Essay:Why Global Warming?

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The Global Warming Movement was born out of the Free Trade Movement in an effort to level the playing field in international trade, to transfer manufacturing from the developed world to the developing world, to raise incomes in the developing world so as they would be able to afford and purchase the manufactured and service exports that the developed world had to offer.

Prior to the modern Free Trade Movement, Third World and developing countries had to take on an often unrepayable debt to purchase Western manufacturing technology, or even foodstuffs, which kept them in a static and subservient position, vulnerable to radical and anti-Western agitation. A hand up in free trade was seen as the solution versus a sink-hole of charity, writing off bad debts, and foreign aid. Enabling the Third World and "emerging markets" to purchase Western wares and services through trade needed to overcome the pay gap between workers globally. For this purpose the Big Mac Index, based on one of the few American exports affordable to workers outside America, was devised to measure the disparity in global wage rates.[1]

The Cold War and Reagan era

Throughout the Cold War (1945-1992) the developed world, and the Western world particularly, bounded ahead of the communist bloc of nations and what was known as the emerging nations by a magnitude of several degrees propelled by ideological competition between capitalism and what the communist bloc offered to the rest of the impoverished Third World. The legacy of this is seen in the US Defense budget; the US, which accounts for 25% of World GDP, nevertheless accounts for 37% of worldwide defense spending, down from previous highs. "U.S. military expenditures are roughly the size of the next seven largest military budgets around the world."[2] No one would suggest further reductions today in a leaderless and dangerous world. Spinoff and collateral technologies of US defense spending have given us the internet, satellite communications, and cell phone technology to name a few engines of the modern global economy.

The Reagan economic program bore with it an unresolved dichotomy: while it proposed to jumpstart a latent economic potential and an end to stagnation of the US and the global economy, its Free Trade aspects carried the seeds of the US's own manufacturing demise. At the time the US already had an economy dominated by the service sector. Housing construction (which is not an export commodity) had already replaced auto manufacturing as the No. 1 manufacturing employer only a few years earlier. Auto manufacturing had been ceded to foreign competitors, with about $10,000 per unit (nearly $30,000 by today's measure) exported for each new car purchase which could have remained home, used as wages for American workers, and circulated in communities. Free Trade helped level the playing field and break the overpriced labor of American unions.

The Ross Perot voters of yesteryear have become the victors of 2016. Albeit, the United States has suffered the damage Perot sought to avoid after he made a decision that both major US political parties were bent on pursuing destruction of the US manufacturing sector.

Birth of an idea

Selling the notion of job destruction, of course, was frought with problems. "Improved living standards" was the first track. Cheaper foreign made goods would stretch the dollar, raise our standards of living, and make us all richer. But labor unions, represented by such politicians as Richard Gephardt (who was Democratic House leader at the time President Bill Clinton shepherded his NAFTA legislation through Congress) railed against it. Turning Third Worlders into producers, traders, and consumers of American exports was a far fetched dream, claimed the anti-NAFTA racists and protectionists. A starving world that lives on $2 a day was better off with nothing rather than pay them $2 an hour, they argued. It was better to live with greedy, overpaid American workers than pacify the developing world with jobs and dignity.

The collective appeal to world peace was thankfully never articulated. The idea the developing and Third World could be mollified with direct investment and resist the Soviet Union's only exports - AK-47s, communist agitprop, and resentment - would help stop the US from having to play the world's policeman. By mid 1990s when Congress finally acted upon several far reaching trade agreements, the "putting out fires" argument grew into a "promote democracy" mantra.

But by the 1980s science had already been called upon to help make the transition of heavily regulated manufacturing in the United and the Western world to the less developed, less regulated, less environmentally friendly developing and Third World. That is, after all, why it was called the developing and Third World. Science made the appeal to the more educated Western workers on environmental grounds (backed up by the strong arm of government and law), and left the inexperienced, uneducated Third Worlders to fend for themselves at the mercy now of tbeir new, greedy, capitalist investors. And what did they have to complsin about? They were making $2 a day now. Here science became less scientific, and more like a political movement. And the roots of this cult-like mentality among "science advocates" have nothing to do with global warming and more to do with socio-political debates related to separation of church and state, the anti-God movement, the Scopes Monkey Trial, and debates over prayer in American schools.

Does Global warming exist?

In short, yes. But that is not the purpose of this essay. The question is, Why does a cult-like mentality grip global warming advocates intent on indoctrinating elementary schoolchildren and demonizing sceptics? Anthropomorphic destruction of the environment is as old as the human species itself; human waste and excretion making its way into drinking water sources, for example, is far more lethal than carbon emissions, certainly has killed more people over countless millenia, and will remain a problem for as long as the species is alive. Deforestation for firewood, destruction of animal habitat to clear arable farmland, have all occured for the economic wellbeing of our species. Why is what is purported to be science-based facts, argued with such emotional vigor? When will the final Apocalypse, preached with a religious ferverence by apologists, arrive? When the Big Mac Index reaches parity (currently at 36, with a range of 78 and 11 between the poorest and richest nations)?

A few cases in point

Lets examine the per capita income of three countries which have remained relatively consistent to each other over the past 35 years despite tremendous global economic changes, Russia, Mexico, and Iran. All three countries are major crude oil exporters. Measured in today's dollars, Russia and Mexico have about $6000 per capita income, or about $100 a week. This parity has been fairly constant now, even after Mexico gained jobs as a result of NAFTA later lost to Chinese competitors, and Russia experienced post-communist boom and bust cycles. Iran has about $7500 per capita income, or nearly 25% higher, while battling global economic sanctions hanging over it for much of the time. $125 a week may not seem like much to an American worker, but a 25% disparity between Mexican, Russian, and their Iranian counterparts is a huge difference. With sanctions lifted and trade restored, the historical disparity will grow, Iranian incomes will rise approaching First World status, Iran will see itself more as an equal among superpowers, and the growth of carbon emissions makes it all possible. Don't fool yourself, Obama has already sold the global warming cultists down the river in the hopes of peace and international trade.

References