Votes: 4.00 Stars!
Loading...by Patrick J. Buchanan – December 11, 1997
On Sept. 2, 1945, Gen. Douglas MacArthur stood on the deck of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay as the Empire of Japan, in the person of Foreign Minister Shigemitsu, signed its surrender.
On Dec. 7, 1997, Al Gore rose in Kyoto to tell the world America was ending its resistance and would submit to a draconian regime on global warming. Undersecretary of State Stuart E. Eizenstat, playing the role of Shigemitsu, signed the instruments of surrender. Under the Kyoto Protocol, Americans must cut fossil fuel consumption by 2012 — to 7 percent below what we were consuming seven years ago.
Kyoto is a formula for a national brownout. Given present projections of U.S. growth, every family would have to cut its use of gasoline, heating oil, natural gas and coal by a third — as would the utility companies that provide the electricity to light our homes.
What the Clintonites negotiated at Kyoto amounts to economic treason against the United States. Said Sen. Larry Craig: If Clinton signs on to what Eizenstat brings home, “it will be the first time in history that an American president has allowed foreign interests to control and limit the growth of the U.S. economy.”
If the Kyoto Protocol were to be approved, America’s standard of living would go into permanent arrest, and the end of the United States as industrial powerhouse of the world would be at hand.
Why did Clinton and Gore capitulate? Because both have been bamboozled by scientific hustlers into believing the world is on the verge of catastrophe and inveigled into believing they can go down in history as the progressive pair that saved the planet.
At the close of the last century, a comparable conclave of soft heads gathered at the Hague for a world disarmament conference — and committed a commensurate act of lunacy. Though many knew that the U.S. and British fleets, and Western armies, were the real guarantors of peace, they signed on to silly resolutions.
As Kaiser Wilhelm wrote: “I consented to all this nonsense only in order that the czar (the kaiser’s cousin, who called the conference) would not lose face before Europe. … In practice, however, I shall rely on God and my sharp sword! And I (defecate) on all their decisions.” An excellent summary of what should be our attitude toward Kyoto.
Apparently, Clinton, scorched for not signing the treaty banning land mines championed by Princess Di, has no desire for another caning and desperately wishes to avoid the dread charge that he “isolated” America from the “international community.”
For a globalist, that is excommunication from the Holy Mother Church. So Clinton accepted at Kyoto what he rejected weeks ago: a treaty that cuts U.S. fossil fuel consumption below 1990 levels and carries no commitment from the big polluters of the future like China, whose factories produce three times the greenhouse gases of U.S. factories.
Clinton and Gore are going to pay a political price, however, for giving their globalist impulses a jolly run in the yard. Unlike paying dues to the United Nations, or dishing dollars to Mexico City, this Kyoto Protocol entails real pain.
The United States cannot achieve what Kyoto promised without taxes or cutbacks in fuel consumption comparable in impact to the energy crisis of the 1970s. If the Senate ever went along with this madness, Clinton and Gore would be ruined with farmers, workers, businessmen and manufacturers, whom they have been courting and whom Al Gore needs to win in 2000.
The best of all worlds for Clinton would be to conduct a skirmish in the Senate — to show environmentalists his heart is with them — while going down to noble defeat and averting the economic consequences of the miserable treaty Eizenstat brought home.
As one observes China and India rejecting Western demands at Kyoto, South Koreans rising in rage at the sellout of sovereignty to the International Monetary Fund, and Americans denouncing any global warming treaty, it is clear that internationalism is colliding with nationalism all over the world. And it would seem that this clash will be the great struggle that succeeds the half-century conflict between communism and freedom.
On a recent visit to London, I spoke with Margaret Thatcher. When I brought up Britain’s decision on whether to give up the pound for a European currency, and used the term “sovereignty,” she corrected me. The issue, she said, is “independence.”
Exactly. And Americans, whose heritage is independence, will have to fight to hold what we have and to regain what we have lost.