Filed under: Economy, Energy, Global Warming, Science/Technology | Tags: Environment, Green Politics, United Kingdom
England is having a bad time with their Green movement. The Greens have worked for over 40 years to undermine the British economic system and to replace it with a Green autocracy that can control the British population. Uninvestigated, it all sounded so — caring, and made a good topic of conversation for dinner parties. When it meant just paying a little more for ‘organic’ veggies, or separating the trash into separate bins, it offered a small noble feeling of doing one’s part.
They, the Greens, pretty much got away with it. At least until the economic crisis hit and people with calculators began looking at what things would actually cost. An excellent example is recycling in the UK. Most of this process has been driven by edicts from the EU — it is the moral thing to do, and you will recycle. But it seems that there is no demand, none whatsoever, for recycled waste. The British paper, The Observer, reported that:
Huge waste mountains could be sited on military bases under emergency plans to protect Britain’s recycling revolution from the economic downturn.
Local authorities have requested government permission to site rubbish dumps on Ministry of Defense land in order to stockpile growing amounts of recyclable waste for which there is no use and no market.
The Observer is the quintessential right thinking newspaper. Recycling is good. Therefore we must continue the recycling revolution no matter what the costs. Can something be “recyclable” if it has no use, and if there is no market at all for it?
A second tactic is the eternal battle against an evil threat. Global warming has become the perpetual threat that demands every sacrifice — democracy, liberty, the destruction of free markets and the establishment of the “Ministry of Truth.” It will be staffed with an army of bureaucrats who will rewrite history, eliminating the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period, as well as circulating pictures of drowning polar bears and melting glaciers.
The third tactic is the adoption of Green bureaucratic language. Global warming becomes “climate change’. “Sustainability” becomes the buzz-word of the day. “Sustainable development” can be encouraged to build wind farms, to bolster the quest for funds, or to pass undesirable laws. It can also be used to prevent development, block growth and to conjure up a return to an imagined, usually rural, Utopia.
Greens come in many guises, and range from the caring but ill-informed to the totally loony. Their prescriptions need to be based in observed science and real economics. That shouldn’t be asking too much.
You are being fed a parcel of lies. Pay attention, read up, and investigate further. Don’t just swallow.
(h/t Climate Change Fraud)
Filed under: Economy, Energy, Environment, Global Warming | Tags: Climate Confusion, Environmental Demagogues, GIGO, Green Politics
From the Washington Post today, from a Professor Joseph Stiglitz:
Obama is also inheriting a climate crisis. The United States and China have been racing to see which nation will contribute most to the greenhouse gasses that cause global warming. It looks as though China will win in absolute terms, but on a per capita basis, America takes the smoggy cake. We cannot save the planet without a global agreement, and we cannot get such an agreement without massive reductions in U.S. emissions. This transition could have upsides beyond the environmental ones. A carbon tax — or the auctioning of emissions permits — could generate huge revenues; some of those could be used to help Americans adjust to the new “green economy,” while the rest could be used to reduce the deficit or lower taxes on workers. But we really have little choice here: Europe and other global players are likely to slap a carbon tax on U.S. goods if we don’t deal with the issue at home. Their firms will not tolerate giving U.S. firms a competitive advantage simply because we refuse to bear our responsibility for the global environment.
This is so wrong headed on so many fronts that it is breathtaking. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is a colorless, odorless benign gas that we exhale. It is not a cause of global warming, and is only a trace gas in the atmosphere. If you burned all of the carbon on earth all at once, it would still be only a trace gas. The major greenhouse gas is water vapor. Carbon dioxide is a natural fertilizer that makes plants grow. This is a good thing.
The planet is in peril only in Al Gore’s mind and in the computer models of the UN’s IPCC. Not in the observational evidence. Only in computer models. High priced computers to be sure, but the same GIGO still applies.
A carbon tax will do nothing whatsoever for the planet, but it will make the planet’s people a lot poorer. Professor Stiglitz is apparently so consumed with his desire to ‘save the planet’ that he has not seriously looked at the downside to carbon taxes. There is simply no reason to tax carbon.
The earth has been warming and cooling for centuries. It is a natural process. We cannot stop climate change because neither we nor our CO2 are the cause. Even if every country in the world implemented the complete Kyoto Protocol, the difference in atmospheric CO2 would be undetectable.
The European Union is facing it’s own revolt. In the face of the credit crisis, many nations are looking seriously for the first time at the real cost of the unnecessary containment of carbon, and having some serious second thoughts.
It has been a bad year for the alarmists. Cold periods and snowfalls are occurring around the world. The British House of Commons debated a climate-change bill that pledged that the United Kingdom would reduce its CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050 , just as London was hit by the first October snow since 1922.
Would someone please note that happenings and observations in the real world trump computer projections every time!
Filed under: Energy, Environment, Global Warming | Tags: Environmental Demagogues, Green Politics, Liberal lies
(h/t. The Daily Bayonet)
Filed under: Economy, Election 2008, Energy, Environment, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear, Politics | Tags: Climate Confusion, Democrat Demagogues, Green Politics, Obama
What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous, planet -destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world — that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.
— Richard S. Lindzen, MIT
Barack Obama’s energy adviser has made it clear that the would-be President intends to blackmail Congress into falling in line with his climate agenda. The “complaint” has been that the White House has blocked EPA bureaucrats from making an “endangerment finding” on carbon. A President Obama would use such a finding as a political club to force Congress to either impose the new taxes on carbon that he wants, or the carbon police will be turned loose to regulate your lawnmower, chainsaw, boat motor and any other engines you might have, with enormous costs to the economy.
Obama wants to give away a lot of money, and he has to find it somewhere. A minor detail is that carbon is NOT a pollutant, but helps plants to grow, is what you breathe out, and is nature’s fertilizer so there is no reason whatsoever to regulate it. None. But think of the possibilities when you have something that is absolutely free, and you can impose a brand new tax.
In a recent campaign move intended to claim Iowa once and for all, Obama announced his plan to increase by two-thirds the federal mandate for ethanol and other renewable fuels.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the price of basic foods in the United States is currently raising at twice the rate of inflation and is expected to continue to escalate in the future. The Pennsylvania State Senate has called on Congress to phase out the use of food crops for biofuel production and amend existing food to fuel mandates. The cost of food at home was up 7.6 percent this last year. The decade average has been 2.3 percent. Cereals and bakery products are up by over 12 percent.
You’d think that someone whose campaign has been based on claims that he would relieve the misery Americans are in would want to avoid raising their food costs. Not to mention the food riots and hunger in developing countries.
But not to worry, there will be a “Green Jobs Fund” to pay for things like the “Energy Efficiency Engineers Apprenticeship”, a two-year program to “hire young people who don’t have a trade and give them a trade making homes more energy efficient, insulating homes, changing light bulbs, and reducing our dependence on dirty power plants” according to a speech Obama gave earlier this year.
Of course this might affect the existing home insulation businesses, the energy-efficient windows businesses but they have a lot more experience than the kids. I don’t know how much people would pay to have someone come in to change their light bulbs. Do you suppose he has thought through the economics of this proposal?
If you are worried about an economy slipping into recession, you might consider that the worst thing you can do is raise taxes and cut off free trade. But everyone knows enough history to know that, don’t they?
Filed under: Developing Nations, Environment, Global Warming, Humor, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear | Tags: Environmentalism, Green Politics, Hypocrisy, Junk Science, Liberal lies
Junk Science’s Steven Milloy reports on the latest thing in green travel:
The World Wildlife Fund’s website states that “It is clearly time for all Americans to roll up their sleeves, to take steps to reduce emissions, to prepare for climate change, and to encourage others to do the same.” We Americans must use compact fluorescent light bulbs, reduce hot water use, turn thermostats down in the winter and up in the summer and use low-flow shower heads and faucets. We should pledge to commute by carpool or mass transit, switch to green power, and get more fuel-efficient cars. We should make our lives more expensive and less convenient so that the Green elites don’t feel too guilty while jet-setting to exotic locales.
That’s for us. For their wealthy donors they have something else in mind:
“Join us on a remarkable 25-day journey by luxury private jet,”invites the WWF in a brochure for its voyage to “some of the most astonishing places on the planet to see top wildlife, including gorillas, orangutans, rhinos, lemurs and toucans.”
For a price tag that starts at $64,950 per person, travelers will meet at the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando, Fla. on April 6, 2009 and then fly to “remote corners” of the world on a “specially outfitted jet that carries just 88 passengers in business-class comfort.” “World class experts — including WWF’s director of species conservation — will provide lectures en route, and a professional staff will be devoted to making your global adventure seamless and memorable.” Travelers will visit the Amazon Rain Forest in Brazil, Easter Island, Samoa, Borneo, Laos, Nepal, Madagascar, Namibi, Uganda or Rwanda, and finish up at the luxury Dorchester Hotel in London.
According to the calculator on the WWF’s website, it would cost in excess of $44,000 to offset the carbon emissions from the jet travel alone. But there is some doubt about the whole carbon-offset thing. it may be just a rip-off. And so it goes.
Filed under: Conservatism, Domestic Policy, Economy, Election 2008, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Liberalism, News, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear, Politics, Science/Technology | Tags: Biofuel, Environmentalists, Food Crisis, Green Politics, Liberal lies, liberalism
Add rising food prices, riots and hunger to the long list of casualties of “environmentalists”:
Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% – far more than previously estimated – according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.
The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body. [read more]
As we have noted before, in addition to causing high food prices, shortages, hunger, and suffering, they are much worse for the environment and they are driving species to the brink of extinction. If you haven’t already, call your federal representatives and demand that the government stop subsidizing biofuels. And contact your local governments as well: if they are anything like mine, they are using biofuels in government vehicles in an effort to be “green.”
And keep this tragedy in mind when politicians tell you they want to do something to stop global warming.
Filed under: Domestic Policy, Economy, Election 2008, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Liberalism, News, Politics | Tags: Democrat Corruption, Democrat Demagogues, Economy, Election, Global Warming, Green Politics, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Obama, Politics, Price of Gas
Well, gas prices are high, and everybody is struggling mightily to avoid doing anything about it. Nancy Pelosi, having refused to allow any debate whatsoever on gasoline prices, is now demanding that President Bush open the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to release a “small” amount of oil.
“These are the kind of circumstances, in addition to national security, in which utilization of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is more than justified,” Speaker Pelosi wrote in the letter dated Tuesday. read more
The reserve was opened by Bill Clinton to help Al Gore get elected. Yes, this was undoubtedly important to Democrats, but it was hardly a national emergency. They sold off the Naval Reserve in California to Occidental Petroleum too. George W. Bush opened the Reserve after Katrina when many rigs were damaged and off line, but that was a national emergency.
The definition of “national security” and the understanding of the phrase seem a little wobbly, at best. The Reserve consists of salt caverns that are filled with the largest emergency stockpile in the world, approximately 705 million barrels, about 97 percent of the reserve’s capacity. The reserve would replace foreign supplies for about 58 days, or roughly two months. Can you imagine an emergency that could last more than two months? Me too.
The biggest game is of course, attempting to establish blame. In her letter, Pelosi said that during Bush’s tenure the cost of a barrel of oil has risen five-fold, and the effects have been devastating. I do seem to remember President Bush repeatedly asking Congress to open offshore lands and ANWR to exploration, to authorize new refineries and nuclear plants.
Democrats have extolled Jimmy Carter’s prescience in dealing with a previous oil crisis, which was apparently wearing a sweater, installing a woodstove in the White House and putting solar panels on the roof.
The Shah of Iran fled his country in the wake of protests in 1979, allowing the Ayatollah Khomeni to take control. The revolution shattered the Iranian oil sector and drove up prices. Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations increased production and the decline in production amounted to only about 4%. Still, a panic resulted, driving the price up further. read more
In the U.S., the Carter administration instituted price controls, which resulted in long lines at gas stations, as had happened six years earlier when President Nixon adopted price controls. Carter called the oil crisis “the moral equivalent of war” and suggested removing price controls. Congress agreed to remove them in phases, and they were finally discarded in 1981 under Ronald Reagan. From all of this we (hopefully) learned that price controls do not work.
Lessons to be learned now should include the idea that you cannot increase supply by hoping that wind and solar will replace gasoline. Not going to happen. Hybrid cars are an expensive luxury. Electric cars are a future possibility, but will require increased generation of electricity. Solar and wind at present make a minuscule contribution to the grid, and require constant back-up of electric power. Environmentalists’ Utopian dreams are just not ready for prime time, however much some want to rely on hope and change.
The other big lesson is that Congressional interference in the market usually has unfortunate results. The likelihood that lesson will be learned is microscopic, for nothing is ever the fault of congress.
The Senate Majority Leader says that oil and coal are making everyone “sick”, that they are “dirty” and that (non-existent) global warming will destroy the earth. This is the caliber of the debate, and the reason that approval of congress has dropped to single digits with only 9% of Americans approving of congress, and only 2% approving a “great deal”. Whew!
Filed under: Environment, Humor, Politics, Pop Culture | Tags: Earth Hour, Environment, Global Warming, Green Politics, Liberal stupidity, Nature
8PM Saturday night, March 29 is designated as “Earth Hour”. The Greenies want us to turn off our lights for one hour, to demonstrate something or other. If you are interested, just google “Earth Hour 2008”. If you think it is a crock, consider yourself an Illumination Activist. Turn on all household lights, any heaters, air conditioners, automobile headlights, the stove’s self-cleaning cycle, the TV. all kitchen appliances, the stereo. Or have a Carbon Party.
David Warren not long ago wrote a column in which he spoke of “Naive Urban People”. I refer to them as NUPs. They love wild animals, particularly babies, and Nature — which they observe from their car windows. The average visit to the Grand Canyon — one of the wonders of the world — lasts 20 minutes. NUPs are deeply concerned about “global warming” and can’t be bothered to read up and find out what it is all about. They are careful to recycle, but don’t ask what it costs their municipal government. They are urban people, deeply uninformed about the natural world and how it works.
Perhaps you remember World Jump Day. A typical NUP production. You can Google that one too.