High Costs of Green Jobs

We are now beginning to grasp the definition and the scope of the words "new world order," an expression inserted into the U.S. political vocabulary by the first President Bush. He never defined it, leaving that task to his successors, and President Barack Obama is only too glad to expand its meaning.

Before Bush Sr. left the White House, however, he attended the 1992 United Nations meeting in Rio de Janeiro, signed the UN Climate Change Treaty and rammed it through the Senate for ratification. It's now available for Obama to use as one engine in his plan to "fundamentally transform the United States."

Of course, the climate changes. Many changes are due to factors over which humans have no control, such as winds, ocean currents and sun activity.

But the liberals want us to believe that climate change is also caused by gases expelled when humans burn so-called fossil fuels. The UN created an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to push the UN's political agenda wrapped up in climate-change ideology.

The first UN Earth Summit was held in Stockholm in 1972. At the second UN Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, the dominant figure was Canadian Maurice Strong, a good friend of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Strong called for social justice, saying, "Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class, involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work air conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable." Sustainable development became the buzzword to require government approval for almost every activity by almost every individual, business and organization.

While President Bush Jr. was more focused on building a North American Union without borders between countries, during his two terms, the two Democratic presidential candidates he defeated, Al Gore and John Kerry, became key players in the UN's climate change politics. It soon became obvious that UN climate change was an attack on the American standard of living as well as on our sovereignty.

Gore and Kerry attended several UN climate change meetings. Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his climate change advocacy. Kerry used his wife's mega-wealth to wine and dine university and school officials to get them to skew academic curriculum. This was supposed to make students believe that climate change is a terrible threat, and that we must abandon our current energy sources.

By the time Barack Obama became president, it also became obvious that UN climate change politics are not only a vehicle to serve his goal of "fundamentally transforming the United States," but also his goal of spreading the wealth.

Government's entry into the field of trying to control climate by regulations, taxes and handouts is a convenient cover not only for deliberately lowering our U.S. standard of living, but also for imposing socialism on America. So most of the $800 billion Obama stimulus was dedicated to exchanging America's dependable energy sources from coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear to less efficient, less dependable and more expensive green energies such as wind and solar.

A case in point is the scandal of Solyndra Inc. This California-based company is a very politically correct green firm making solar panels.

So Obama, a true believer in green energy, as well as in socialism's fantasy that government can and should pick winners and losers in the economy, gave $535 million dollars of stimulus money to Solyndra. It didn't hurt Solyndra's application that some of its investors were donors to Obama's political campaign.

The trouble with green energy is that it simply can't exist without government subsidies. And Solyndra can't exist, even with this massive government grant.

Just as soon as it received the stimulus money, Solyndra filed for bankruptcy. How could any business think it could survive when it cost Solyndra $4 for every watt of power it produced and China produces panels at 75 cents per watt?

Meanwhile, Obama is working with the UN to fundamentally transform America with a new global tax. His appointee Marisa Lago is attending UN meetings to design a proposed global tax to build a "Green Climate Fund."

This fund is designed to pay for greening the global economy, estimated to cost $1.9 trillion annually for the next 40 years, or $76 trillion.

Initially, it is expected to raise at least $100 billion a year, but if the UN's tax design is approved in December at a UN meeting in Durban, South Africa, it could increase exponentially from $100 billion to $1.9 trillion annually, or more. It will be an indirect tax, making it impossible to opt out, although the UN is planning to reimburse Third World countries in another underhanded device to transfer U.S. wealth to Third World countries.

Phyllis Schlafly is a lawyer, conservative political analyst and author of 20 books. Her latest, written with co-author Suzanne Venker, is "The Flipside of Feminism" published in March by WorldNetDaily. She can be contacted by email at phyllis@eagleforum.org. To find out more about Phyllis Schlafly and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Website at www.creators.com.

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