NBC: Combat Russian Imperialism and Global Warming

     The media have found an interesting new angle to wage this artificial war on manmade global warming – to combat Russian imperialism. Along the way, they promoted a treaty that the U.S. has avoided signing since Ronald Reagan.

     The media have found an interesting new angle to wage this artificial war on manmade global warming – to combat Russian imperialism. Along the way, they promoted a treaty that the U.S. has avoided signing since Ronald Reagan.

     “Call it the new Cold War,” said NBC correspondent Kerry Sanders in the August 13 “Nightly News” broadcast. “Why the polar rush? Global warming. A UN report says the Artic sea ice may disappear by the year 2050.”

     Earlier in August, Russia made claim an underwater tract the size of Germany and France in Arctic Circle and likened it to the planting of the U.S. flag on the moon in 1969.

     “But all this political maneuvering may not matter in the end,” Sanders said. “Right now a United Nations treaty has the final word on who owns the Arctic Seas riches.”

     However, the United States hasn’t approved the United Nations treaty Sanders is referring to.

     The once dead Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) was rejected by the Reagan administration in 1982 on the grounds it gave too much power to the 21-nation “U.N. Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf,” of which only Norway and Russia are nations bordering the Artic Circle.  Now it has found new life with the Russian act.

     According to [1]an article by Carrie E. Donovan posted on the Heritage Foundation Web site, “Reagan refused to sign the Treaty in 1982 due to its innate conflict with basic free-market principles (e.g., private property, free enterprise, and competition).”

     President Reagan was quoted in The Washington Post in July 1982 saying, “‘We're policed and patrolled on land, and there is so much regulation that I kind of thought that when you go out on the high seas you can do what you want.’”

     Now, the treaty has found new life and even the support of George W. Bush.

     Lawrence Kogan, CEO of the Institute for Trade, Standards and Sustainable Development, pointed out in The [2]Washington Times August 8 that the White House was trying to create a legacy by “shepherding” LOST through a Congress who “enthusiastically embraces collectivist European-style environmental activism and multilateral treaty-making — at the expense of constitutionally-protected individualism and property rights.”

     Kogan warned that, if passed by the United States, LOST would expose companies, citizens and the U.S. military’s civilian technology to “new costs and burdens” by domestic and international bureaucracies, “if it can somehow be shown they pose some possible future hazard to the marine environment.”

     Frank J. Gaffney Jr., who held senior postions in the Reagan Defense Department, explained in the August 14 USA Today that LOST has even more liabilities, namely, “overreaching environmental obligations; unaccountable, socialist bureaucracies; international taxes; potential for interfering with military operations; and demands for transfers of sensitive technologies.”

     The story of Russia’s underwater claim to the North Pole drew attention when it was discovered state broadcasters [3]used scenes from the 1997 movie Titanic to “beef-up” footage. Reuters used the footage in that coverage and has subsequently [4]printed a clarification.