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Environmental Issues

The American Voice Institute of Public Policy believes that God created the earth and has entrusted its resources to mankind to develop and share productive resources for the benefit of present and future generations. In recent years, the environmental movement has shifted its focus from one of conservation of natural resources to one of radicalism with an emphasis on the New Age Movement. We believe in a careful use of the earth's resources in correlation with an understanding of the principles of free enterprise and property rights. The American Voice Institute of Public Policy is opposed to overregulation and believes that environmental laws should be based on sound science and the protection of limited resources.

The American Voice Institute of Public Policy believes that policies relying on positive incentives, responsibility and forces inherent in both property rights and the free market will provide greater protection and improvements of natural resources in the United States than the punitive, heavy-handed, top-down regulatory approach currently used by the federal government.

It is time for the United States to adopt a conservationist agenda that incorporates accountability, flexibility, sound science and stewardship through the following principles:

• Protecting people from real risk
• Making pollutors pay
• Using incentives inherent in property rights and the market to achieve environmental goals
• Enhancing the role of the states, local communities and individuals in improving the environment

The Kyoto Protocol (The Global Warming Treaty)

The Kyoto Protocol, the Global Warming Treaty, will do nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; instead, the cost of implementing the agreement will be significant to average Americans.

As outlined in the treaty, the Protocol places binding greenhouse gas emissions reductions on the U.S. and 31 other countries while simultaneously exempting 132 developing countries from the regulations. Ironically, these exempt nations are expected to generate three-fourths of all the world's greenhouse emissions by 2100, including 66 percent of all carbon dioxide (a major source of the greenhouse emissions) by 2016. Doubt on whether the Protocol will reduce the planet's aggregate emissions is cast by excluding the developing nations from the treaty's restrictions that ignore the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.

At best, the Kyoto Protocol would lower the projected temperature during the next century by 0-1 degrees celsius according to conclusions from a study by Professor Bert Bolin, chairman emeritus of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The American Voice Institute of Public Policy believes Congress should reaffirm and enhance the principle outlined in Senate Resolution 98, passed by a vote of 95-0 in July 1997. The Senate's unanimous disapproval of the terms of the treaty was expressed in this resolution.

A global climate change treaty that has questionable mandatory emissions reduction targets but does not hold all signatories to those standards and causes serious economic harm to the American economy should not be signed by the United States.

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