Food Rationing to Combat Global Warming?

Chinese farmers try to save some vegetables from an early snowfall.

According to Louise Gray, the Environment Correspondent for the UK Telegraph:

Global warming is now such a serious threat to mankind that climate change experts are calling for Second World War-style rationing in rich countries to bring down carbon emissions.

The idea is to "halt economic growth in the rich world over the next twenty years, " according to the director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Professor Kevin Anderson.

This would mean a drastic change in lifestyles for many people in countries like Britain as everyone will have to buy less ‘carbon intensive’ goods and services such as long haul flights and fuel hungry cars.

[snip]

This could mean a limit on electricity so people are forced to turn the heating down, turn off the lights and replace old electrical goods like huge fridges with more efficient models. Food that has travelled from abroad may be limited and goods that require a lot of energy to manufacture.

“The Second World War and the concept of rationing is something we need to seriously consider if we are to address the scale of the problem we face,” he said.

And governments could make it a criminal act to grow food in your own backyard and give some of it to your hungry neighbors--that's if you live in a "rich" country. If you live in a non-"rich" country, do what you like; rich countries will even help you pay for what you do, or at least pay your dictators to enjoy themselves.

From John Griffing at American Thinker:

Meet the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), a new legislative proposal [a bill passed by the House in 2009 and passed by the Senate on December 19th, while you were hanging ornaments on your Christmas tree] designed to centralize control over food stocks to protect Americans from "terror."

Next thing you know, the TSA will be frisking tomatoes and cabbages.

The motive may indeed be to protect the food supply from the actions of terrorists, but what about acts of government terror? Can centralized control by the government protect the people against the whims of human nature? This question is not being asked by those so in favor of surrendering control of food to an entity that cannot even manage a budget, much less an oil spill or other natural disaster. Now we are to believe that this same inefficient, broken entity can guarantee the safety of our food?

A Florida orange, January 16, 2010 (courtesy mothertrip).

Why not? The socialist hero Stalin did it in the Ukraine, and his "artificial famine . . . intended to break the will of Ukrainians--Communists and non-Communists alike--who clung to their national identity," caused the deaths of seven million people.

Something stinks, and it smells like government cheese. Usually when people ask for power, it is because they want power, regardless of the stated motive.

What good, for example, can be gained from removing the right of Americans to grow their own food, as several of the provisions of the Food Safety Modernization Act do? The Ninth Amendment arguably guarantees this and other unenumerated rights. The Ninth Amendment reads:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

To clarify, how can the rights to life, liberty, and property enshrined in the Constitution exist without the ability of citizens to attend to bodily needs -- i.e., sustenance?

The FSMA doesn't merely wrest control of the food supply from citizens. Dangerously, the FSMA proceeds to transfer U.S. food sovereignty to the WTO, with one provision reading, "Nothing in this Act shall be construed in a manner inconsistent with the agreement establishing the World Trade Organization or any other treaty or international agreement to which the U.S. is a party." This provision is significant, since the WTO draws all its food safety standards from the controversial Codex Alimentarius, which is thought by some to be a vast postwar scheme to control the world's population by means of food. The bottom line vis-à-vis food is that Americans lose control, and foreign bureaucrats gain control.

Great. Our legislators don't care if the FSMA is inconsistent with U.S. Constitution, but it better not be  inconsistent with the World Trade Organization or that friendly, super-organized, sterling defender of human rights (or something), the U.N.

I hear the cold wind howling.
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