As the UNFCCC – that’s United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – frolics in Durban, South Africa for 11 days of cocktails, crab legs and planet saving, what better time for another excerpt from YOU’VE BEEN GORED.

The UN is in the world government business, make no mistake about it. And our current domestic regime is more than happy to embrace and comply with UN edicts – oh how they love to embrace and comply.

Planetary Citizens,  meet your new Uncle Sam. And prepare to embrace, comply and bleed, with:

ECO TAXES

Once the richest country on earth, America is hopelessly broke. So it prints trillions at will — each fresh buck devaluing the previous one. Now, the most gargantuan, wasteful, polluting, unsustainable machine ever created – the U.S. Government – must drill for fresh revenue. But where? Greeniacs have the answer. Tax our every breath, because we are all greenhouse gas producers/polluters and therefore responsible for global warming/climate change/Gaia’s suffering.

We must financially atone for our eco sin–living.

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The Antelope Valley is a vast patch of desert on the outskirts of Los Angeles County, and a segment of the few rugged individualists who live out there increasingly are finding themselves the targets of armed raids from local code enforcement agents, who’ve assembled into task forces called Nuisance Abatement Teams (NATs).

The plight of the Valley’s desert dwellers made regional headlines when county officials ordered the destruction of Phonehenge: a towering, colorful castle constructed out of telephone poles by retired phone technician Kim Fahey. Fahey was imprisoned and charged with several misdemeanors.

But Fahey is just one of many who’ve been targeted by the NATs, which were assembled at the request of County Supervisor Mike Antonovich in 2006. LA Weekly reporter Mars Melnicoff wrote an in-depth article in which she exposed the county’s tactic of badgering residents with minor, but costly, code violations until they face little choice but to vacate the land altogether.

“They’re picking on the the people who are the most defenseless and have the least resources,” says Melnicoff.

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To say environmentalists are immune to reality is an understatement. When anyone dare question their conclusions, their deeply held “religious” beliefs, they are immediately attacked as a heretic, or worse, a shill for whatever industry they are trying to destroy. The soundness of the science, and the lack of such on their part, is irrelevant, it’s agenda uber alles. They find someone involved in what goes against their view who they can play “6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon” with and connect to whatever industry/organization they’re trying to destroy and claim that discredits everything contrary to their orthodoxy. But every once in a while something so beautifully karmic happens…That’s what this is about.

Bisphenol-A (BPA) is a chemical used to harden plastic so it can be used in the countless ways it helps improve countless millions of lives. As it is a chemical, it was only a matter of time before the extremist environmentalists started talking of the “dangers” of it to human beings. Ironically, charges of this nature are always led by people who have no concern of human beings. They are the same type of people who effectively banned the mosquito killing agent DDT. That ban has led to millions of avoidable deaths around the world from malaria. While the banning of BPA wouldn’t lead to deaths, it’s banning wouldn’t save any lives either. But it would put a lot of people out of work.

But work, jobs, livelihoods of individuals has no place in the environmental extremist agenda. They’ve replaced what was known to kill malaria carrying mosquitos with nets to sleep under. So instead of eliminating the problem they’ve reduced the problem…during sleep hours. Malaria’s largest number of victims are infants and children who don’t have the wherewithal to swat mosquitos away when they land on them, and since no one can live their whole life in a net, their exposure risk is high.

The book from which the religion of modern environmentalism sprang is “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson. In many ways it is the Bible of that movement. And even though it has been discredited, the “Silent Spring” model still serves as the modus operandi of the environmentalist cult. Ban first, ask questions later. That’s what they were trying to do with BPA.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Utopia…

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When Dwayne Whitney started his trucking business decades ago he had only one truck. Today he has eighteen and 20 employees. But that’s about to change.

“The State of California says my trucks are killing people,” says Whitney. “What do you say to that?”

In a few years, new air quality regulations approved by the California Air Resources Board will render Whitney’s entire fleet illegal.

“New CARB rules are putting me out of business,” he says.

CARB claims that diesel particulates, a type of pollution emitted from buses and trucks, contributes to 2,000 premature deaths in California each year. But UCLA epidemiologist Dr. James Enstrom says the number should be closer to zero.

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The Commerce Clause that regulates interstate commerce is at issue in the legal battle of Obamacare.  Can the federal government tell individuals that they must buy insurance?  Not as well known is how the same commerce clause is destroying farms and raising food prices by stopping the flow of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Rivers to the Central Valley in California.      The feds at the urging of the state government has literally turned off the tap, destroying prime farmland in order to benefit the sex lives of the Delta Smelt.

Approximately 85-90% of the water from this primary source has been shut off to the Central Valley.   The smelt is a fish so insignificant that no one other than the Bezerkely-enviro-wackos and some local fisherman have heard about this tiny fish.

The smelt is fish that is native to California and, for the most part, is known to fisherman simply as “bait”.   The California enviros’ zeal to increase the population of smelt has led to a terrible federal, legal decision that shut down the water to thousands of farmers in the Central Valley; the nation’s largest and most productive farm land.    Thousands of farmers there are suffering with unemployment over 20%, scores of farms have been lost and tens of thousands of agricultural workers are now without jobs.   If California didn’t have enough economic problems, you can add shooting yourself in the foot.  The inmates are now officially running the asylum.   If we needed a poster for enviro-insanity it would be the promotion of the lowly smelt over the interests of: farmers, food production, food prices, jobs and California families.

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This week, National Journal asked a rather interesting question this that implied it head has been fully tucked in the sand when it comes to recognizing the long term implications of Obama’s environmental policy.

As the EPA readies itself to enforce a handful of rules limiting carbon emissions – a backdoor Cap and Trade policy known as the “Tailoring Rule,” which severely and arbitrarily limits the amount of greenhouse gas emissions many industries are now allowed to produce – the National Journal sleepily wonders what the effect these rules will have on the affected industries.

There are a few responses that take a theoretical approach to the question, but National Journal and it’s guests don’t have to go far to look for a real answer, supported by research. According to a study published recently by the National Alliance of Forest Owners, the Tailoring Rules will have a definite – and immediately felt – negative impact on the economy.

A newly released economic impact study finds that the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Prevention of Significant Deterioration and Title V Greenhouse Gas Tailoring Rule” jeopardizes over 130 renewable energy projects, between 11,000 and 26,000 green jobs, and $18 billion in capital investment across the country. The risk of reduced capacity also could prevent as many as 30 states from meeting national renewable energy targets.

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Buried beneath the avalanche of press coverage about the lame-duck Congress, I found a story about President Obama’s mid-December meeting with twenty corporate CEOs. The purpose of this Blair House get-together was to discuss how to jump-start our still-ailing economy. Among other aims, Mr. Obama reiterated his goals to increase employment, end the recession, and double U.S. exports over the next five years.

These are lofty and laudable ambitions. But it seems that Mr. Obama’s regulatory bureaucrats haven’t gotten the memo. For example, consider the counter-productive impact of their efforts on agriculture.

As any shopper knows, food prices this past year have been rising faster than the overall rate of inflation. “Fears of a global food crisis swept the world’s commodity markets as prices for staples such as corn, rice and wheat spiraled after the U.S. government warned of ‘dramatically’ lower supplies,” the Financial Times reported in early October. “There is growing concern among countries about continuing volatility and uncertainty in food markets,” said World Bank president Robert Zoellick later that month. “These concerns have been compounded by recent increases in grain prices.”

Confronting this looming food-supply crisis is the American farmer. His productivity is such that the United States is the world’s largest agricultural exporter, with $108.7 billion in farm products shipped abroad in 2010. Helping him increase the supply of agricultural products is the key to addressing both rising food prices and global shortages. His productivity is also critical to our country’s broader economic recovery.

So, you would think that the administration’s apparatchiks would be doing whatever they can to remove the regulatory impediments that farmers face. But you would be wrong. Consider several ways in which federal regulators are threatening agricultural productivity, both directly and indirectly.

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A newly released economic impact study finds that the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Tailoring Rule” – a back-door Cap-and-Trade style regulation scheme that limits the greenhouse gases industries can emit – jeopardizes over 130 renewable energy projects, between 11,000 and 26,000 green jobs, and $18 billion in capital investment across the country.

Worse, that is just the Tailoring Rule’s effect on a single industry, biomass. Although biomass is generally considered a carbon neutral and renewable energy resource, the EPA included in it’s list of “most wanted” industries. The economies and renewable energy goals of nearly 30 states could be jeopardized.

The study is neatly summarized here on the National Alliance of Forest Owners’ website, along with comments from people central to the industry. The full study is posted below.

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Conservative author Dinesh D’Souza recently published an insightful, much-discussed article in Forbes, “How Obama Thinks.”

Drawing upon Obama’s writings and history, D’Souza concludes that his policy agenda—so at odds with traditional American values and principles—is rooted chiefly in the anti-colonialist intellectual influence of his Kenyan-born father:

What then is Obama’s dream? We don’t have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father’s dream. . . .

[T]o his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. . . . Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America . . . .

Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called “Problems Facing Our Socialism.” Obama Sr. . . saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa . . . . As he put it, “We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now.” The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that “theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed.”

Like father, like son, says D’Souza:

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

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Remember Audi’s absurd “Green Police” Super Bowl commercial where green cops arrest citizens for using plastic bags, plastic water bottles and sort through the community’s trash cans to ensure they’re recycling? Well, the absurdity is about to hit the streets of Cleveland.

Cleveland.com reports,

“It would be a stretch to say that Big Brother will hang out in Clevelanders’ trash cans, but the city plans to sort through curbside trash to make sure residents are recycling—and fine them $100 if they don’t. The move is part of a high-tech collection system the city will roll out next year with new trash and recycling carts embedded with radio frequency identification chips and bar codes.

The chips will allow city workers to monitor how often residents roll carts to the curb for collection. If a chip show a recyclable cart hasn’t been brought to the curb in weeks, a trash supervisor will sort through the trash for recyclables.”

The high-tech collection system is an expansion of a 15,000-resident pilot program that commenced in 2007. Proponents of the program argue that not only is the $2.5 million program good for the environment, but because the city will collect revenue from the fines and from recycled goods, the trash police will eventually raise revenue.

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What do you get when you combine: 1) a political radical who has been arrested and charged with conspiracy after causing civil disruptions including riots and 2) bureaucratic agencies in California with a record of environmental extremism that are focused on putting in place regulations on businesses that far exceed those set by the federal government?

The answer is massive job loss and industry displacement that satisfies ideologues on the far left and hurts both Americans and the economy.

And that’s exactly what California is confronting concerning the Scientific Review Committee (SRC), which was appointed by the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) to focus on reviewing new pesticides, which also happens to have significant overlap with the Scientific Review Panel (SRP), which is charged with evaluating the risk assessments of substances proposed for identification as toxic air contaminants by the Air Resources Board (ARB), the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) and the DPR.

You got that? And folks wonder why there is uncertainly in the marketplace and businesses are packing up and heading overseas due to the weight of government.

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California’s Air Resources Board (CARB)—long considered a foe of conservatives nationwide— has shelled out close to $800,000 to bolster its latest pet “green” initiative, Capitol Confidential has learned.

A study released last month, which draws positive conclusions regarding CARB’s favored “feebates” program, cost a whopping $796,641 according to a document found at CARB’s own site.  That has some observers scrutinizing CARB’s activities thinking it could come under renewed and sustained criticism.

California is currently mired in a fiscal morass that seems almost intractable, with many in the Golden State blaming overspending by government for the state’s fiscal woes.  Assembly Democrats have proposed plugging the state’s budget hole via $9 billion in loans, whereas Senate Democrats want to suspend $2 billion in corporate tax reductions, among other measures; the state budget deficit, meanwhile, is reportedly as big as $19 billion.

The “feebates” program is a CARB priority, however.  The agency sees slapping a tax on new, higher-emissions cars purchased by Californians, while offering a rebate on new, lower-emissions cars, as a key to combating climate change.

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So about two weeks ago Sen. John Kerry, a lead author of the looming Kerry-Graham-Lieberman global warming/cap-and-trade legislation said about his bill, to disassociate from Earth Day loopiness: This is not an environment bill.

No kidding. No one on the planet claims it would change the climate in any way our most sophisticated instrumentation could discern. It’s about power. Hence the title of books like “Power Grab“.

Today we read in E&E Daily, from another co-sponsor Sen. Lindsey Graham: “It’s not a global warming bill to me. Because global warming as a reason to pass legislation doesn’t exist anymore. ”

Oddly, both remarkable statements have been ignored by the establishment press, slavish as they are to also seeing this agenda through to the end because, as Sen. Tim Wirth said in 1988 and Barack Obama in his 2010 State of the Union address, even if you don’t buy the excuse, their agenda is still “the right thing to do.”

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Coinciding with Earth Day, a group of teenagers launched a new program called GreenMyParents, which seeks to “help young people teach their peers and parents how to work together to help the economy, earn money at home, and save the planet through simple, everyday actions.”  Looking for ways to help their families save money while protecting the environment are laudable goals, but I have some concerns.  I don’t want to insult these kids by assuming that they are just puppets of any other organization, but they should be aware of the fact that many will seek to use their organization to advance their agenda.

These kids should be commended for designing a program that relies on persuasion and free choice.  All too often, environmental groups have sought to circumvent public opinion and free choice by appealing to governmental force.  Mandates on personal behavior and restrictions on liberty are not how people should seek to affect change in a democratic society. I hope they will stay focused on their model of persuasion and stay away from politicized issues like cap-and-trade.

While wading into the issue of personal choices, I also hope they will stop and consider some of the trade-offs adults have to make.  It is easy to condemn their parents for wasteful behavior while they are still too young to have to be responsible for things like safeguarding a family.  For instance, in a write-up by the New York Times, it was suggested that the group would advise “washing in cold water, walking or biking to school/work and kicking the bottled-water habit,” as ways to save money and help the environment.  Walking or biking to school might save both money and reduce pollution, but it also exposes children to greater risk of violence or kidnapping.  These are the types of things that responsible adults have to consider.

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And that’s the point, I guess. Watch this ad for a “clean diesel” car by Audi, and good luck getting this slightly modified version of the Cheap Trick classic “Dream Police” out of your head. I couldn’t get it out with a lobotomy. It’s been playing off and on in my brain since it first aired during the Super Bowl.

But beyond the diddy, I also can’t get the vision of a fascist “green” future out of my head — even if it’s portrayed with a heavy dollop of of “Reno: 911“-style cop-show parody. Good comedy has to have a grain of truth in it to work, and this spot has plenty. It’s not just a peek at a ridiculous future, but a look at our “be green or else” present. An overreaction? Tell that to the chief of America’s Green Police, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, who Tweeted:

“Ok .. That ‘green police’ Audi commercial hits home..”

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On May 27, President Obama remarked to an audience gathered at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada that Americans, “pioneered solar technology, but we’ve fallen behind countries like Germany and Japan in generating it, even though they get less sun than we do.  They certainly get less sun than Nevada.”  Today, Vice President Biden and a handful of Cabinet secretaries releases the Recovery through Retrofit report that will extol the virtues of green jobs and energy savings to be had if only the government had its way.

Observers of national policy may want to look at other countries’ experiences to see how they have fared with efforts to improve environmental policies.  Previous research on green jobs policies in Spain showed that costs were high and benefits short-lived.  But what of the President’s example of Germany?

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In September, the European Union banned the sale of 100-watt incandescent light bulbs, with lawbreakers facing up to $70,000 in fines. Over the next few years, bans on lower-wattage bulbs kick in. In the United States, similar legislation comes into play in 2012. The idea is to kickstart the market for compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), which use less energy than conventional incandescents. Although CFLs present any number of problems (even beyond a much higher initial cost), governments all over the globe are determined to make them the new standard.

Invented in its modern form by Thomas Edison in 1879, the light bulb became synonymous with a brilliant idea. Now, it seems, it’s just one more symbol of a nanny state that increasingly dictates more choices in our public and private lives.

“Light bulbs vs. The Nanny State” is produced by Meredith Bragg and Nick Gillespie. Approximately two minutes.