the Clinton administration, it is President Bush who is absorbing the attacks by liberal environmentalists. "People blame President Bush for walking away from Kyoto. In fact President Clinton never submitted it to the U.S. Senate for ratification," Ebell said. "Even if President Bush did submit [the protocol] for ratification, it would be defeated overwhelmingly," Ebell added. "This treaty has been dead for a long time in this country."

Chris Horner from the Competitive Enterprise Institute said the reason that approximately 160 countries have joined the U.S. in not supporting the protocol is because the nations fear the treaty more than any potential climate calamity. "Those 160 countries believe that a failure to grow economically is a greater threat than (potential climate change). They believe that the Kyoto Protocol is a greater threat to mankind than climate change," Horner told Cybercast News Service .

Patrick J. Michaels, an environmental sciences professor at the University of Virginia, echoes the criticism of the Kyoto Protocol. Claims of human-caused catastrophic "global warming" are "scientifically unfounded," Michaels wrote in a column in Sunday's Washington Times. He labeled Kyoto "an economic weapon, not a climate instrument. "Kyoto is absurd because it does absolutely nothing measurable within the foreseeable future about planetary temperature, while one nation - the United States - bears almost all the cost," Michaels wrote. Michaels is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of a new book "Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media." Michaels also wrote that "there is no technologically and politically feasible way to reduce emissions enough to dramatically change the current temperature trajectory ... The only method is to make energy (read: fossil fuel energy) unaffordably expensive."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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