IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- Criminalizing Carbon


The United Nations Climate Change Conference kicked off in Poznan, Poland, on Monday with representatives from around the world working to negotiate the framework for a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol.
Stephen Hockman, the former head of the British Bar Council and a deputy High Court judge, has an idea why Kyoto failed to reach its emission goals and has proposed a remedy: creating a body similar to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
The new court would have the ability to sanction and perhaps even punish those who violate or fail to obey climate change treaties such as Kyoto.
It's tempting to dismiss this as the pipe dream of a barrister who also supports bringing Shariah law to Britain. But the idea of enforcing greenhouse gas reductions through legal means has been voiced by others and could easily snowball into widespread acceptance.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has agreed that the idea of such a court will be taken into account when considering ways to make such international agreements binding on all parties.
"The time is now ripe to set this up and get it going," said Hockman. "Its remit will be overall climate change and the need for better regulation of carbon emissions but at the same time the implementation and enforcement of international environmental agreements and instruments.".............
..............Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, and next head of the European Union starting in January, recognizes such authoritarianism and totalitarianism when he sees it. He sees global warming hype not as an attempt to save the planet but as a campaign to collectivize it, to put the nations of the world and their economies under the thumbs of global planners.

Writing in the Financial Times, he warned: "As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not communism."

 

This whole thing, and carbon credits etc.. are a load of crap. People "buying credits" aren't helping as much as they are just forking over money to someone who found a good way to make rich folks and the mighty Al Gore(ok, this is far as I'll go against him) feel warm and fuzzy over "saving" the planet.