Located on the Chesapeake Bay between the Rappahannock and York rivers, Virginia's Middle Peninsula seemingly needs to fear rising sea levels not only due to global warming but also due to "post-glacial rebound" — an after-effect of the last Ice Age — and an ancient meteoric impact crater that continues to affect the area nearby.
If global warming is real it will melt the polar ice caps and arctic ice sheets, scientists say, putting more water in the oceans. That's why sea levels can be expected to rise. In fact, global ice melting has already begun — see Study: Ice sheets melting, sea level rising faster than previously thought. But if the surface temperatures of the earth continue to rise due to further global warming, the problem will just get worse.
Yet some Virginians vociferously reject that scenario.
Planners and politicians have been talking up the issue at public meetings, the Post article says, in hopes of generating support for changes such as rezoning local land for use as a dike against rising water. Opponents of the changes have organized themselves and come to meetings intent on shouting down and otherwise resisting the planners.
One of the opposition organizers is Donna Holt, leader of the Virginia Campaign for Liberty, a Tea Party affiliate with 7,000 members. She says a United Nations initiative called "Agenda 21" is behind a global drive for "sustainable development," which she believes is internationalist code-speak for the demise of local governments and individual liberty. The local planners and politicians who want zoning changes for purposes of protecting the counties of Virginia's Middle Peninsula against sea-level rise are, she wold have it, dupes of the international Agenda 21 crowd.
Agenda 21 is "a United Nations environmental action plan adopted in 1992," says the article. Wikipedia says about "Agenda 21"(see this article) that it is ...
... an action plan of the United Nations (UN) related to sustainable development and was an outcome of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. It is a comprehensive blueprint of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the UN, governments, and major groups in every area in which humans directly affect the environment.Donna Holt believes, says The Post, that it's just a "shadowy global conspiracy" to take away our liberties. If property owners or local governments don't comply with its mandate for "sustainable development," they'll be in line for international sanctions of some sort.
That's just not so, says Patty Glick, senior climate-change specialist for the National Wildlife Federation, according to The Post. Agenda 21 "has no legal or policy implication for local governments in the United States," she says.
I believe Donna Holt and her fellow climate skeptics are wrong, and that manmade climate change is real. See Global Warming Real After All, Says Former Scientific Skeptic for some of the reasons why I think global warming is a real concern for all of us.
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But I also think that the reflexive hostility to environmental issues that exists on America's political right is a real concern for the rest of us.
Obviously, there will have to be federal (and international) responses to threats of climate change. Regions, states, and local governments, too, will have to get involved. And private industry, as well. And I can't imagine not imposing some sort of carbon tax, someday in the hopefully not-too-distant future.
Why a carbon tax? When we burn fossil fuels such as coal, oil, gasoline, and natural gas, byproducts of the combustion include carbon dioxide and other compounds that likewise contain carbon. They are given off as gases, and they hang around in the atmosphere for decades, providing a thermal insulating blanket to trap the sun's warmth. This is the "greenhouse effect." Carbon dioxide and the other long-lasting gaseous byproducts of fossil fuel combustion are "greenhouse gases."
Taxing the creation of greenhouse gases that contain carbon would stimulate producers of electric power and refiners of petroleum products to invest in alternative, sustainable technologies of energy production.
A carbon tax (or, alternatively, a cap-and-trade system that would likewise impose an extra cost on fossil fuel use) would impose a temporary burden on the economy, though. Down the road, after "green energy" technologies have become the norm, we'd probably have cheaper energy than we have now, but in the meantime, energy costs would go up.
Hence it would make little sense to tax carbon emissions if there were not even greater costs associated with the deleterious effects of global warming — such as much of Virginia's Middle Peninsula going under water.
So I definitely urge my fellow voters to take the threat of climate change seriously and not see it as a Trojan horse for internationalist conspiracies and scientific hubris.
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