Can Obama Sign A Climate Treaty Without Congress?

Industry, left to its' own devices, is very productive, while government tends to produce one thing, well two, counting the dead trees, but what, exactly, is produced?

The political climate, and the extent and degree to which 'government' runs around researching things, and then making laws regarding this or that in the absence of a public(keyword) vote, is such that the vast body of people in this world are treated not as participants in deciding their own fate, but roughly as subjects of the crown, to do as they're bid, and not otherwise. Why? Because if you read back, most of these governments were, at one time, monarchies, dictatorships, plutocracies, all that kind of good stuff. It's all a Big Show, to kind of distract people from the fact that more and more layers of bureaucracy will then be imposed on them, now by faceless entities from overseas.

Is climate legislation one more step towards world government? Some say yes, some say it's time for groups of nations to start doing a better job of governing their OWN countries, picking the beam out of their OWN eye, as it were, and letting other nations generally fare as they might. But, I think we've crossed the Rubicon, the point of no return, in all of this, because frankly, issues and countries are now interconnected and interrelated to the point that international partnerships and entities almost have to form, in order to get a handle on the problem. THAT having been said, is there really an environmental problem, or just people with solutions for problems that don't honestly exist, bureaucrats and scient(olog)ists that would otherwise end up unemployed, drinking Ripple on a park bench, or having to make movies with specially-trained sea life as the key character of the feature?

Well, 'experts' tell us that, among other things, there's now a Giant Sea Of Floating Plastic Stuff, whirling and swirling around out there, in the Pacific. There's probably a similar garbage gyre slopping around in the Atlantic ( but maybe it's better to focus on something we can blame on China, and tell them how to run THEIR country, tee, hee).

No, this issue is about more than garbage barges doing what they do best, this issue is about more than just those evil people that heartlessly chuck half a bottle of laundry detergent in the dumpster, just because it has dried crusties on the cap and nobody wants to take the time to clean them off, or people that throw a car battery in the disposal, or the 20,000 other castoff things that eventually either make it out to the ocean, or into the landfill etc. This is about people, and what a throwaway society we are(always have been, but now with better, more durable garbage). This is about 6.8 billion people, and the amount of garbage we produce, and the amount of energy we consume, on an hourly basis. Now that everything's gone commercial, gone BIG, we blow through more BTU's, gigawatts, and metric tons of consumer goods per hour than at any previous time in history, partly because there's more people than there's ever been, at any time in history, and everybody wants that Lexus(or equivalent). Or, DO they? Is this pollution/energy consumption paradigm mainly a problem for so-called 'developed' countries, where big business is king, and people do just like they're told on TV, because that's the way it's always been? Hard saying, not knowing, but the commercial/industrial production phenomenon and the pollution it produces is now a global phenomenon, and like 6.8 billion little 2-legged termites, our activity now also results in mining, drilling, and other harvesting functions that'd put your average ant colony to SHAME. Actually, since one of the things we do is poison the ground to exterminate things like ants, it also puts them to death. Along with entire species of fish, birds, heck, even other people. We are, so to speak, become victims of our own success, in this sense.

Now, despite whatever gets signed, does not get signed, or by whom it get signed, will there be a dramatic overnight cumulative change in overall human behavior? Probably not, because at least some portion of the climate debate is, in fact, hot air, and a money game. Take the business of carbon credits. Now they're talking about how companies can move money around, carbon offsets, all this other business. Well, if the problem is heat emissions, then stay with the idea of coming up with low-heat/no-heat methods of production of material goods. Ah, but now you're asking manufacturers to re-tool assembly lines, do things differently, to change their practices and methods. For some companies, this would mean going out of...business. Now you get into some of the motive and motivation driving some of this legislation, because if you're over here, playing climate politics, and over there, in a country where they don't care about such things, they're also making money from the sale of finished goods, and YOUR nation's economy is faltering because of all the hoops you make companies jump through in order to turn out finished products, say, in the United States, and then those companies turn around, and jump on the boat overseas to get away from all the state and federal red tape, what are you going to do, but try to expand the government red tape to where it will then have global reach? A colleague of mine once remarked, 'its all about control', well, maybe some government types have a control fetish, and a presumed authority from which to operate, and can't really restrain themselves from the urge to get into other people's/countries' business, especially because 'government' tends to get a cut of the action, regardless of what country you're talking about. And, maybe the majority of the people in this world are about sick of having either the United States, or Europe, tell them how to run their affairs? Maybe it's time for some DE-globalization? Instead of NIMBY, then GOMBY(Get OUT of my back yard)? Using our own corporate structures, manufacturing practices, and so forth, China is now moving into 1st place, globally. 1.4 billion hands make light work, and eventually, short work of the United States and its' economy. We ARE friends with China, right? Good thing, too, because increasingly, they underwrite our very government, and our currency, which might someday even have chinese characters on it due to economic karma resulting from previously existing trading arrangement(s).

No, I don't think a policy paper is going to cut the mustard, or the CO2 levels, here. I think that pollution, global warming, if human-caused, which is still under debate, is an issue that's going to be solved the same way it came about, namely through technological advancement, and the basic 'deal' of people deciding that having rivers full of dead fish or empty of water really isn't the right way to go, and that using things like sunshine to its' best ability is a better overall concept than glow-in-the-dark(and chatter-in-the-dark) tap water.

6.8 billion people gotta eat, sleep, and poop somewhere, now, how good are we at arranging it so that it's not the same place where we eat? Time will tell...

I say, 'show me'. I want to see a polar bear that just couldn't swim that last 1/2 mile to the floating piece of debris which is the only object that breaks the otherwise smooth surface of the now completely liquified artic. I want to see the people dousing themselves with Coppertone tanning oil on the coast of Alaska. I want to see the waterskiers and the hotel developers creating new white sandy beaches and umbrella drinks. I want to see their other resort hotels in lower latitudes sinking beneath the waves. Yes, show me. People can wave sheafs of paper around all day long, sounding very important on TV on a great number of subjects, but time after time, the proof, the tangible proof, is absent. We're supposed to take it on faith that supplemental layers of bureaucracy will make for a better planet. Well, that's worked well in some countries, hasn't it? Well, maybe not. No, unfortunately, brand 'government' is laying its' overall credibility on the line on this one, and as long as you have 2-legged land whales like Al Bore trying to lecture the rest of humanity about consumption, it's just not going to hold water. No, people want to see measured, verified ocean level increase, as measured ON a stick, and then triple-quadruple-verified by people that have their own little labs and institutes, and stuff like that, and then go look at the stick for themselves, and inspect the top of the stick for hammer marks, and the bottom for any kind of subsidence, or evidence of being mounted on some kind of hydraulic or telescoping mechanism. Yes, show me. Show me something that can be proven NOT to have been cooked up in some college class by a bunch of oxygen-thieving pot smokers whose main extracurricular activity isn't whining about people that run successful companies that make the money which is then taxed to pay for their educational activities. Yes, I wanna see proof, and then I want to see evidence that ALL these people are smart enough, and think they're important enough, to tell our oceans what to do, because if you pan back, and look at it, like say, in Hubble-vision, or something, the Earth is a BIG place, and you can't even SEE people from 100 miles up, let alone 10, so, maybe this is a case of people kind of seeing themselves as far more important and significant than they really are, and they'll all be surprised next time an asteroid of sufficient size gets sucked down into our atmosphere, and causes a Big Tsunami, and shuts down all that evil commercial fabrication stuff that seems to be the heart of the problem, here.
Show me, in other words, that this isn't just an excuse to suck more revenue out of companies that would otherwise be able to keep their doors open, and people hired on at decent wages, were it not for the simple fact of having entirely too many well-meaning albeit misinformed government busybodies involving themselves in, and then interfering with, the operations that produce the golden eggs for the customers around the world that then pay good money for them, or would, if they had money left over after the government got done sucking it all up to pay for some kind of goofball climate study, keeping eggheads and other hangers-on employed at public expense for all perpetuity...in one sense, government's kind of a parasite, and it doesn't really matter what justification is used for stuffing their blood snout into an economic artery...if they can successfully prove that the environment and all attendant paperwork isn't just a bunch of B.S., then fine, but if they can't, then they need to shred it, and make like, paper mache out of it, maybe it'd float better, that way, when the ocean finally does rise to wipe out all human life, or whatever? Ok, I'll get off the soapbox now...