The New Manacles

-Coldwarrior 24 FEB 2012

Manacles are a metal band, chain, or shackle for fastening someone’s hands or ankles to restrict movement and prevent their escape and freedom.

Normally manacles are placed on a prisoner or criminal because he will want to escape his confinement.  The warders have a duty to restrict this criminal’s freedoms. This duty and these manacles are given to the warders as part of the social contract between the citizens and government. The citizens allow the government to try, incarcerate, restrict the movements and freedoms of, and eventually deem the criminal as rehabilitated and release him from his manacles.

In the last decade we have seen a different kind of manacle placed on not the criminals, but on the law abiding citizens. These manacles are the policies and fees and extra costs levied because of Carbon driven ‘Global Warming’ both globally and here in America. Any distortions in the energy market, restrictions of availability, or increased cost in the use of energy is a manacle on the economy and on the citizen’s freedoms when we get right down to it. We are going to see $5-6 dollar gas this summer because of lack of drilling and lack of refining that was in part a product of the environmental/Global Warming agenda. Electric costs are up due to the onerous regulations placed on coal fired power stations, ‘necessarily skyrocket’, anyone? We could have built Nuclear Stations, they are clean and emit zero carbon dioxide. That should have placated the Global Warming crowd, right? No, we can’t have all the energy we want: Manacles placed on you and me for what? A myth?

‘Global Warming’ as a driver of policy and taxation is dead in the US. It has even become the butt of jokes on late night TV. Seriously, could we have blamed anything else on Global Warming? The blogs, some real scientists, and the Global Warming crowd with their lies and fake data cut off this manacle. It took us about ten years to get back to reality, Carbon Dioxide is plant food and does not have an appreciable effect on the atmosphere. Therefore, much to the chagrin of the New Carbon Warders, Carbon Driven Global Warming eventually makes a lousy manacle.  The Carbon Trading desk at the Chicago Mercantile exchange was closed without much fanfare and now the New Carbon Warders are all silent. The prisoner came out of his trance and could see through the manacle and break it with common sense and a little research on the internet.

That should be the end of the story. It isn’t.  The New Carbon Warders will change uniforms. It leaked out in the President’s speech last night confirming what I have been saying in private for a couple of months. The New Carbon Warders will change into the ‘Sustainability Police’ . Sustainability will replace Global Warming as the driver for taxation, fees, and destructive policies that will continue to retard and distort our economy.The Sustainability Police will insist that this is for our own good, they just want to make sure we survive. Isn’t that what Sustainability is, survival and the ability to endure? Why not care for the ecosystems while providing for our needs? We can get fuel from algae! What a great idea! The Sustainability Police sound rational enough at first until they get into the implementation phase.  They see consumption of any kind to have a negative impact on the ecosystem. Instead of using Carbon as the Manacle, they will use ‘Carrying Capacity of Planet Earth’, ‘Management of Human Consumption’, ‘Impact’ and ‘Footprints’ to form the restrictions of our freedoms:

In 2007 a report for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stated: “While much discussion and effort has gone into sustainability indicators, none of the resulting systems clearly tells us whether our society is sustainable. At best, they can tell us that we are heading in the wrong direction, or that our current activities are not sustainable. More often, they simply draw our attention to the existence of problems, doing little to tell us the origin of those problems and nothing to tell us how to solve them.”

Sustainability will be the new manacles placed on the citizens to restrict their freedom and control their lives. Sustainability does not need science behind it. There does not need to be tree rings, temperature monitoring stations, and massively complicated computer models to back it up. Sustainability only needs the force of law and regulation. It is, simply because it is, and it is what the Sustainability Police say it is. This is a far more dangerous Manacle because the regulators and the activists define the ‘reality’; there is no scientific process to dissolve the chains that will be placed on us in the name of Sustainability.