Thursday, January 08, 2009

The Flat. Tax

The EPA has floated a proposal to tax cattle and pigs in an effort to ostensibly limit green house gases. Hugh Hewitt called this the Flat. Tax on his radio show (Flat. being an abbreviation for flatulent, pronounced flatch). For years conservatives have been trying to stress how small man's contribution of greenhouse gases is in comparison to the natural world, and they have often used cow flatulence as an example of just one of the many natural contributions that makes man's effect pale in comparison. Maybe some of these conservatives are wishing they had not opened their mouth. What would have been a tongue-in-cheek remark a year ago, "What are you going to do, put a tax on cow flatulence?" has now become a potential reality.

America has become a parody of itself.

What I find interesting is that the EPA has decided to kill all the cows, but has not offered any recommendations for draining the Florida wetlands. Wetlands produce more methane than cattle, and wetlands aren't a source of food or a significant business concern. But this isn't really a war against greenhouse gas emmission, it's a war against capitalism and the enemies of environmentalism. There are myriad reasons why greens would attack the cattle industry that have nothing to do with global warming, whereas the wetlands hold a near and dear place in the hearts of all good environmentalists.

I'm not saying we SHOULD drain the wetlands, I'm just saying that the global warming propogandists are not really interested in stopping global warming, they are using global warming as leverage for the broader agenda. We could put the whole nation on nuclear energy in a generation and stop the production of greenhouse gases related to electrical energy production in a generation, but this would not advance the broader environmental agenda, so it is not considered viable.

What makes me irate, however, is that while there is not really a consensus when it comes to global warming and how it is caused, there certainly is a consensus concerning what can be done to stop it: nothing. Unless, of course, you're willing to consider the eradication of the human race a viable option. The Kyoto Protocol, as damaging as it will be to the world economy, could only produce a statistically insignificant change in the earth's temperature, indistinguishable from statistical noise. Yet we are willing to cause widespread human suffering for this statistical noise.

I can only hope that God will step in again and confuse our speech, thus preventing us from completing this tower of human pride.

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