Tesla Carbon Pigs, Climate Change, Environmental Equity and Liberal Democracy: Why we should do whatever we can for the environment provided it doesn't raise the cost of living for poor people or undermine liberal democracy

By Peter Thalheim

Read how the typical TESLA electric vehicle driver is more affluent than the average citizen and consumes considerably more carbon to live their comfortable lives at their first or second home with their private clubs, take-out food, household staff, extensive vacations, etc. The vow of poverty to immediately aid our environment is not in the cards for these carbon pigs, or for the rest of us for that matter. Most of us fall short between our personal consumption habits and our public persona expressing concern for our environment. Read how amazon prime is unsustainable at any speed of delivery as other delivery options, albeit slower, are already in your neighborhood. Read about various strategies of solar, wind, hydrogen, fusion, efuels, and others to ameliorate our stress on the environment living our comfortable and consumptive lifestyles which include cell phones, laptops, and social media. We should do whatever we can for the environment provided it does not raise the cost of living for the poor. They should not bear the brunt of greenwashing the environmental conscience of our betters, those with a higher net worth and/or higher education degree than the rest of us. Eliminating the United States' economy from the world's ecosystem, would have a negligible impact on preventing the rise in average global temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius proposed by the Paris Climate Accord by the year 2100, yet the United States is imperative for the liberal democratic project of expanding the Rule of Law to more of our brother and sister citizens around the globe versus Rule of Man totalitarian regimes like China and Russia, who care not for international rules and norms of conduct. You decide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798885050623

Book preview

Chapter 1

Chapter One: Introduction to Environmental Equity

Climate change means different things to different people. For some, it is a variation of the climate crisis, where men and women as the stewards of our earth’s environment do not have that much time to reduce man-made pollution on the globe before the sea level rises with devastating consequences for developing nations such as Bangladesh, which has so many people living close to sea level, or the nations of Oceana in the Pacific, which have little elevation to begin with unless theirs is a volcanic island. There are also climate crisis prognosticators who surmise that the frequency and strength of storms are increasing as well as there being a resultant negative impact on crops by climate change through drought or generally higher temperatures. As more of us live and work along the shores of our oceans, hurricanes, tropical storms, and occasional tsunamis from the shifting crust of the earth have a greater destructive power over people and buildings since there is now more property to damage and more lives to take than years before.

On the other hand, climate change can be a recognition that our earth cycles through different types of weather eras as a matter of course and that we are merely along for the ride. On a local basis, there was an ice age in, among other places, North America, which had glaciers come all the way down to where New York City is today. That was only twenty thousand years ago. That is a long time for modern men and women but a blip in the time cycle of the earth. In fact, we are in the middle of these repetitive ice ages now.

Ever since the Pre-Cambrian age (600 million years ago), ice ages have occurred at widely spaced intervals of geologic times—approximately 200 million years—lasting for millions or even tens of millions of years.¹

During the present ice age, glaciers have advanced and retreated over 20 times, often blanketing North America with ice.²

If you live near New York City, you may be familiar with places like Long Island, the Hamptons, Block Island, Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket. In fact, President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama purchased a twenty-nine-acre waterfront estate in Martha’s Vineyard in 2019, the island being the sand and runoff from the last ice age glaciers. All of Long Island including the Tony East End and these other islands are heaps of sand left by the last ice age. They are a builder’s dream. You may recall from your childhood or from taking your kids to the beach how nice it is to make sandcastles in sand. Imagine how nice it is to excavate in a sand pile that lacks any ledge rock! There are the occasional rocks and boulders on these sand islands that were taken for a ride by the last glacier, but those are mere inconveniences to the builder. Drainage is even better. Consider what happens when you accidentally tip over your soda, seltzer water, or adult beverage at the beach. Hocus-pocus, it’s gone. What a wonderful draining material the last glaciers left behind. Long Island Sound, between Long Island, New York, and the great state of Connecticut, used to be a freshwater lake until the ocean levels increased, the fresh water from the glaciers emptied, and the land eroded the sand near Fisher’s Island. The fresh water in Long Island Sound emptied out and cut into the sand deep enough until the salty ocean water poured back into what is now Long Island Sound. This happened some 15,500 years ago.³ Long Island Sound is a generally shallow estuary of forty to one hundred feet in depth that mixes mostly salt and some fresh water. It reaches depths up to six hundred feet near Fisher’s Island, where the tides surge in and out every six hours.

Whether climate change represents a climate crisis as an existential threat to life on earth, both human and nonhuman, or whether it is a continuous cycle that the earth goes through, is an open question. It is fair to say that people on both sides of the climate change discussion do like the environment and do like people. How does environmental equity come into play? What is environmental equity? It is an effort to address both sides of the definition.

Motivated by the message of life, love, liberty, as found in the weekly worship bulletin for Faith Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church, an African American Baptist church in Stamford, Connecticut, I ran for governor of the state of Connecticut in 2017–2018, which overlapped with America’s involvement in the Paris Climate Accord. During the gubernatorial campaign, the Paris Climate Accord was frequently in the press, particularly because the Trump administration started formal steps to withdraw the United States from the treaty in the summer of 2017. The agreement itself had been finalized in December 2015 in Le Bourget, France, northeast of Paris, the most beautiful city in the world. The treaty was assembled under the guidance of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and was actually signed in New York City, which is not a surprise as the United Nations is headquartered there. The goal of the accord is to limit the increase in global average temperatures to below two degrees Celsius. The United States representatives under President Barack Obama signed the accord after April 22, 2016, and the agreement went into force on November 4, 2016, after fifty-five countries accounting for at least 55 percent of global emissions had ratified the accord in their own countries. Our presidential election occurred on November 8, 2016, which resulted in the election of President Donald Trump. Then-candidate Trump had campaigned against the Paris Climate Accord, promising that a lot of money from the United States would be paid to other nations when the United States was already contributing plenty to the global effort to ameliorate living conditions, and it was argued that the proposed rules threatened to hamstring the United States economy by pledging reductions in its carbon emissions by certain levels, which would weaken our economy. In the belief that it would better serve the interests of American citizens, President Trump announced on June 1, 2017, that the United States would cease all participation in the Paris Accord.

Nonetheless, even during the Trump presidency, the United States remained a participant in ongoing negotiations and discussions with the accord members. After Joseph Biden’s electoral victory in the 2020 election, the United States withdrew its intention to leave the accord and remained a member.

At all events, the Paris Accord was a matter for media coverage and political discussion during the 2017–2018 gubernatorial campaign in Connecticut. I love the environment, and you love the environment. The question is, How do we help the environment but not hurt the chances of our poorest citizens in improving their lives? How do we help the environment not only in the United States but also globally but not unnecessarily cripple our economy and, by extension, our preparedness to defend our democracy, people, and land? On leaving office, President Eisenhower had warned the country to be wary of the experts. At that time, he was focused on the military-industrial complex. This cautionary advice can also be applied to the call by some in major media to listen to certain experts approved by our betters.⁴ Those experts not approved by our betters are to be ignored or castigated. Yet the caution advised by President Eisenhower can also be applied to the recommendations coming from the experts on how we address climate change. The citizenry should look at the proposed remedies themselves and decide for themselves. This is not something that should be left to the experts. Ours is a nation founded on the consent of the governed. We have not relinquished our sovereignty to any foreign body and certainly not to our betters in our own land. Environmental equity does just that. It checks the conceit of our betters and examines the impact of the proposed remedies on our nation in general and on our poor in particular!

Environmental equity is not the Paris Climate Accord but is separate and distinct. Environmental equity says that we will do whatever we can for the environment so long as it does not raise the cost of living for poor people. This should be the guiding principle of politicians in the United States as well as abroad when we design rules and spend government and private monies to address climate change and our environment. The cost of living applies not just to the cost of food, housing, clothing, and medical care; it also applies to the impact on the wages and job opportunities of our fellow citizens. If you take someone’s job away, their ability to independently buy food, clothing, and shelter is seriously jeopardized. To suggest the patronizing, alternative route of giving the poor food, shelter, and clothing for free as recompense for eliminating their jobs or increasing their cost of living is cruel. We know that the only way to aspire to the middle class is through effort. You have to be in it to win it. This was a jingle for one of the typical state lottery pitches to primarily lower-income Americans to waste their money on lotteries so that the state could collect more of the citizens’ money in exchange for the excitement of a dollar and a dream, in which they could win their way into riches just like in the storybooks. And it does happen, although lost friendships and financial ruin have also been known to befall the lucky lottery winners. The state only pays out a percentage of what they take in to fund their operations and the general operations of government. In California, the feds have their hand out for 37 percent of big winnings before you even get out of the door. Nonetheless, you have to be in the lottery to win the jackpot. By the same token, you have to either be working in the economy or running your own business in order to hope to get into the middle class. It is not done via government checks or litigation to sue your way into the middle class. You have to be in it to win it! It will not do for the climate change proponent to say that while they eliminate your job and make your cost of living more expensive that they will give you a check in return. This politician has effectively warehoused you to sit on the sidelines and not participate in the struggle for life’s bread.

Do not be lulled by the politicians’ refrain that they will bait and switch the jobs of today with new, high-paying green jobs and job training tomorrow. This sales pitch should be taken with a pound of salt. The politicians who boast about job training are using an age-old catchphrase, which is about as original as the politician whose stump speech or debate line is that they will eliminate fraud and inefficiencies in government and save the taxpayer millions. Hold on to your wallet; they will be coming for your money as surely as the sun sets in the west. The job-training politician has generally taken their focus off job creation as they cannot make a direct correlation to jobs created by the free market system fighting through the plethora of state restrictions, taxes, permits, fees, and surcharges versus the easier concept of a job training session for a job that may not be on the other side of the training. It is easier to lay claim to a job training center and get the politician’s name plastered above the door or to a line item in a budget. Some of these same politicians will issue press releases on a new climate initiative such as the Green New Deal, but this is accompanied by fuzzy math on how it can be paid for. Little attention is paid to how much a certain green initiative will increase the cost of living for the poor just to fill the tank in their car to get to work or to fill their grocery cart to feed their family. Those increased costs are better left unsaid, and the elite media of our betters happily obliges. Environmental equity demands an answer to that question: how much more will the cost of living for the poor be increased, and how many jobs will be forced to end by ending the need for existing jobs or pricing them out of business with high regulatory costs and mandates?

Another ploy for the politician is to say that there will be all these new well-paying jobs in a green economy. Each of us assumes that we will be one of those with this new well-paying job. Not so fast. There are qualifiers to those new well-paying jobs. The statists⁵ will push something known as prevailing wages, which is a prohibited emolument under most of our state constitutions. Connecticut’s constitution provides at article 1, section 1 that "all men when they form a social compact are equal in rights; and that no man or set of men are entitled to exclusive public emoluments or privileges from the community (emphasis added). This means that no set of men or women may earn something beyond what is available to the general citizenry by nature of their influence in the state capital. But this happens all the time when schools are forced to pay a higher wage, or prevailing (union) wage," when asbestos remediation or fixing a leaking roof will cost $1 million or more. This is how statist politicians pay their political supporters back—by directing higher wages to the insiders, to the employees of their donors. This means that only two schools can be remediated for the price of remediating three schools of asbestos or have their leaking roofs replaced. The statists care not for the public weal but rather for continuation in power through the combination of factions to suppress the best interests of the citizen qua citizen.

This does not even focus on how schools in poor areas are even less well maintained due to the machinations of the insiders but on how the general citizen—rich, poor, and in the middle—has their ox gored by the statists and their allies. This goes beyond winners and losers in elections to a violation of most of our state constitutions with prevailing wage. A foreign emoluments clause is found at article 1, section 9, paragraph 8 of the federal constitution, saying that no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatsoever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State. It can be assumed that Congress has allowed ambassadors to accept $200 ties and pens, but there can be no personal aggrandizement. The federal constitution allows these individuals to accept a present or emolument so long as Congress assents. Connecticut’s individual state constitution does not allow its legislative body to authorize public emoluments or privileges to any man (or woman) or set of men (or women). Thus, the promises of well-paying green jobs is nothing more than a reward to the lucky few insiders while the general taxpayer is left paying an inflated wage and the poor having existing jobs eliminated.

For some of the advocates of costly remedies to address climate change, it is not so much about saving the world’s environment as it is about allowing such individual or individuals to continue their existing consumption habits in housing, transportation, food, vacations, clothing, and services with the hope of consuming even more tomorrow but with a clearer conscience as to the net cost to the environment. Few of the proponents that claim we are in a climate crisis have taken on a vow of poverty to live the life of a poor person and thereby consume significantly less of the world’s resources than they do today. That is not what some of the climate change proponents are proposing. Let them continue consuming but in less environmentally damaging ways. What additional costs are piled on the poor does not matter to them so long as the climate change proponent can continue to enjoy the absolutely unprecedented prosperity that is available in developed countries globally and to which developing countries and their populations aspire.

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¹ Kirk Maasch, What Triggers Ice Ages? Nova, January 1, 1997, pbs.org.

² Ibid.

³ Long Island Sound Study, Department of Geosciences, accessed July 15, 2021, pbsotopes.ess.sunysb.edu/classes/GEO101handout.

⁴ Betters are those with higher educational credentials or a higher net worth than the average American.

⁵ A statist is an individual who promotes the state over the citizen. A statist increases the width and breadth of the state vis-à-vis the citizen so that the state requires more resources in taxes, fees, revenues, investments, tolls, marijuana taxes, etc. to run the state and to also increase the areas of the lives of the citizens and our enterprises that are under the watchful eye of the state. This runs counter to the citizen as sovereign, which is at the core of the Rule of Law.

Chapter 2

Chapter Two: Undermining the Strength of Liberal Democracies

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded the sovereign nation of Ukraine in violation of the United Nations Charter. The Russians did not even have the decency to declare war but, instead, called it a special military operation. This invasion of a fellow Slav nation without declaring war is on the level of the Day of Infamy—December 7, 1941—when Japan launched a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and other US military installations in the Pacific. At least the Japanese were trying to deliver their declaration of war in Washington, DC to do the right thing under international rules of conduct, but their emissary was left waiting outside of the office of a US government officer until it was too late. When Russia / Soviet Union declared war on Japan in the waning days of World War II on August 8, 1945, they did so before midnight on the day before invading. This was a three-month timeline after the end of World War II in Europe if the Soviets hoped to steal land from the Japanese and Chinese and impose the hell of Soviet governance on other people. With the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, World War II ended six days later, but the Soviets pressed on and took over Manchuria, which they later handed to Mao Tse Tung in 1946 from which Mao was able to fight and subjugate China to the Communist Party of China in 1949, which has never held a free election since that time and menaces liberal democracies the world over.

Russia also completed the occupation of the northern half of the Korean peninsula, which had been a Japanese territory before the end of World War II. Here, the Russians Soviets installed Kim Il Sung as the communist overlord of North Korea, the same Kim who started the Korean War in 1951 by invading South Korea and whose progeny developed intercontinental ballistic missiles to reach the United States all the while imprisoning North Korea’s citizens in brutal gulag slave labor camps near the Chinese border and starving the rest of his people. This was the misery spread by Russian Soviet adventurism.

As Russia has shown time and again, the niceties of international law do not interest her except when they work to her advantage. Unless the reader was living in an information vacuum free of information from the outside world in 2022, the reader was aware of the daily onslaught of Russian missiles, artillery fire, tanks, bombers, and jets on the Ukraine on a daily basis beginning with the February 24 invasion. An assassination squad was even loosed in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, to assassinate the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal in the early hours of the surprise attack—thankfully to no avail. The egregious bombing of civilian targets to include apartment buildings, homes, schools, and hospitals were common. What of the vision of the pregnant mother who was carried away from a bombed hospital on a stretcher, her full-term stomach in full view in the besieged city of Mariupol on March 14, 2022? She later gave birth to a daughter whom she named Veronika in keeping with victory over the Russian invaders.⁶ Another pregnant woman who was carried from the same maternity ward in Mariupol was not as fortunate as her baby and she perished.⁷ Then there was the well-publicized bombing by smart weapon of a Soviet era public theater in Mariupol. Hundreds of refugees who had already been bombed out of their own homes or villages were seeking refuge in the theater and basement of the theater. The locals had identified the shelter to the sky with the name deti, which is child in Russian, on both sides of the theater. It mattered not to the Russians. They bombed it anyway with a direct hit. Hundreds were killed. Some miraculous survivors were found in the basement. The killing of civilians in breadlines with artillery fire was reported. The shooting of an elderly man’s leg after carrying his infirm parents to a basement was exhibited. The misery voluntarily inflicted upon the Ukrainians will be recounted by the world for centuries. It will take generations for Russia to atone for this violation of international law and blatant inhumanity toward a civilian population. This shock will not subside for a long time, except in the promising event that the Russians were able to throw off their rulers and atone for this travesty by joining Rule of Law nations with their own liberal democracy.

Russia’s war on Ukraine brought about a swift response from the United States, Europe, and liberal democracies around the world. Germany, which had encouraged this Russian adventurism with its feckless defense expenditures and embrace of cheap and readily available Russian natural gas and oil, made some movements toward supporting the liberal democratic project. Germany had worked to undermine the imperfect and sometimes-corrupt Ukrainian pursuit of nationhood and sovereignty next to imperialistic Russia.

Germany signaled its willingness to sacrifice Ukraine for Germany’s own self-interest by piping more Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea in order to circumvent Ukraine, thereby depriving Ukraine of revenue and leverage vis-a-vis the Russians. Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder headed the Nord Stream 2 project to bring this natural gas pipe directly from Russian soil under the Baltic Sea to the German coast and, thereby, circumvent the Ukrainian nation. Both Russia and the Ukraine had previously suffered under the invasion and occupation of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party regime from 1941–1945. But the Soviet Union had been an ally of Germany prior to the outbreak of World War II and jointly invaded Poland in September 1939 as well as supplied the National Socialist war machine with oil, chromium, grains, and other war-supporting materiel up to June 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, whereafter the Germans battled and marched through the Ukraine on the way to Moscow.

The Russian czars had long subjugated the Ukrainians before the Russian Revolution in 1917. After the Bolshevik counter-revolution⁸ by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin in the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks brutally suppressed the Ukrainians to keep them under the Russian heel. The nadir of Russian domination was reached with the Holodomor starvation and execution of millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s under the guise of socialist collectivization of agriculture and the removal of food stuff from the Ukraine to subjugate the Ukrainian people. The Russians also did this to the Uzbeks over a similar time frame where the Russians Soviets seized 90 percent of the animals of a nomadic people and forced them to adopt a modern and scientific way of living by being forced to become famers on collective farms, Kolkhozes. A quarter of Uzbekistan’s population perished in the 1930s under the enforced socialism of collectivizing food production based on science. This is the murderous nature of the politicians who claim their politics are based on science.

Thus, in the twenty-first century, Germany undercut the Ukrainians by giving the Russians a way to supply natural gas to Germany by any means but through the Ukraine. When gas is supplied through the Ukraine, Ukraine is entitled to a transit fee, which would help their finances. If natural gas is sent under the Baltic, then Ukraine earns nothing. And Germany was helping whom by their vainglorious policy?

Germany compounded this by funding and manning an ineffective military. Within a week of the invasion of Ukraine, German Federal chancellor Scholz, originally from the town of Osnabruck, announced that Germany would increase its defense spending from 1.3 percent of their gross national product to over 2 percent of their gross national product. It took a war and the sacrifice of Ukrainians to achieve this! President Donald Trump had hounded the Germans to match the commitment of all North Atlantic Treaty Organization members to spend at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense. Germany dawdled, whined, evaded, equivocated, and shirked their responsibility to the western alliance, playing right into Russia’s hands.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, originally from East Germany that had been liberated in 1990 from forty-five years of Russian occupation after the end of WWII, did nothing to honor this commitment. This must have amused the Russians—that the world’s fourth-largest economy, Germany, continued to avoid its minimal commitment to freedom. President Trump had even given a figurative bill to Chancellor Merkel for all of the money that Germany owed the US taxpayers and servicemen and servicewomen who were defending the freedom of Germans not only with US soldiers stationed in Germany but manning submarines and ships in the ocean and stationed in South Korea not far from the North Korean gulag state, as well as making regular naval trips through the Taiwan Strait and the Chinese mainland to remind Supreme Leader Xi Jinping to keep his hands off the free people of Taiwan. Even the increase of promised German defense expenditures above 2 percent of GDP was worthless without an overhaul of the German military. If Germany continues to operate a military that cannot fight its way out of a brown paper bag, these expenditures will come to naught and will further fortify the Russian hegemonic project, also known as the Rossiiskoi Projekt, as set forth in this author’s forthcoming book on Russia: "The Rossiiskoi Projekt and the Misery It Has Inflicted on Russians and Non-Russians Alike."

Germany has spent too many years petting trees and wiping bottoms to have had a serious military. It was practically worthless as a fighting force, navy and air force, on February 24, 2022. When the Soviets-Russians were still occupying East Germany in 1989, Germany had 3,500 functioning tanks in its Bundeswehr. In 2022, Germany only had five hundred tanks of questionable readiness. If you have to cannibalize one tank to keep another tank running, that would indicate that a low number of German tanks were actually operable. This brings one to the mathematical truth that any number multiplied by zero is still zero. Whether Germany was spending 1.3 percent or 2 percent of its GDP petting trees and wiping bottoms, that is still zero military capabilities. This is an exaggeration, but few were running in the other direction on hearing that the German military was coming. Germany will actually have to revamp its military from top to bottom to actually transfer it from a sleepaway camp to a capable military force.

If one were a Russian strategist sitting in Moscow, how could one not smile or have trouble controlling one’s laughter? The fourth-largest economy, Germany, and a pillar of NATO in terms of finances and men and women in uniform had a meager military and was prostrating itself to Russian natural gas via the Nord Stream 2 project to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty. How much more could Berlin have done to suggest to the Russians that Germany would do nothing? And given enough time, they would thoroughly denude Germany of the ability to power its own industry, heat its homes, run its buses and trains, and have enough fuel or electricity for its citizens’ cars. In the blind pursuit of decarbonizing the German economy, Germany had even decommissioned functioning nuclear power plants and was taking more off line in the coming year. And nuclear power is one of the green, carbon-free sources of power today and not a pie in the sky for tomorrow! This was putting even greater reliance on the Nord Stream 2 project. They say in church that every man has his price to sell his soul. It appears that the former German chancellor Schroeder’s price, who headed the Nord Stream 2 project to bring Germany to its knees before the Russian bear, was merely a fancy office, business expense accounts, and a nice salary, plus he could speak with Supreme Leader Vladimir Putin and other world leaders on a regular basis. That does not seem like a high price to signal that the core of NATO would subjugate itself to Russia, a nation with an economy about the size of New York state and far smaller than Germany’s. Does it surprise the reader how Cuba, with a meager economy but strong military and interior police force, was able to subjugate Venezuela with a much larger population and economy as a puppet state of Cuba over the past twenty years, all with the assistance of college-educated, affluent elites in America, such as the two Democrat senators