ITSSD: Congress Should Do its 'Homework' Before Adopting Costly Euro-Style Energy/Climate Change Rules
PRINCETON, N.J., June 21 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Although the 110th U.S. Congress should now be considering how best to promote America's future energy and economic security, it is actually devising costly and unscientific environmental mandates and tax schemes that will drain the pocket-books of Americans and diminish their fundamental individual rights, including private property.
Arguably, Congress should have already learned about the market distortions and personal hardships triggered 'across the pond' by Europe's environment-centric energy policies. Crafted by unelected bureaucrats,
environmental activists and socialist party 'kingpins' and supported by most European leaders, such policies have focused more on promoting sustainable development via consumer and business sacrifices than on securing desperately- needed regional energy supplies.
Ordinary Europeans have been denied a broad portfolio of cheaper local energy options that include newly drilled oil, gasified and liquefied 'clean' coal, and nuclear, hydro and geothermal power. Instead, they have been provided 'bird-slicers', solar panels, natural gas pipelines, severe energy- use restrictions and poorer performing 'energy efficient' cars and
appliances. The result: lower economic productivity and innovation rates, higher petrol, manufacturing, services, food, housing and transportation costs, and greater reliance on opportunistic foreign oil and gas resources.
In a new white paper entitled, Europe's Warnings on Climate Change Belie More Nuanced Concerns, international attorney Lawrence Kogan discusses how there is more to Europe's globally inspired climate change campaign than meets the eye. According to Mr. Kogan, "An evolving Europe is experiencing many internal problems that ultimately render it incapable of
serving as a positive role model for multilateral energy and environmental action."
In Mr. Kogan's view, "As long as Europe's self-identity remains in question and is tied to an unreformed United Nations, heavily subsidized welfare-state economics, conditional positive individual rights and risk- averse political correctness, Congress must resist following in Europe's environmental footprints down the primrose path towards global governance" "Otherwise," says Kogan, "Americans will be afforded fewer economic opportunities and private property protections against wanton governmental intrusions than they are currently guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and its accompanying Bill of Rights."
The Institute for Trade, Standards and Sustainable Development (ITSSD) is a non-partisan, non-profit international legal research and educational organization that examines international law relating to trade, industry and positive sustainable development around the world. This ITSSD study is accessible online at:
http://www.itssd.org/White%20Papers/Europe_sWarningsonClimateChangeBelieMoreNu ancedConcerns.pdf.
CONTACT: ITSSD, +1-609-951-2222, info@itssd.org.
SOURCE Institute for Trade, Standards and Sustainable Development
Good Neighbor Committee
P.O. Box 155 - La Salle, CO 80645
info@goodneighborlaw.com
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