Any human that cares about the survival of himself and his descendents must, to at least some level, care about the environment in which he lives. However, those who truly care for their environment also must be certain to deal with the true causes of environmental destruction rather than simply jump upon whatever environmental trend happens to catch the fancy of pop and political culture.

In fact, those who have an earnest desire to see the improvement of their environment should be the first to attack any who are attempting to hijack the environmental movement for political gain. This is exactly why true environmentalists should currently be livid with the political establishment’s attempts to use environmental concerns to enforce new international laws and centralize power to all new levels.

The United Nations and other international agencies have for the past several years been using the threat of climate change and environmental disaster as justification for increased centralization of power to the international level. However, as my article last week attempted to show, government almost always becomes more tyrannical and less caring of individual needs the further it gets from the individual, not to mention, less effective at achieving any good.

Thus, an international government with “moral” force to back it would most likely be the largest affront yet to individual liberty in global history.

So, how would large-scale governments convince the global population that centralization of power is necessary for global safety? In his short book The Anatomy of the State, Murray Rothbard wrote that government expands its power via a symbiotic relationship between the ruling and intellectual classes. The intellectuals serve as apologists for the rulers, and the rulers ensure that the intellectuals have positions of importance and important-sounding jobs. This intellectual role has been fulfilled by numerous institutions over the centuries, sometimes religious institutions such as priests supporting divine mandates to rule, and sometimes intellectual institutions such as academies confirming royal rights to the crown.

This trend has been frightfully exemplified over the past decades. The primary researcher on climate change has been the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was formed to study “the risk of human-induced climate change,” which presumes the guilty party before research was even performed.

Over the years, the panel periodically reported that the evidence was stacking up against humanity as the cause of dangerous global climate change. The most recent report in 2007 claimed that there is a direct correlation between an increase in average global temperatures and an increase in greenhouse gases. Never mind the fact that this same panel, just six years earlier in 2001, was putting forth the “hockey stick” theory that has since been debunked. It would seem that the panel was actively looking for reasons to align a global threat of climate change with human causes.

In fact, this desire to find evidence for man-made climate change rather than objective truth was revealed to be quite real this past November, when a hack of the Climactic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England revealed that evidence for man-made climate change had been deliberately tampered to make the results appear to be exactly what the United Nations wanted.

For example, the chart of the history of global temperatures published by these researchers deliberately cut off the period of the last 50 years, due to the fact that the data showed an overall drop in temperatures back down to historical averages, suggesting that climate change is a natural occurrence.

But never mind the fact that during the past few thousand years, there have been two major periods during which global temperatures were as warm or warmer than they are now, with current temperatures dropping. Never mind that human beings really simply do not know that much about the causes of climate change, as the computer models that show what the climate would be like if the UN scientists were correct are being completely contradicted by current temperature trends.

While this is merely a shred of the evidence against the cause to centralize power behind the cause of saving the environment, it should be enough to instill the importance of having unbiased scientists study the environment without pre-determined ideas of what they should learn from their data or what policies they need to support.

Science must not be allowed to be wielded as a political tool by the world’s elite. It is absolutely necessary that people educate themselves about true environmental threats and solutions in order to not only live in a cleaner environment, but also avoid the despotic hand of international government which would so gladly justify itself by claiming to save humanity from a danger that it fabricated with the help of intellectuals it funded and encouraged.

However, an advocate of localism and minimal government should not be so naïve as to think that environmental dangers do not exist. Yet is this not justification for government to regulate and control for the benefit of all? I’ll attempt to tackle this question next week.

Elliot Engstrom is senior French major from Matthews, N.C.