The Swiss have one of the few federal systems in the world. And interestingly, they are perhaps the only country to limit government power through a federal system of cantons and direct initiative voting that developed before, and independently of England.

Other countries that have a dispersion of power systems like the United States and Canada, all were offspring of mother England.  Switzerland was not. Few, if any countries, allow direct referendums to have a say on taxes, as they do in Switzerland.

Switzerland also has a stronger sense of national identity than most European nations.  It is striking traveling from either France or Germany into Switzerland. In France and Germany, one rarely sees a flag.  In Switzerland, it is not uncommon to see Swiss flags openly displayed on homes and even woodpiles. The Swiss feel differently than the rest of the Euro blob and display this openly. The nation-state still lives in Switzerland.

The Swiss are a very knowledgeable and worldly people, trading with everyone they can, neutral in most disputes, and they host numerous diplomatic parleys and are the home to many international organizations. But with all this international sophistication, they don’t view themselves as US elites do as “citizens of the world.” No, they are Swiss.

Perhaps then, there is a signal that the hysteria about climate change, which is reaching a fever pitch in the United States right now, may be ebbing.

According to Euro Intelligence, having withdrawn from talks with the EU, Switzerland decided to make her own decisions about climate change legislation in the form of a referendum.

There were three parts to the proposed law: CO2 emissions (the supposed cause of global warming), pesticides, and drinking water quality. All three portions of the law were rejected by voters.

The law had been approved by a cross-party majority, reflecting the gains in the Green Party in 2019. But when sent before the people, the recent referendum failed 52-48%.

As in voting seen in the United States with Trump, and in England with Brexit, there was a distinct division between rural and urban voters. Also striking was that opposition in the 60-70% range came from 18-34-year-olds. Without the opposition of the young, it arguably would have passed.

Given the brainwashing that is done in public education these days, that outcome is a bit of a surprise.

It is going to take more political forensics to determine why this has occurred, but here are several theories.

The Swiss likely felt whatever they did, their tiny footprint would have little impact on the climate as long as China is given a free ride to burn all the coal they want to. It is no use wrecking your standard of living to no avail.

There is a strong skepticism that the “science” of climate, based largely on computer modeling, is bogus. After the disasters of Covid modeling, there certainly is justification for such skepticism.

What started with a claim that carbon dioxide would create a “greenhouse effect”, has morphed into murky “climate change”. This switch in verbiage permits the green lagoon, which is the powerful combination of corporate interests seeking subsidies and socialist politicians, to grab power for any reason, since the climate is always changing, with or without human actions.  It could be voters are getting wise to this scam.

Wealthy urban elites often push policies that crush the economic potential of rural areas that survive with farming, logging, ranching, and mining. Rural people often pay the costs, directly, and through lost opportunities, to the urban wealthy whose view of nature is often solely through the narrow lens of recreation. Talking about the theory of climate change can make you feel hip and cool, but when presented with the bill, it is not so cool.

Whatever adaptation we must make to climate change, man-made or natural, can be done much cheaper and without giving such arbitrary power to government by addressing specific problems rather than attempting grand scale central planning, hoping efforts will in the end, actually change the climate of the planet. Human efforts have to compete with changes in ocean temperatures often changed by natural undersea volcanoes, ocean currents, the tilt of the earth on its axis,  sunspot, and sun intensity changes, plus radiation.

The interaction of all these variables is not understood well and man plays virtually no role in most of them. Voters are growing wary of schemes that destroy the economy and warp choices through subsidies. It is watermelon politics. That is, green on the outside and red on the inside.

Perhaps, the pure hubris of the environmental movement is just starting to turn people off.  It has very much become a hectoring secular religion. Only instead of teaching people to treat their fellow man better, it teaches people to treat people quite poorly, (let them die of malaria) especially if they don’t agree with your vision. Worse yet, this secular religion is not separated from the state, it has in fact become the state.  We have seen that model of governance before, and it is not pretty.

Whatever the set of factors are, it was good to see the Swiss vote No.

Editors’ Note:  Even if one accepts the dubious proposition that carbon emissions cause global warming, it seems to us almost insane to wreck America’s energy infrastructure, while giving China a free pass on coal-fired plants until 2030. All of the U.S. sacrifices would do nothing to improve the situation as China is the main contributor to the problem. You wind up with the worst of both outcomes: the climate does not improve and we placed ourselves at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party. It is naive to think the Chinese Communist Party would alter its ambitions because they feel the need to copy America’s supposed righteous behavior.

Feckless far-left fantasies of trading away the 80% of American fossil-fueled energy independence and prosperity for technologies that are 80% dependent on China’s rare earth materials makes for a gullible green new deal that only Beijing beneficiaries can love.

Included are 17 indispensable metals including lithium, that will be needed to supply those so-called green “technologies to decarbonize industry and power.”

Such 21st Century technologies are used in the manufacture of domestic and strategic military airplanes, computers and smart phones; electricity generation and transmission systems; advanced weapon guidance systems; and yes, those solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries for utility-scale energy storage and electric vehicles (EVs).

To the inevitable delight of Beijing oligarchs, Biden’s new policy priority focuses on a singular issue above all else that plays entirely to their advantage … namely to forego American energy independence for China’s support in promoting the administration’s climate crisis-premised agendas.

China is reportedly known to be looking into strategies to leverage its control of rare earths against competitive Western interests. Last January, according to the Financial Times, their Ministry of Industry and Information proposed draft controls where industry executives were asked to assess how U.S. and European companies could be affected if Beijing decided to cut rare-earth exports during a bilateral dispute.

A Chinese government adviser told the Financial Times that one of the topics discussed was whether the U.S. “may have trouble making F-35 fighter jets if China imposes an export ban.”

Meanwhile, as President Biden and his handlers have re-upped the U.S. in the Paris Climate Accord and called for slashing our greenhouse emissions by 50% or more by 2030 over the 2005 level, China, the largest CO2-emitter gets a free pass to continue ramping up its coal development until 2030.

Last year, China built over three times as much new coal power capacity as all other countries in the world combined — the equivalent of one large coal plant per week.

The Biden administration’s vainglorious holy war on hydrocarbons exemplified by capping off the Keystone XL pipeline, canceling oil and gas permitting on federal lands and waters, and this month suspending drilling leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will vastly increase Beijing’s rare earth leverage and control over our national economy and security.

An unnecessary irony is that many of those “rare earths” aren’t truly all that rare.

Whereas China only actually possesses about an estimated one-third of global rare earth reserves, America also has an abundance of these natural resources.

The big problem is that environmental opposition to mining these dirty materials needed to create that “clean energy” has resulted in a regulatory minefield of local, state, and federal rules that have turned permitting into a costly decades-long process.

Lawmakers have all but banned rare earth mineral exploration and development on materials-rich federal lands, and the few once-active mines have been shuttered largely due to compliance costs.

Making matters even worse, many of the rare earths mined in the USA are processed in the People’s Republic of China because it’s cheaper to have them do it than to pay for American regulatory environmental and workplace safety costs.

Shortage pains will worsen as Democrat plans to transform America’s transportation to 100% EVs dramatically add to power demands, dependence on rare earth imports, and auto industry trade deficits.

In January 2020, Tesla Inc. kicked off production of its first vehicle manufactured outside the U.S. in its new $2 billion Shanghai, China factory.

GM, China’s second-biggest foreign automaker, is aiming to offer four models as it looks to improve its brand image and support a sales recovery: Chevrolet’s Tahoe and Suburban, Cadillac’s Escalade, and the GMC Yukon Denali.

Ford announced plans last January to manufacture its Mustang Mach-E, an all-electric SUV, in China.

In addition to providing a large automotive sales market, China will maintain a chokehold over batteries needed for U.S. EV and hybrid production everywhere.

A report from Securing America’s Future Energy indicates that China currently controls nearly 70% of electric vehicle battery manufacturing capacity, compared to just 10% by the U.S.

The report projects that 107 of the 142 EV battery manufacturing projects scheduled by 2021 will be in China… with only nine in the U.S.

Add to this disaster-in-waiting that Taiwan – a central target of exploitive Chinese Communist Party territorial ambitions – produces 92% of the world’s most sophisticated sub-7 nanometer semiconductor computer chips which form the backbone of many sectors in the rapidly evolving digital economy, ranging again from automotive – to smartphones – to advanced weapons systems.

The island is home to Taiwan Semiconductor CO. (TSMC), the world’s largest foundry and go-to producer of chips for Apple Inc. smartphones, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.

Taiwan’s importance to the international auto industry recently became too important to ignore as shortfalls of chips used for everything from parking sensors to emission reduction recently forced carmakers including the U.S. Ford Motor Co., Germany’s Volkswagen AG, and Japan’s Toyota Motor Corp. to halt production.

Although the United States lacks a formal diplomatic relationship with Taiwan, we maintain unofficial ties with the self-ruled island under a 1979 Taiwan Relations Act which authorizes the U.S. to provide defensive military equipment through a nonprofit corporation called the American Institute in Taiwan which serves as a de facto American embassy.

Nevertheless, Washington has always been cautious about provoking a major confrontation with Beijing over Taiwan’s sovereignty, a circumstance which can be expected to be particularly true with the current White House.

President Biden and his B Team are transparently desperate in seeking China President Xi Jinping’s symbolic support for their obsessive Paris partnership.

We can also but imagine that Biden Family Inc. isn’t anxious to risk ugly Beijing extortion blowback regarding legendary foreign influence-peddling demons known to be residing in Hunter’s laptop from Hell.

Altogether, team Biden’s clueless climate crisis-premised carbon-cutting cooperation canard awards huge gifts to China.

First, Beijing gains leverage over America in establishing unserious and unrealistic CO2 emission concessions as key bargaining chits in bilateral economic and trade policies.

In concert with a weak and compliant U.S. president, Chinese oligarchs then gleefully watch as America abandons its rich hydrocarbon resource advantages to eliminate competition from an economic and military adversary.

On top of all this, the Chinese Communist Party gains control to hold hostage over the commercial, industrial, and military materials needed to power Biden’s fossil-free fantasy future.

Such destructively dunderheaded green new dealings will not end well for America.

*****

This article was published on June 11, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from CFACT, The Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow.