The much-ballyhooed global meeting of representatives of 192 +/- nations seeking so far elusive common ground on the issue of climate change got under way under a threatening cloud of doubt Monday. Some of these people strongly this is humanity’s last chance to stop global warming. The motive of some of these people is perhaps more sinister. Some, and perhaps many of them, are aiming at instituting a one-world government as part of the fallout from this supposed climate-change catastrophe cum hoax.

According to United Nations’ climate chief, Yvo de Boer, “The clock has ticked down to zero.” He was probably thinking at the time as much about the movement in public opinion away from the idea of global warming as about any man-made scientific deadline.

From now until December 18, delegates will try to knock out some of the most perplexing details in the pursuit of a global climate deal. Among those: getting some of the bigger polluters like the United States, China, and India to commit to deliver what could ultimately be hundreds of billions in financing to help the poor countries with their part in of problem. As always, of the three nations mentioned, only the United States is expected to actually pony up much money.

Several countries, including China, Brazil, the United States and most recently India and South Africa announced new emissions goals that are considered quite feeble by standards set by many of the climate control participants.

The global climate change meet-up started off with a slickly-produced video appeal from children around the world asking to be saved from what looked like an apocalyptic future. This regrettable video was intended to spur the participants to produce favorable results.

Connie Hedegaard, the Danish minister presiding over the conference speaking of the recent string of emissions commitments, said, “Every positive announcement will improve our changes of staying below the two-degree-Celsius target, but as we all know only too well,: she added, “we are not there yet.” Two degrees Celsius is the climate scientists recommended cap on temperature increases.

Miss Hedegaard went on to admit that the financing required to fund any emissions cut commitments will be the bigger challenge.

Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, had pointed remarks for those who “find it difficult to accept” climate change science after email messages and files allegedly stolen from a British climate research center recently raised questions about data manipulation among some leading climate scientists.

To counter bring our attention to those damning emails, Dr.Pachauri went on to point out a list of trends that suggest global warming.

The mood among negotiators and other participants was one of cautious optimism. The American, Jonathan Pershing, the State Department’s special envoy for climate said at the opening plenary session that he saw strong evidence the conference would prove critical to moving forward on curbing emissions and helping poor countries limit vulnerability to climate hazards. He was certain the decision by more than 100 leaders, including President Obama, to attend would give their efforts a strong boost.

He also said he saw no indication that efforts could be blunted by Saudi Arabia and other countries that have raised concerns about climate findings based on the e-mail scandal.

The environmental group, Friends of the Earth, sent an open letter that condemned what it called “undemocratic practices adopted by the Danish presidency of convening small and exclusive groups of countries before the Copenhagen meeting”—a reference to the rumored existence of an “alternate” treaty document being readied by some big players in the negotiations, including conference organizers, should efforts to sort out differences on the current text prove undoable.

Other blocs — including China — are rumored to be working on similar alternative documents of their own.

Meanwhile, in what appeared to be an unprecedented action, 50 or so newspapers around the world published the identical editorials calling for “decisive action” in Copenhagen.

“In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage,” read the editorial, spearheaded by Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.”

Continued inaction, the authors asserted, would ravage the planet and wreak havoc on economies and livelihoods.

“The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation. . . .” In conclusion the editorial added, “We implore them to make the right choice.”

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by Patrick J. Buchanan

Down at the Chinese outlet store in Albany known as Wal-Mart, Chinese tires have so successfully undercut U.S.-made tires that the Cooper Tire factory in that south Georgia town had to shut down.

Twenty-one hundred Georgians lost their jobs.

The tale of Cooper Tire and what it portends is told in last week’s Washington Post by Peter Whoriskey. [As Cheaper Chinese Tires Roll In, Obama Faces an Early Trade Test, September 8, 2009]

How could tires made on the other side of the world, then shipped to Albany, be sold for less than tires made in Albany?

Here’s how.

At Cooper Tire, the wages were $18 to $21 per hour. In China, they are a fraction of that. The Albany factory is subject to U.S. health-and-safety, wage-and-hour and civil rights laws from which Chinese plants are exempt. Environmental standards had to be met at Cooper Tire or the plant would have been closed. Chinese factories are notorious polluters.

China won the competition because the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection of the laws” does not apply to the People’s Republic. While free trade laws grant China free and equal access to the U.S. market, China can pay workers wages and force them to work hours that would violate U.S. law, and China can operate plants whose health, safety and environmental standards would have their U.S. competitors shut down as public nuisances.

Beijing also manipulates its currency to keep export prices low and grants a rebate on its value-added tax on exports to the U.S.A., while imposing a value-added tax on goods coming from the U.S.A.

Thus did China, from 2004 to 2008, triple her share of the U.S. tire market from 5 percent to 17 percent and take down Cooper Tire of Albany.

But not to worry. Cooper Tire has seen the light and is now opening and acquiring plants in China, and sending Albany workers over to train the Chinese who took their jobs.

Welcome to 21st century America, where globalism has replaced patriotism as the civil religion of our corporate elites. As Thomas Jefferson reminded us, “Merchants have no country.”

What has this meant to the republic that was once the most self-sufficient and independent in all of history?

Since 2001, when George Bush took the oath, the United States has run $3.8 trillion in trade deficits in manufactured goods, more than twice the $1.68 trillion in trade deficits we ran for imported oil and gas.

Our trade deficit with China in manufactured goods alone, $1.58 trillion over those eight years, roughly equals the entire U.S. trade deficit for oil and gas.

U.S. politicians never cease to wail of the need for “energy independence.” But why is our dependence on the oil of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, Nigeria, Canada, Mexico and Venezuela a greater concern than our dependence on a non-democratic rival great power for computers and vital components of our weapons systems and high-tech industries?

As Executive Director Auggie Tantillo of the American Manufacturing Trade Action Committee compellingly argues:

“Running a trade deficit for natural resources that the United States lacks is something that cannot be helped, but running a massive deficit in manmade products that America easily could produce itself is a choice—a poor choice that is bankrupting the country and responsible for the loss of millions of jobs.”

How many millions of jobs?

In the George W. Bush years, we lost 5.3 million manufacturing jobs, one-fourth to one-third of all we had in 2001.

And our dependence on China is growing.

Where Beijing was responsible for 60 percent of the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods in 2008, in the first six months of 2009, China accounted for 79 percent of our trade deficit in manufactured goods.

How can we end this dependency and begin building factories and creating jobs here, rather than deepening our dependency on a China that seeks to take our place in the sun? The same way Alexander Hamilton did, when we Americans produced almost nothing and were even more dependent on Great Britain than we are on China today.

Let us do unto our trading partners as they have done unto us.

As they rebate value-added taxes on exports to us, and impose a value-added tax on our exports to them, let us reciprocate. Impose a border tax equal to a VAT on all their goods entering the United States, and use the hundreds of billions to cut corporate taxes on all manufacturing done here in the United States.

Where they have tilted the playing field against us, let us tilt it back again. Transnational companies are as amoral as sharks. What is needed is simply to cut their profits from moving factories and jobs abroad and increase their profits for bringing them back to the U.S.A.

It’s not rocket science. Hamilton, James Madison and Abraham Lincoln all did it. Obama’s tariffs on Chinese tires are a good start.

Source: Patrick J. Buchanan Blog

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