1201 Sustainability is All About Politics
Some threats to the family and our way of life are very easy to spot. It doesn’t matter how eloquently they are defended or how much recognition and praise they manage to garner, threats are still threats.
Other threats are much more complex and cloaked in just enough fact to Trojan the danger. On December 21st, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) managed to take another jab at healthy families and individual liberty when it issued the Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) rule. Thus far, this threat seems to be escaping any significant detection.
MACT squarely targets coal-fired power plants. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy cites a cost estimate to families, business and manufacturing of as much as $11 billion per year. The Center also notes that in response to the rule, utility companies have already announced the closing of 72 power plants around the country. Dr. Tom Borelli of the National Center for Public Policy Research believes that “The consequences of the EPA’s war on coal will result in double digit electricity price increases and millions of job losses.”
Believe it or not, the EPA is really only doing what its handlers and its administrator, Lisa Jackson, expect it to do. To understand the situation, a little environmental history is in order.
In the 1970’s, a movement arose on the west coast known as “Smart Growth”. It was patterned on a British model which had been in place there since 1947. It didn’t take long before there was an explosion of governmental and non-governmental organizations, international, national and local, pressing an agenda that was already beginning to stifle British property rights and damage her economy.
In 1987 the concept of sustainable development (SD) hit the international stage through the publication of the Brundtland Report. The report linked environmentalism with leftist economics and social justice. By 1992, the Brundtland version of SD was incorporated into United Nations’ bylaws and formalized into an initiative known as Agenda 21.
Beginning with President Clinton, both Republican and Democratic administrations have continued to force smart growth and Agenda 21 programs on the American people on every level of government. Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood is what the Heritage Foundation calls the present “point man” in the effort to remake America through SD. The West Michigan Environmental Action Council, the Sierra Club, various sustainable business forums, public-private partnerships (PPP’s) and local sustainability committees are the functional arms, knowingly or unknowingly, of the SD movement and Agenda 21.
Radical environmentalism has managed to become a threat to the American way of life and it has reached that stage virtually undetected. Agenda 21 policies and SD cannot work in a free market system so central control is a must. Private property rights cannot stand if growth is controlled by the mystic interests of “Mother Earth” and “Father Sustainability”. Representative democracy cannot survive if public policy is an administrative process first.
So, here it is. The United States of America, the state of Michigan and even the city of Holland continue to fall prey, willingly, to American exceptionalism killing leftist ideology. Rather than steward abundant cheap natural resources intelligently, we could saddle future generations with second-rate liberties and third world lifestyles.