UN Human Rights Office Asks If Economic Freedom Is An ‘Urgent Threat’ To Mankind?
UN Human Rights Office Asks If Economic Freedom Is An “Urgent Threat” To Mankind?
http://lidblog.com/un-human-rights-office-asks-if-economic-freedom-is-an-urgent-threat-to-mankind/
Guest post by Onan Coca Something absolutely NUTS transpired earlier this month when an ignorant leftist tool at the United Nations Human Rights Office got a hold of their Twitter account. Here’s what the UNHR office tweeted back on September 2nd: Hillel Neuer is the executive director of UN Watch, and following his repudiation of their tweet, the UNHR deleted their comment, acting as if nothing had even happened. Neuer had more to say about the episode at the UN Watch’s website. “This was a loony tweet, and it calls into question the judgment of the UN’s top human rights office,” said Neuer. “While millions of people are suffering from genocide, sexual slavery and starvation, it is far from clear why the UN would instead focus its attention on unidentifiable ‘urgent threats,’ let alone on economic subjects about which it has neither competence nor expertise,” said Neuer. “Tellingly, the same UN human rights office has failed to issue a single tweet about this past month’s dire human rights crisis in Venezuela, where millions face mass hunger in part due to attacks on the free market in the failed economic policies of the late president Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro, which included arbitrary seizure of businesses and private property.” “If the UN did not have a strict policy of ignoring its own guaranteed human right to private property, established in Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, then perhaps Venezuelan mothers would not be struggling to find food for their children.” “Virulent anti-capitalism was a policy of the defunct Soviet Union, but it should not be embraced by the UN body which is supposed to be focused on human rights emergencies.” Most intellectually honest observers of the United Nations understand that the organization is much further to the left than most of the government in the Western world (yes, even the socialist ones), but it is still surprising to see such a flamboyant display of leftist lunacy. Never mind the fact (and yes, it’s a fact) that the United Nations has only survived this long thanks to the Free Market values of the Western world, and to the dollars that those values have generated (particularly from the United States). Never mind the fact that the most urgent threats we face have nothing to do with the free market but arise in nations where the free market is not valued or respected …
History rewritten, Global Cooling from 1940 – 1970, an 83% consensus, 285 papers being ‘erased’
…2016 Arctic ice 22% greater than 2012 – ‘May be seeing one of fastest September growths on record’
…NSIDC: 2016 ties with 2007 for second lowest Arctic sea ice minimum
…Obama’s Electric Car Fail: None Meet the 150-mile-per-gallon standard he promised
Obama’s Electric Car Fail
Only 40% of Obama’s electric cars are on the road. None meet the 150-mile-per gallon standard he promised.
Last year 17.5 million cars, SUVs, and light-weight trucks were sold in America. A mere 115,000 of those (two-thirds of one percent) were electric vehicles. Let’s press the rewind button back to the 2008 presidential campaign trail, in which Barack Obamadeclared:
we will help states like Michigan build the fuel-efficient cars we need, and we will get one million 150 mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on our roads within six years. [bold added]
In March 2009, two months after he became President, Obama delivered a speech at theSouthern California Edison Electric Vehicle Technical Center in which he similarlyasserted:
we will put one million plug-in hybrid vehicles on America’s roads by 2015.
In these closing months of 2016, it’s reasonable to ask how those green promises worked out. In short: abysmally.
Governments at both the state and national level have tried to persuade consumers to buy electric vehicles by offering rebates totaling thousands of dollars a pop. But only about 400,000 are currently on US roads, including those purchased by government bodies. The only way we reach a million is by counting all the electric vehicles in the entire world.
Despite spending billions, Obama delivered less than half of the electric cars in the time frame he promised. And let’s not forget his insistence that these cars would achieve the equivalent of 150 miles per gallon. A 2016 US Department of Energy list of the 11 most efficient electric vehicles indicates that not a single one meets that criteria. BMW’s i3achieves 124 miles per gallon. The Chevrolet Spark is in second place at 119, and Vokswagen’s e-Golf is in third at 116.
The 11 best-case-scenario electric vehicles on the road eight years later fall 25% short of what Obama said would be entirely normal. Between them, they average only 112 miles per gallon. In other words, Obama and his speech writers were pulling numbers out of the air in 2008, confidently promising to meet goals they had no reason to believe were actually feasible.
Time and again, we run up against this problem. Anyone can stand at a podium and promise to make all manner of green fantasies come true. But even US presidents with billions at their command …
Tragedy Of Consensus …’Climate Experts’ Obsessed With CO2, Ignored Remaining Universe Of Factors
…Survey: 42% of US adults don’t want to pay even $12 a year to ‘stop climate change’
This is the devastating question few surveyors are willing to ask. Survey teams usually use mindless motherhood questions instead, like whether we “believe” in climate change. (Who doesn’t?) Or they ask if we want clean energy… (doh, like I want my energy dirty?) But the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research actually did a nationally representative poll of 1097 adults.
Everyone wants a nice climate, but hardly anyone wants to pay for it:
When asked whether they would support a monthly fee on their electric bill to combat climate change, 42 percent of respondents are unwilling to pay even $1. Twenty-nine percent would pay $20, an amount roughly equivalent to what the federal government estimates the damages from climate change would be on each household. And, 20 percent indicate they are willing to pay $50 per month. Party affiliation is the main determinant of how much people are willing to pay, not education, income, or geographic location. Democrats are consistently willing to pay more than Republicans.
The answer has flummoxed people. Sam Ori in the Wall St Journal can’t make sense of it:
This is despite the fact that a whopping 77% said they think climate change is happening and 65% think it is a problem the government should do something about.
This is an upside-down result. The best available science tells us that Americans should be willing to pay considerably more, because the damages from climate change are so great…
He thinks that people don’t see this as a threat to themselves personally. But the answer is mostly within the survey, at Q20 which basically asks if people are confident that greenhouse gas obligations will be met. Fully 31% of people don’t think the US will reduce emissions, and two thirds don’t think India or China will. So who wants to pay for something that is likely to fail?
They didn’t go on to ask how many people thought that windmills or carbon markets would cool the planet. The answer to that would scare the pants of the lobbyists, and blow the whole charade. The real story is that everyone wants a nicer climate, but most people know it’s a waste of money. That’s why this is a dead topic in the election.