This is the second in a seven part series detailing our objections to plans by the United States Environmental Protection Agency to claim unlimited power over the life of every American. Those plans were laid out in an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR), dated July 11, 2008. The EPA is inviting comments to this advance notice. This article explains the first of our six major objections to the EPA plans. The total of our objections, including our letter, our comments, and a link to the EPA website, may be accessed at: http://www.classicalideals.com/EPA_Ruination.htm
Comment Number One: The EPA Plans are Immoral
We oppose these measures on moral grounds. These proposals violate the moral principles affirmed by the American Founders, and instituted in the American limited government: the inalienable right of every individual to his own life, his own liberty, his own property, and the pursuit of his own happiness. These rights are inalienable; they are not contingent on the permission of a federal agency.
It is important to grasp the arbitrary nature of the claims to impending climate disaster, their lack of support among many eminent scientists, the history of failed predictions of disaster (of which this is merely the last), and the lack of viable alternatives to fossil fuels. It is important to recognize that there is no natural “disaster” looming over the horizon–only a political disaster of our own making. We shall address these issues in comments following this one.
But the major impetus behind the man-made global warming scare–and the resultant political proposals–is rooted in something other than the rational identification of a genuine problem. It is erroneous moral ideas that are leading us to political disaster.
The fundamental moral issue is this: do human beings have a right to exist, and to live their own lives in pursuit of their values? Or, must human beings live only with the permission of a higher authority? Is the purpose of a government to protect each individual’s rights? Or is the government’s purpose to issue permissions to exist and to act?
We affirm that every individual has the right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, and that these rights are inalienable to our beings. We maintain, therefore, that we are not obligated to purchase these rights from the self-proclaimed representatives of “The Earth,” or from a federal agency empowered to enforce their program. We hold that it is morally good–that it is right–for human beings to think, and to act, in order to achieve their values. We hold that governments are properly constituted only to protect these rights.
We hold that the greatest of all values is human life, and that nature should be open to the use of human beings, for their own ends. We reject any dogma–and any political program–that sacrifices man’s life, man’s industry, and man’s freedom to “nature,” or to the self-appointed guardians of “nature.”
We reject the idea that by the very action of creating the values we need to live–by living itself–we create some kind of a blot on the earth. We reject the idea of a “carbon footprint” for which we must atone to an Earth-goddess–as if carbon is not an element, and as if human “footprints,” the evidence that we live on Earth, are demonic.
We reject the idea that CO2, a gas existing in nature for billions of years, which is vital to plants and is emitted by animals, can be a “pollutant.” We reject the claim that by the very act of breathing, we are polluters who defile the Earth.
Following the release of this ANPR, a spokeswoman for Greenpeace issued the following in a statement:
As
