From: Greg Burch (gregburch@gregburch.net)
Date: Sun Dec 01 2002 - 19:51:59 MST
> -----Original Message-----
> From: spike66
> Sent: Sunday, December 01, 2002 8:04 PM
>
> When the Kyoto Protocol was being debated I wondered
> about the fact that the US government does not have
> the authority to dictate how much CO2 is produced by
> its citizens. Furthermore there is nothing in the
> US constitution from which such authority could be
> derived. In their saner moments, every government
> on the globe must have realized that they too lacked
> the authority to dictate CO2 production. Why did they
> decide to play chicken with that proposal, and wait
> for the US to be the bad guy? Did not every government
> recognize this as a bad solution to a questionable "problem"?
> Did they not wait around for the US to point out that the
> emperor was naked as a boiled egg?
Earth to spike, Earth to spike ... It's been a looooong time since
governments didn't assume the authority to regulate such things as are
covered by the Kyoto Protocol. The constitutional groundwork for such
regulation in the U.S. was laid over a hundred years ago in the series
of Supreme Court decisions that gave an almost infinitely broad
interpretation to the Commerce Clause in order to grant Congress the
power required to "regulate commerce." Even without this, the feds
would assume they had the power under the "general police power."
Whether the Kyoto Protocols are a good idea or bad, the legal framework
for instituting them domestically has existed in the States for at least
a hundred years. Jurists in other constitutional democracies couldn't
even postulate the question -- there was never a time when their
governments didn't have such power.
Greg Burch
Vice-President, Extropy Institute
http://www.gregburch.net
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