Posted on October
21, 2019
Planning UN-opolis
IPCC's property rights problem
by
Daniel
Clark
When the Roman emperor Nero proposed to construct a
city of palaces called Neropolis in honor of himself,
the Senate objected, for the reason that the land he wanted was already
occupied. Nero's plan required the
destruction of one third of Rome, which was never approved, but which happened
to occur anyway, in the most convenient conflagration of the pre-Janet Reno
era. So the emperor was able to build
his palaces after all.
Thankfully,
the United Nations doesn't wield that kind of power, but its aims are not too
dissimilar, as can be seen in the recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change report, "Climate Change and Land."
In it, the IPCC does not come right out and advocate the abolition of
property rights, because it only fleetingly contemplates the private ownership
of land in the first place.
Although the report incessantly cites "sustainable land
management" as the key to reversing the detrimental environmental effects of
"land use change," not until Chapter 7 does it bother to consider the problem
of sustainably managing land that belongs to someone else. "[W]here land is in different ownership
structures, different mechanisms will be required," it says. "Indeed, land tenure is recognized as a
factor in barriers to Sustainable Land Management and an important Governance
consideration."
Or, to paraphrase Hedley Lamarr,
there's only one thing standing between them and all that land -- the rightful
owners. To dispel any doubt of it, the
authors include a table entitled, "Policies/Instruments that address multiple
land-climate risks at different jurisdictional levels." Among those items in the "Policy/Instrument"
column that it deems important to "Sustainable Land Management" are taxes,
subsidies, regulations, and "Land ownership laws (reform of, if necessary, for
secure land title, or access/control)."
These are policy instruments meant to be used at the
national level. The UN has neither the
intention nor the wherewithal to exercise them itself. The threat lies in the fact that America's
oldest and largest political party shares the IPCC's eco-tyrannical vision.
Democrat presidential candidates have unanimously
endorsed their party's "Green New Deal," one of the goals of which is "Working
collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to eliminate
pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as
is technologically feasible." Toward
this end, the candidates are proposing new subsidies that would pay farmers to
adopt what Bernie Sanders calls "sustainable agricultural practices" like
no-till farming, and planting "cover crops" during the winter, as if the
government knows better how to run a farm than those farmers who are not
already employing these methods.
Sanders, along with opponents Cory Booker and Andrew Yang, is even
proposing to compel Americans to curtail our meat consumption through punitive taxation,
in order to reduce the amount of land that is needed to produce livestock.
When
the government starts "working collaboratively" with its citizens to do things
it wants to do and they don't, how do you suppose that will work out? Our "voluntary compliance" with income tax
laws ought to give you a hint. A
collaborative effort between a citizen and his government about how to use his
property works out pretty much the same as a collaborative effort between you
and the IRS.
They won't jump directly to land confiscation, of
course. It will be more gradual than
that. They'll start by depriving people
of the ability to develop and use their land, even while they still legally own
it. They already do this in some cases
under the guise of protecting endangered species. If you can have your property rights
nullified for disrupting the habitat of some allegedly endangered rat, then how
much easier is it to justify such an action on the basis that you're endangering
the entire world by contributing to "climate change?"
The possibilities are nearly endless. Might you want to remove some trees from your
property, thereby contributing to increased atmospheric CO2 levels? Thinking about starting a ranch or a dairy
farm, and increasing the world's population of methane-belching cows? Tisk, tisk. You'll need to
be forced to work collaboratively with your government to manage your land more
sustainably. Who knows? Perhaps in the end you'll decide it's better
to work collaboratively on a wind farm instead.
Like Nero, the eco-tyrants are determined to build
their utopia, knowing that it will require the destruction of what already
exists, and with a resolute callousness toward the plight of their
victims. Like him, they'll probably even
dream up some excuse to blame it all on the Christians.
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press