Great Britain’s Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) is proposing a zero waste policy in an effort to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions and landfill usage which would ban all food and food scraps, cans, paper, and glass items from being deposited in land fills. Violators of the ban will be fined.

Environment Minister Hilary Benn is hosting a “waste summit” in order to develop the details necessary to achieve the very strict goal of a zero waste policy. Why, you may ask — “Because does it make sense to put food into landfill? No it doesn't," Benn offers.

It doesn’t? As food scraps are organic and biodegradeable, banning food and food scraps from landfills then becomes a curious idea. Except that there are other plans afoot to collect the food scraps separately, to be used to generate electricity. This can only be accomplished by using updated technology and plenty of taxpayer money to install the proper generators for a process that is still not yet cost-effective and fraught with various glitches.

To handle the British government’s latest scheme, there may be as many as five different wheeling bins and recycling boxes issued per household for the task of enabling homeowners to become compliant with the new directives: Compost — grass clippings, garden wastes, and cardboard, (oddly enough); Food — all cooked and uncooked scraps; Recyclables — glass, plastic, cans, aluminum foil, clothes, shoes, batteries; Paper — clean paper, shredded paper, envelopes with plastic windows removed, telephone directories; Landfill — pet litter, diapers, drink cartons, plastic caps and lids, various packaging, toothpaste tubes, and foam.

Matthew Elliott, of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said, “Voters are sceptical about recycling policy. The Government should sort out the current recycling policy before starting on new barmy ideas.” Adding, “The fact that food waste could be banned from landfill — effectively treating it as a kind of toxic waste — is a recipe for disaster.”

There were no specifics available as to the overall cost of such an undertaking, and how much of a bureaucracy would be needed to oversee and enforce the policy — £1,000 per violation — not to mention the effect on the global environment of producing all those plastic bins and containers, along with the urban blight such containers pose, disfiguring neighborhoods, floating around from location to location, convenient and favorite targets for arson in crime-ridden areas.

There are few who have little problem with reducing real waste in an ever increasing materialistic and consumeristic society; most believe, in theory at least, in good stewardship of the Earth and its resources. But what citizens are really hankering after, both in Great Britain and in the United States, is a zero waste policy applied to government, letting competition and free enterprise handle the trash.

It is excessive government that is most wasteful; thick bureaucracies and a multiplication of public agencies marked with corruption and abuse are the real wasters of money and resources, as these disregard private enterprise and individual freedom and responsibility.

Bloomberg News reported on March 12 that the budget proposed by President Obama in February anticipated revenues of almost $650 billion by 2019 from a so-called cap-and-trade program. The president's proposal would require companies to buy government-issued permits to release carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere.

The way most cap-and-trade plans are explained is that each company would have a government-imposed limit (cap) on the amount of so-called greenhouse gas that it can emit. Companies that emit less than their allowance can sell (trade) their extra permits to companies that are not as easily able to make the reductions required to stay under their caps.

The term "greenhouse gas" refers to those gases in the earth's atmosphere, such as water vapor, carbon dioxide, etc, that help trap the sun's energy and thus lead to warmer surface temperatures than if there were none of these greenhouse gases present. The global warming alarmists incorrectly maintain that the earth's surface is warming up due to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by man.

The whole concept of a cap-and-trade tax is based on the myth that mankind is endangered by global warming due to the man-made (anthropogenic) buildup of "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere. You can verify for yourself that the scientific case for anthropogenic global warming is far from settled by viewing some of presentations by 80 prominent climate experts at the "2009 International Conference on Climate Change" held from March 8-10 in New York City.

As for the economic reality of "cap-and-trade," an excellent explanation by Patrick Semmens was posted on the Ron Paul blog on March 9th 2009. It is titled: " 'Cap and Trade' is Really Just a Massive Tax." As the writer explains: "Putting a price on carbon is regressive by definition because poor and middle-income households spend more of their paychecks on things like gas to drive to work, groceries or home heating."

Scientific evidence of a natural climate shift is being touted by UW-Milwaukee scientists, in this the International Year of Planet Earth.

Using a math application known as synchronized chaos, scientists at UW-Milwaukee lent renewed credibility to variable climate evidence, and in the process have thrown cold water on the anthropogenic climate changists’ hypothesis pushed by Al Gore and Tom Brokaw.

By applying synchronized chaos to the temperature data from the last 100 years, the scientists have concluded that the ocean and air systems are showing signs of synchronizing or coupling, but eventually this too shall pass, which will lead to another climate shift.

Noting that the most recent shift started in the year 2000, Dr. Anastasios Tsonis said, "In climate, when this happens, the climate state changes. You go from a cooling regime to a warming regime or a warming regime to a cooling regime. This way we were able to explain all the fluctuations in the global temperature trend in the past century. The research team has found the warming trend of the past 30 years has stopped and in fact global temperatures have leveled off since 2001."

After viewing over 100 online reports, news items, snippets, and blogs, the popular conclusion is that because of squabbles over just about everything, there will be no definite long-term agreement reached on CO2 emission levels, who will pay for them, and even how they can be reached, at the UN’s Poznan, Poland, climate conference.

The UN’s worldwide regulatory efforts to reshape and direct the economic future of businesses and countries through climate change initiatives, with the possibility of plunging many countries into recession and repression, looks rather dismal at this time.

However, expect the UN to never give up. Ban Ki-Moon, like a sales pitch on a late-night TV informercial, is keeping up the pressure saying, “If we take action today it may not be too late. But if we take action tomorrow, we may have to regret it for not only us, but for coming generations and even for planet Earth.”

Spiegel Online International reports that the first draft by Yvo de Boer, secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), of a protection treaty for 2012 and beyond consisted of lists of demands by the Americans, Europeans, and developing countries, all in contradiction to one another.

The biggest stumbling block according to a senior fellow at the CFR, Michael A. Levi, to what he described as stalled negotiations, are the classifications of poor countries vs. rich countries. Because the wealthier nations of the world would cap their greenhouse-gas emissions and would be paying for poorer countries economic problems resulting from emissions caps, re-development, and emission credits, the classifications really matter -- the devil is always in the details.

The parameters for distinguishing wealthy from non-wealthy nations was established in 1992. Well, a lot has changed since then. Countries such as Qatar, China, Singapore, and Peru were listed as Third World countries then -- very poor. But of course they are very wealthy now. Truly poor Portugal, with an average income of $22,000 per year, is still listed as wealthy. China and Singapore are doing everything they can to maintain their poor status, lest they have to ante up as they want the United States to do. They would rather be on the receiving end, than the paying end -- imagine that.