Has the time come for America to seriously reassess its participation in and support for the United Nations (U.N.)?
It’s a question that some prominent people are asking this week after the increasingly woke and essentially useless globalist body attempted to sneak a global carbon tax in through the back door while no one was looking.
Except someone was looking, as it turns out. Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who chairs the powerful Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and is part of the majority on both the Senate Judiciary and Senate Foreign Relations Committees, said in an X post Thursday evening that this latest bit of anti-American action “warrants our withdrawal from the UN.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in his own X post on the matter on Wednesday that the Trump administration “will not allow the UN to tax American citizens and companies. Under the leadership of POTUS (President Donald Trump), the U.S. will be a hard NO. We call on other nations to stand alongside the United States in defense of our citizens and sovereignty.”
On Friday afternoon, Mr. Rubio took to X again to announce the news that efforts by himself and others in the Trump administration succeeded in killing an effort to move the tax forward during a meeting in London. However, the proposal is not fully dead – a final vote on it was simply delayed for a year.
The issue at hand stems from an attempt by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) – an agency of the U.N. – to impose net-zero rules on fuels used for seaborne shipping operations. The Trump administration estimates the imposition of the new requirements will increase the cost of shipping goods by about 10%, thus creating yet another round of inflation hitting the poorest citizens the hardest thanks to the globalist obsession with the amount of plant food – carbon dioxide – in the atmosphere.
Known as the IMO Net-Zero Framework, the proposal claims it would effectively “zero out” emissions from the shipping industry by 2050.
The potential implications if the U.N. ultimately succeeds in implementing its own global carbon tax are obvious. If this unelected, unaccountable globalist body can levy a carbon tax on Americans, a concept that America’s own elected officials have steadfastly rejected across the terms of the last five U.S. presidents, what would then prevent it from imposing other kinds of taxes on the world to support its ideological goals?
President Trump’s opposition to exactly this kind of international intrusion into America’s domestic policy choices is the reason why he has twice won the presidency, each time de-committing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords.
It has become increasingly obvious in recent years that the central goal of the global climate alarm movement is to dramatically raise the cost of all kinds of energy in order to force the masses to live smaller, more restricted lives and make their behavior easier for authoritarian governments to control. This camel’s nose under the tent move by the U.N. to sneak a global carbon tax into reality is just the latest in a long parade of examples that serve as proof points for that thesis.
At some point, U.S. officials must seriously reassess the value proposition in continuing to spend billions of dollars each year supporting and hosting a globalist organization whose every action seems designed to inflict damage on our country and its people. Now would be a good time to do that, in fact.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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