Environmental Taliban Use Taxation to Curb Travel

The Daily Telegraph has an article by Janet Daley on how green taxes are starting to become even more absurd than before:

"a recent columnist in this paper who pointed out that over 300 million have died from Malaria since Environmentalists forced the banning of DDT which might otherwise have wiped out the insects that carry the disease. Now air travel is their target.

But it is not just air travel for the poor that the green tax lobby is engineering: it is a restriction on any mobility. Clamping down on one form of movement, as the glib reformers have discovered, simply creates intolerable pressure on the others.
Londoners had just become accustomed to the idea that they would have to pay an £8 congestion charge to drive into their own city when they discovered that the fares on commuter rail and underground services had been hiked up with the intention of driving away customers from the public transport system - now grossly overcrowded as a result of people having been forced off the roads by the congestion charge.
The only solution - and I am just waiting for the politicians to recommend it explicitly - is for none of us to go anywhere. Stay at home and save the planet.
The logical conclusion is a retreat from all the things that make metropolitan existence worthwhile: all the social, professional and cultural interactions that free mobility makes possible - and which, since the Renaissance, have made great cities the centres of intellectual progress.

The eco-snobs are, like proponents of illegal immigration, are using government to keep the middle classes and by-the-hour salaried workers in their place, which is not travelling by air or train and is competing for jobs with undocumented immigrants who keep wages down and unions weak.

Anything that keeps the chattering and whimpering classes a notch above the millions competing for the scarce slots in the highest levels of social and political and financial influence. These nouveau-snobs are regular Taliban about restricting debate on "the consensus" on anthropogenic global warming, as the august Senators Rockefeller and Snowe [no pun intended] recently did by threatening oil companies with retribution for financing studies that conflicted with the august Senators' "consensus." Ditto those liberals who call enforcing the laws keeping our borders secure "racism" and calls for a real wall "a Berlin Wall," forgetting, as foolish liberals are wont to do, that the Berlin Wall kept the workers from leaving their socialist workers' paradise, while the Border Fence keeps illegal immigrants OUT of what liberals call a "slave economy" of a million impoverished Wal-Mart employees working without what these liberals call union protections. Anyone who has been a member of a union, as I have, may learn to know that unions are a group of racketeers who use politicians [and vice-versa] to strong-arm and buffalo small businesses into bankruptcy and big businesses into low dividends for shareholders.

A reader to Daley's article is a bit harsh on the newly-hatched "climate scientists" who form this "consensus" politicians are just aching to find a way to tax:

Then you should point out that it is "consensus" only among "climate scientists", principally the several hundred odd on the IPCC, which is like saying that it is universally agreed by Priests that God exists, therefore He must! This "consensus" ( on either issue ) is not shared by the millions of other ( I am tempted to say "real" ) scientists: physicists, chemists, astronomers, whose work impinges directly upon the issue of climate change and is only vaguely comprehended by the average "climate scientist".

Ah, yes, those disinterested guardians of human wisdom, the "climate scientists" who thirty years ago were clamoring and whimpering that the planet was freezing over and that the onset of a new Ice Age was upon us. Then the Sun heated up or some other solar phenomenon pushed temps up a degree or so, and it's the fault of humans! Especially prosperous capitalist countries! No one thought to inflict the mindless silliness of Kyoto on India or China, which between them spew more effluent pollutants skyward than the entire continents of Latin America or Africa or Australia. That would be sooo unfair. So they get a pass and the US is the usual ogre, punished for its hideous and obscene PROSPERITY.

So even though it is a polluted capitalist hellhole, the Eurotrash and Mexican kleptocrats snipe at us for enforcing our own border laws while they busily keep Turkey at bay and capture boats full of undesirables in the Mediterranean, even capsizing them if no one is looking. But they're socialist nanny-staters, and therefore, immune from MSM criticism.

Now that the tax-loving Dems are in charge of Congress, watch for RINOs like Snowe join actual caucus-attending Dems like Rockefeller to try to tax big business because the eco-Taliban want vengeance against those who succeed in the capitalist way of doing business.