“At this juncture our governments are just nominal. We all take our orders for legislation from the U.N. that sends out sheafs of “suggested” regulation for all ministries and departments large and small. If a legislator or bureaucrat decides, “Hell, no, I’m not going to do that,” he or she is immediately assaulted by several of the NGO’s that operate in whichever concerned sphere of influence, first gently, then a bit more influence is brought. If he insists, the poodle media is unleashed by a “study” that “shows” that women and minorities are hardest hit, and the legislator or bureaucrat is tamed.
Where I live – an excellent case study for the hellscape of our meticulously planned future –people get elected promising reform, and within weeks surrender. Any change he tries to muscle through will invite lawsuits as far as the eye can see. It will cost millions. Since the legislation is boilerplate, there is no room for local considerations. This is walking insanity, and has created unimaginable unnecessary pain. It has foreshortened lives, prevented economic activity, and destroyed opportunity. It is straight-up stupid and cruel.
Let’s take a closer look at the bars of our prison. First you have U.N. treaties. Our governments have signed hundreds upon hundreds of them, committing to a new green future. The following is the PR:
With these new actions, President Biden is delivering on the most ambitious land and water conservation agenda in American history. These actions build on more than two years of the Biden-Harris Administration’s progress and historic investments to advance conservation, restoration, and stewardship nationwide. That record includes:
Protecting more lands and waters in his first year than any president since JFK
Setting the country’s first-ever national conservation goal to conserve at least 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by 2030
Signing an Executive Order to better protect America’s forests
Securing the largest investment in climate, environmental justice, and conservation ever
Putting the entire U.S. Arctic Ocean off limits to new oil and gas development
Restoring and strengthening protections for cherished places, including Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monuments, as well as the Tongass National Forest
Designating the Camp Hale – Continental Divide National Monument in Colorado
FACT SHEET: Biden-Harris Administration Takes New Action to Conserve and Restore America’s Lands and Waters
Take a look at the list of things ‘saved’. Note that it locks away thousands of square miles of ocean from drilling or fishing. What it doesn’t say is that the Waters of the United States gives the government control of every run-off ditch and puddle. This massive taking, which will, by the end of it remove one billion acres from American use, locks up pretty much any and all natural resources, on the grounds of “scarcity.” Every single order and legislative initiative hews to this one idea: humans are killing the earth and we are running out of everything except sun and wind, which is the future and you better get used to brownouts. NGO offer proffer “proof” that set-asides create prosperity, but if you examine the proof, it is boilerplate for every set-aside, the prosperity is in “service” jobs, which they claim are doctors and engineers, but which are really summer waitress and checkout cashiers. Real jobs, the ones that build families, decline. The only increase is tourism and that would have come anyway.
This inversion of reality is creates the most astonishing cluster of incompetence and cruelty. Last weekend the city of Philadelphia took three days to notify 14 million people that their water was tainted by a spill from a factory. California, which had been in a “drought” for the last 20 years until the recent spate of torrential rains (not “climate change” but part of the West’s natural boom-or-bust water cycle), has meant that farmers and ranchers in California, literally a bread basket for the nation, have been deliberately starved of water.
For 150 years, the western states engaged in building what I consider to be the Eighth Wonder of the World, the water system that could feed, clothe and house the known universe. For the past 25 years, the environmental movement, guided by the U.N. and Rockefeller, Ford, and a half dozen other pernicious foundations, has been breaking that water system. More than one thousand significant dams have been taken out, and thousands upon thousands of little dams and weirs in the upland ranges and forests have been removed. The result this has been, and its purpose is, to starve human development, food production, and economic well-being.
In fact, California has plenty of water. It is hidden and masterfully. In my book, Eco-Fascists, How Radical Environmentalists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage, one of my later chapters declares that the takings of the United Nations, in every single country, are primarily focused on locking up water. Without water, everything dies. Controlling water means you control everything. Water, of course, is a renewable resource. But the U.N. declares it is not. Because “global warming” means everything is going to dry out.
Green watershed management is crazy-expensive. A town of 4,000 in southern Ontario, Canada, will spend $500,000 just on the planning alone. Green watershed management sends water first to “wetlands” rather than to reservoirs and then seas or lakes. The catastrophic flooding of Calgary and Toronto in recent years has as a major contributing factor, that created wetlands do not store water like reservoirs and dams. The incompetencies of green watershed management are deliberate, meant to fail, in order to reduce water use, and increase fear around water.
Kevin Kiley, a young legislator in California, took this battle to the floor, showing California drought restrictions on the one hand, and a video of 20,000 cubic feet of water pouring into the ocean every second. If you are a rancher or a farmer anywhere west of the Mississippi, you have four meters on your well from each state and federal agency and any infraction means a fine of tens of thousands of dollars.
I live in a rainforest. On my land I have enough water for 80 families. When I sold my house at the top of the hill, a new owner spent $50,000 on a water catchment system. He had been told by authorities that he was going to run out of water. At the north end of my island, again, in a rainforest, green watershed management has meant that everyone pays ten thousand a year for water, their gardens are minimal and any excess use means a visit and fines. This year, the taxes on that water tripled.
How did this happen? It was subterfuge, the foolish were blandished, the media was bought, anyone objecting was silenced and cancelled, government at all levels was bullied, and every single resource we need to create an abundant world was stolen in the night. As the Bolsheviks famously put it: Who? Whom? It’s them or us.
Elizabeth Nickson is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
