Here Come the Black Helicopters!

PART NINE Agenda 21: Telling Us How to Live

The single most intrusive—and most ambitious—of the global initiatives that are under way as part of the effort to battle climate change is Agenda 21.

This set of principles, adopted at the First Rio Conference in 1992, spells out how each of us must live in the new world order. We need to leave rural areas, low-density suburbs, and leafy small towns and aggregate in big cities and crowded urban areas. Good-bye, Los Angeles. Hello, midtown Manhattan. Why? So we don’t need to drive. We contribute to greenhouse gas emissions when we get behind the wheel. Bikes will become the order of the future.

Like Stalin’s collectivization in the 1920s and ’30s and the British Enclosure Acts in the nineteenth century, the goal is to force a vast population movement, in this case so we don’t emit greenhouse gases.

Agenda 21 began as a long series of recommendations adopted at the First Rio Conference in 1992. Initially, they were really just suggestions to local zoning and planning boards on how to develop more “sustainable” communities. But the movement is gathering to make it the norm for land use decisions at the local level. More and more zoning boards are molding their plans to its contours. Cities are approving or vetoing land use plans based on Agenda 21. It is beginning really to structure how we live.

In Screwed!, we set out how Agenda 21 is influencing local communities around the nation.

Its requirements are all in the name of stopping climate change, but, in fact, through voluntary action and citizen education, we are reducing greenhouse gas emissions on our own. Without being herded into high density living arrangements.

• We are driving less. Per capita vehicle mileage is down by 7 percent in the past five years and is continuing to drop.

• One in ten coal-fired energy plants has converted to lower-emission natural gas in the past five years and the trend is accelerating.

• Automobile energy efficiency is continuing to climb steeply.

• Oil use for home heating is down by two-thirds in the past decade.

• Overall, we have reduced our use of oil by 5 percent since 2000 even as our population has grown by 30 million people.

Total US greenhouse gas emissions are down by 10 percent since 2006 and are on schedule to drop by another 10–20 percent by 2020.

We don’t need to change the fundamentals of our lives. Greater energy conservation and higher vehicle mileage are the answers. Not a radical change in how we live.

Sorry, environmentalists. We are doing it the American way.