Lord Monckton advises the US Congress in ONE sentence
This is the Longest Sentence
ever written
Against Global Warming Legislation
(417 words)
March 23rd, 2009, in
Energy and Environment.
Courtesy of Lord
Christopher Monckton:
I warn this honorable House that any proposal to inflict billions of dollars of new taxation on all citizens by charging selectively-disfavored industries for arbitrarily-rationed permits to emit a harmless and beneficial trace gas that is necessary to all life on Earth and has little effect on its surface temperature
will
fall cruelly and disproportionately upon the poor, will threaten
their very lives, will gravely diminish the liberty that is the
glory of your great nation, will render difficult if not unlawful
the pursuit of happiness,
will raise little net revenue if the poor are adequately compensated
by subsidy, will damagingly distort the labor market by widening and
deepening the unemployment trap that already gives millions of your
most helpless citizens a better income on welfare than in work, will
imprison the poorest earners in a perpetual poverty trap by
inflicting upon them a crippling marginal taxation and
benefit-withdrawal rate that powerfully deters them from increasing
their earnings,
will be complex, extravagant, and costly, will savagely compound the
adverse effects of recession, of excessive public and private
indebtedness, of fiscal incontinence, and of monetary laxity on
industries and employment, will create soi-disant “green” jobs by
the thousand while destroying real jobs by the million,
will establish an unstable and artificial derivatives market in hot
air that will enrich a handful of portly middle-men while
impoverishing the people, will automatically and ineluctably defeat
its own objective by so depressing economic activity that the
“market” price of carbon dioxide will tend rapidly to fall as close
to zero as it has done in both of Europe’s attempts at a
cap-and-trade scheme,
will directly encourage fraud by incentivizing not only both parties
to every transaction but also the regulatory authorities recklessly
to overstate the magnitude of that transaction, will set your
enterprises at a profound competitive disadvantage against nations
that steer wisely clear of purposeless restrictions on or taxation
of the very air we breathe out,
will accelerate the transfer of wealth from your citizens’ pockets
to other nations’ governments by way of boondoggles such as the UN’s
“Clean Development Mechanism”,
and will appreciably increase global carbon-dioxide emissions by transferring US jobs and manufactures to less efficient nations whose emissions per unit of production are many times greater than your own, and by increasing poverty and consequently birth-rates and consequently carbon-dioxide emissions worldwide,
thereby exerting at
prodigious and tragic cost a double influence on the global climate
that will be precisely the opposite of that which was, however
piously, intended.”