The Great Greeniac Debate.
This post was written by my friend Eric over at Black Tygrrrr a few months back. Eric would of placed as the best political blog in the country had it not been for the judges reluctance to properly count the votes. I even discoverd later that my wifes vote for Eric had been omitted.
None the less,It has been till this day the most informative and stimulating debate I have ever participated in.
Fore anyone who has any doubts about the hustle that the green community and environmentalist along with the government cronies are bestowing upon us , please feel free to take you’re time reading this.
It is quite lengthy. But I’m sure that whatever questions you may have about supposed global warming or environmental matters, they will be answerd in this thread.
As for all you moonbats, you may want to double up on you Lattes`
________________________________________________________________
Blacktygrrr says;
“One of my main criticisms of liberalism is that it demonizes anybody that dares to disagree with the conclusions that liberals theorize. Either one is a liberal, or they are an imbecile, evil, or in rare cases such as George W. Bush, both. Feelings trump facts, emotions trump evidence, and loud screaming displaces logical reasoning.
When Timothy McVeigh committed the Oklahoma City bombings, Senator Dianne Feinstein claimed that we needed more gun control, even though guns had nothing to do with this atrocity.
When Bill Clinton received illegal campaign contributions from Asian donors who skipped town (a pattern his wife is now repeating), the left claimed that we needed more campaign finance reform.
What the left either willingly or inadvertantly refuses to concede is that more solutions in the form of laws do not work if the underlying premise for enacting the laws is flawed.
Unfortunately, the pattern is continuing on the left today in the form of the environmental movement. Senator Barbara Boxer is blaming global warming for causing everything from the San Diego wildfires to a supposed decline in polar bears.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/polar_bear_pandering.html
I am not an expert on environmental matters. I freely admit my knowledge base on the subject is paper thin, with apologies to those who hate paper because it comes from dead trees. What bothers me is that when I question aspects of those who consider themselves environmentalists, I am treated as a dunce. If I am so wrong, why get angry with me? Why not answer my questions in a sincere manner? Why not allow debate from those who know more than me and disagree with the conclusions of some environmentalists?
Like many republicans, I am not anti-environment. I am just not willing to destroy all human and animal life to save the environment. Trees matter, but so do people. It is nto that the right hates nature. It is that the left is so hades bent on saving nature that they often disregard any human consequences.
Simply put, the Greeniacs do not allow for debate. The issue is open and shut, especially on global warming. The problem is, it is not. Stifling debate is not the same as consensus. Shouting people down or insulting them is not the same as being right.
In the spirit of Socrates, I have several questions.
First of all, does global warming exist? I have no idea. I am not a scientist. Some scientists say yes, and some say no. Some say that the scientists saying no are not “serious” scientists. The question is then, who gets to decide what makes some scientists more serious than others? Are the ones saying that global warming does not exist all quacks? Do they not have college diplomas, much less advanced studying of this subject? I am not educated enough on this issue to be definitive, but I am educated enough to know that trying to invalidate those that disagree with others is a sign of a lack of confidence in one’s own argument. I suspect reasonable and educated people dispute this issue. It is not beyond dispute at all, far from it.
Even if global warming exists, which I cannot concede, what causes it, man or nature? Again, I have no idea. What I do know is that those on the left insist that humans are killing the planet, and those who question this are relegated to the back of the little yellow bus reserved for “special” children. Can a 14 year old girl spraying mousse in her hair really be raping the planet? Isn’t that a little extreme?
In the 1970s it was global cooling. We were headed towards an ice age. The Greeniacs maintain that the technology we have now allows us to be more accurate. I can accept that on many subjects, we know more now than we do then. That is reasonable. However, absolute truth does not exist with regards to this question. Maybe nothing any human being is doing is causing this problem. Plenty of things that harm this planet on some level are completely not preventable. Earthquakes are not caused by human beings. As of now, there is nothing any living person can do to prevent an Earthquake. Yes, we can take actions to minimize the damage, but the Earthquake itself cannot be stopped. What if global warming fits into this category? Is a person an uneducated baboon for even pondering this as a reasonable question? I would say that this is not the case.
The third question exists if and only if the answers to the first two disputed questions are accepted with a ringing affirmative declaration. Can human beings do anything to stop global warming? The third question actually contains a fourth question…should we care?
Now this line of thinking makes liberals go apoplectic. How can we not care? What kind of horrible people do not care about global warming? How can we not do something? We have to do something. We cannot just sit idly by and do nothing.
Actually, yes we can. Possibly, and I stress possibly, yes we should.
Liberals love to take swift action on many issues because it feels good to say that one are “doing things.” On many issues, reasonable people believe that doing nothing is a perfect solution. On economics, many respected economists believe governments should do absolutely nothing, and let the economy do what needs to be done. Keynesians believe in activist intervention, with higher taxes. Supply Siders such as myself favor lower taxes. Yet some economists favor just taking a nap and leaving everything alone. These economists are not imbeciles.
Some people believe in doing nothing with various global conflicts. We are doing nothing with regards to conflicts between India and Pakistan. In fact, America made things worse when an ancient San Francisco dinosaur known as the Pelosiraptor decided to inject herself into a conflict between Turk and Armenians. Rather than minding our own business with regards to a conflict that…like global warming…may have occurred (there is much argument on this subject) almost a century ago, we chose to “do something,” and exacerbated conflict in the Turkish region of the world.
Although liberals are often hostile towards business, decisions need to be made in a cold, businesslike fashion, removing human emotion as a calculation component. If we decide that global warming exists and is caused by humans, can combatting it be done without humanity paying too high a price? Destroying the global economy is too high a price. Since America is the leader of that economy, destroying America is tantamount to destroying the world. That may not lways be the case, but it is now. Enacting the Kyoto Treaty, and other treaties where China and India are exempt, forces America to unilaterally destroy itself financially. It seems that liberals love unilateral action except when it is positive for America, such as removing bloodthirsty tyrants like Saddam Hussein.
Should Americans recklessly try to destroy the environment? Of course not. No rational person favors ruining the Earth. However, liberals actually characterize conservatives as people who enjoy raping the environment, which is almost as insulting to conservatives as it is to rape victims. I wonder why liberal feminists never condemn this language.
What I do know is that Hollywood celebrities that spout off are not any more informed than I am. If the scientists do not agree, anybody can line up behind any scientist. Al Gore may turn out to be right. For those who have just had their jaws drop, I am not saying he is right. I am saying he very well one day could be. However, his winning an Academy Award contributes nothing to the debate. The Academy are not scientists. They are artists. His winning a Nobel Peace Prize is even less relevant. It was not a science award.
I have often said that those giving out Oscars and Nobels are simply liberals rewarding liberals. It would be like me giving an award to somebody for reinforcing my opinions. These awards are given by people who do not even try to hide their ideological biases. Science is only effective if it is unbiased. Otherwise it is tainted. It is one thing to show bias in terms of who to give a film award to, regardless of quality or facts. It is another to let medical or scientific studies be flawed. That is how people die, and drug companies spend millions on studies, with true “double blind” studies having the most credibility. Science can produce clear unambiguous results, but while the results do not need to be neutral, the methods used to get to the conclusions must be neutral.
Neutrality is only valid if it is honest neutrality, which brings us to the concept of being carbon neutral, in the form of carbon “offsets.” The way it works is this. Al Gore flies around on private jets. This is supposedly bad for the environment. He is a “Lear Jet Liberal.” To avoid this label, he pays other people to be more environmentally friendly in their own lives, therefore negating, or offsetting, his negative contribution.
This is ludicrous. If I pay 10 people to not kill anybody, can I go then kill 10 people and claim neutrality? Of course not. How can killing the Earth, if that is what people are doing, be any better? Some would argue that Al Gore’s message is so important, and his stature so high, that he needs to break the rules to educate people on how to obey them. How is that leading by example? It isn’t. It is hypocrisy. Gore could be environmentally positive by encouraging others to obey the rules and obeying them himself. Of course, this assumes that the problem exists, people caused it, and we could and should attack it.
What separates normal people from crusaders/zealots/activists is the idea that disagreement is heresy. I do not condemn people for being vegans. If they believe it is healthier, more power to them. All I ask is that they not yell “meat is murder,” when I am trying to eat a burger.
Many conservatives do not hate liberals. We just want them to shut up and sit down. We want them to leave us alone and let us live our lives. Most importantly, we want the right to engage in legitimate socratic debate without being pilloried.
At no time in this column have I definitely stated that the Greeniacs are wrong. They could be. I am simply openminded.
Being closeminded is sometimes acceptable. Questioning that 2 + 2 = 4 is beyond debate. Questioning that terrorists crashed into the Towers on 9/11 is fact. The sun does rise in the East and set in the West. There have been tests, retests, and finally accepted conclusions. It is permissible, and logical, to be closeminded on issues that truly are beyond dispute.
Global warming and other environmental issues could be in that category one day. Not to frighten the liberals, but the conclusions could be the opposite of what they now suspect, in the same way that they were wrong about global cooling. Technology is constantly evolving, and who knows what is beyond the horizon?
The world has a finite amount of some resources, including money. It is one thing to spend money to wage a war against an enemy that wants to destroy the world. Preserving all of humanity from Armageddon is a reasonable expenditure. Reasonable minds can disagree on the approach, but not whether preserving civilization matters. Yet spending enough money to cripple the global economy through treaties and other anti-business methods for a possible situation is what separates rational people from screaming Deaniacs…in this case Greeniacs.
Intelligence involves developing an argument so strong it cannot refuted. The null hypothesis is rejected, and the alternative hypothesis reigns supreme. Rather than declare the debate over, the left should have the courage of their convictions (shouting and screaming is not courage) to be willing to test those convictions. No scientist wants to find their life’s beliefs invalidated, but that is the price to pay for having more accurate scientific results. The science has to supersede the scientists. This is anathema to liberals, because liberalism is about the people, not the ideas. Right versus wrong is meaningless, because the ideological agenda is what matters, not the consequences.
Liberals need to unclench their teeth long enough to have spirited but honest debate.
The truth, with a very small “t,” is that the Greeniacs, like most liberals, do not want to accept the real truth…that their theories…everything that they believe in…could…very…well…mean…that…the…Greeniacs…could…possibly…be…wrong.”
eric
128 Comments
-
Jersey McJones said,
“…apologies to those who hate paper because it comes from dead trees.”
Though it all originates from dead trees to some degree, more and more paper is recycled today (much of it abroad because of the cheap labor crowd and their “Free” Trade). Eventually, the vast majority of paper will be recycled, from what I’ve heard.
“Like many republicans, I am not anti-environment. I am just not willing to destroy all human and animal life to save the environment. Trees matter, but so do people. It is nto that the right hates nature. It is that the left is so hades bent on saving nature that they often disregard any human consequences.”
I’m sorry eric, but this makes absolutely no sense. We ARE the environment. Animals, people, trees, water, air - everything is interconnected. We are a part of the environment, and a very large part as we are the most ubiquitous and successful advanced species in the history of the planet.
You have to try to understand that the environmental left does not discourage debate about global warming and such, as long as it is free and honest (not paid for by conflicted interests and lied about). What we want, however, is to hedge our bets. We should not ignore the possibilities of the future. Conservative thinking would not have taken us to the moon, or brought us genetic science. You have to think outside the box. You have to imagine what might be to discover what is and what will be. And if there’s one sector that should force conservatives to get what I’m saying, it’s the private sector.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/08/22/news/economy/pluggedin_gunther.fortune/index.htm
“Marsh (Charts), the world’s largest insurance broker, last spring sent a 36-page “risk alert” on Climate Change to clients that, among other things, looked at the possible relationship between climate change and natural disasters.
“Climate change - often referred to as ‘global warming’ - is one of the most significant emerging risks facing the world today, presenting tremendous challenges to the environment, to the world economy, and to individual businesses,” the report said.”
“AIG (Charts), the giant global insurer, issued a statement on climate change that says it “recognizes the scientific consensus that climate change is a reality and is likely in large part the result of human activities that have led to increasing concentrations of the greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere.””
Now certainly you do not believe that mega-insurers are “Greeniacs!” Perhaps they are profiteering, but they certainly have never shown a penchant for appeasing the wants of the Left. The private sector reacts to demand. Sometimes they create demand, but without some real and natural market want, the private sector can only create so much. If these guys are saying that Anthropogenic Global Warming is real, then you conservatives should listen up. We can debate the nuances of the issue all you like, and there is plenty to debate about, but there is no good reason not to act. We have nothing to lose. If the demand comes, then we’ll be ahead of the game, if it doesn’t, then the capital will simply flow elsewhere. But to ignore the issue because of ostensible debates on the details would be to put on blinders and get caught behind should real drastic change ever occur. Why not just act while we talk, rather than just talk? These are not mutally exclusive courses.
We know from everything from the Bible to our parents that littering and polluting the Earth is morally and ethically wrong. There’s nothing wrong with creating markets from this demand to clean up existing indutries With tax credits and a little investment, it would not hurt said indutries as well. But intertia is a fact of the universe so unless change is forced, intertia will prevent change. We should wait until it’s possibly too late to act. That would be stupid. A smart invester hedges his bets. He doesn’t throw all his eggs in one basket and hope for the best. Given the odds as of now, the temporal progressivity of science and climate study, we’d be very foolish indeed not to take this risk and turn it into capitalistic opportunity, rather than ignore the risk and miss the opportunity. Any true capitalist (yes, I AM a capitalist, just not of the American lunatic fringe variety) should get what I’m saying.
JMJ
-
micky2 said,
This game has been going on since I was a hippie in the 60s and 70s and we were convinced that you were helping the enviroment if you bought those sandals that had the soles that were made from old tires.
It became as big as the smiley that said ” have a nice day”
Well, those sandals still had to get thrown out at some point also.I remember when the “is it safe to drink the water?” scare happened. Consequently millions of people started buying bottled water. Nobody has died from tap water yet. And the bottled water business turned into a billion dollar industry.
A couple months ago it was all over the news. Today the two top selling waters are nothing but tap water. The irony.
I can buy my own filter and bottle it myself and cast away my worries about bad water, and dont have to worry about the trash impact on the earth. ( Which is totally blown out of proportion)
Will we see that happen? Probably not. Because the corporations know that they can scare us into buying anything, for whatever convuluted reason they come up with.
I told all those people then that they were fools, and I was right.Scientist who oppose the mass hysteria on this subject thats being driven by the liberal media are subjected to loosing funding for not jumping on the wagon.
In an op-ed piece http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220 written soon after the release of An Inconvenient Truth (by Nobel-Prize winner Yassar — oops, Albert Gore) the distinguished climate scientist Richard Lindzen of MIT had this to say:
The very commonplace — indeed, cliche — environmental tactic on any dissenting scientist these days is not to address the actual science. That would be too much like rational discourse. It is, rather, to lambaste the source of funding.
Well, turnabout is fair play.
As Mr. Lindzen notes in the above-quoted passage, government-employed, government-funded scientists depend entirely upon politicians for their funding. Science, then, which by definition is supposed to be an objective discipline, is instantly politicized. Ultimately, the money comes from the taxpayers. Science becomes a thing of consensus.
Thus, government-funding makes science political and non-objective.
That is why, instead of rational debate and scientific inquiry, we’re subject to the endless lobby campaigns, the endless invectives, the endless personal smears against any scientist who dares to do her job — i.e. question and investigate — and that is why there is this overwhelming authoritarian cry we now hear: “Silence! The debate is over.”
-
antisocialist said,
The majority of paper most emphatically does not come from recycling, Mr. McJones, but from pulpwood farms.
Pulpwood is specifically grown for paper, and that is why this notion that forests are “mowed down” to produce paper is a complete fiction. It’s more environmental mythology. The only places where forests are mowed down to produce paper are in non-developed countries, which is exactly the type of places that environmentalism wishes to force us all into.
Mandatory recycling, moreover, as its very name implies, ignores the law of supply and demand. That is why so much recycled paper is ultimately landfilled. When, for instance, New Jersey “passed legislation that required every community in the state to recycle, the recycling rate for newspapers jumped from 50 percent to 62 percent. This, in turn, created such a glut that the price of newsprint fell $45 per ton to minus $25 per ton!” (Facts not Fear.) You read that correctly: recyclers had to pay $25 per ton for someone to haul the newspapers away.
In Europe, where the recycling craze has really run amok, the German government (e.g.) required businesses to take back from customers and recycle all forms of packaging, including bottles, cans, containers, cartons, and sacks. In no time, the (nonprofit) company that collects and sorts the items was $412 million in debt, and the government admitted that tons and tons of the material would be landfilled anyway, because there wasn’t enough demand for that kind of supply.
As Doctor William Rathje (of the University of Arizona, and arguably the world’s foremost scientist on rubbish) points out in his excellent book Rubbish, “paper accounts for 40 percent or more of landfill volume. There simply isn’t a market for this amount of recycled newspaper. Nor are enough mills to process all the paper that could be collected. In addition, de-inking newspaper, which is necessary in order to recycle it, creates a potentially toxic sludge, which sludge, toxic or not, must somewhere be landfilled” (William Rathje, Rubbish).
But there’s more: As Lynn Scarlett of the Reason Foundation points out, environmental laws anent recycling could conveivably “eliminate the one-pound coffee ‘brick-packs’ you now find in retail stores. These packages hold the same amount of coffee as metal cans, but weigh less than one-third of traditional metal cans, and they take up little space. Recycled-content laws would force the use of cans instead.”
But there’s more, much more: “There is no shortage of landfill space, not remotely. All the trash produced by the United States for the next one thousand years could fit into a landfill forty-four miles square by 120 feet deep—one tenth of 1 percent of all this country’s entire land area.” (“A Consumer’s Guide to Environmental Myths and Realities,” Policy Report #99, National Center for Policy Analysis, Dallas, TX, September 1991, 3, quoting Clark Wiseman of Gonzaga University.)
But there’s more, much more: Transporting recyclables to processing plants requires separate collection trucks, and producing the finished goods consumes energy and causes pollution, just as production of paper from wood does. (”In Los Angels, recycling laws meant that instead of four hundred garbage the city needed 800, and LA already has an air pollution problem” Facts not Fear.) Also, the trees that will allegedly be “saved” are, as intimated earlier, those that are planted specifically to make a pulpwood paper. “More recycling reduces the incentive to maintain and plant such tree farms” (ibid). As Doctor Clark Wiseman again wisely points out, “if paper recycling reaches 40 percent (it is about 30 percent right now), demand for paper from trees would fall by about 7 percent, and owners will be forced to convert their land for other uses than tree growing.” Added to which, because recycling so often requires more labor and more energy to produce, recycled products are often more expensive.
When recycling makes sense—and it does with things such as scrap steel and aluminum cans—it makes sense not because of resource scarcity, which is not a problem, nor because extracting the resources will irreparably harm the environment (it won’t), but because it is economically sound to do so. Businesses in free market countries exist to recycle these products. And they’ve existed for many, many decades, long before the environmental craze swept across the country like a plague. It’s one of the millions of examples of how free-markets take care of themselves. Furthermore, no one, in these instance, is forced to save recyclables, or to take them away.
Force is the opposite of freedom. Coercion, be it direct or indirect, is the only way to violate freedom.
Coercion is what environmentalism espouses.
One other very crucial factor you must never forget, Mr. McJones: nothing is ever recycled until it is sorted, collected, re-manufactured, and, most important of all, resold. If a re-manufactured product sits on the shelf until it is taken down and thrown away - as so much of these products are - it is not recycled. On the contrary, it’s been a far greater and far more costly waste than if it had just been landfilled to begin with.
That is where your government intervention gets you. For starters.
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Moving on to your wild assertion that there are different “styles” or “varieties” of capitalism, be it lunatic-fringe style, or moderate style: this is an absurd and demonstrably false notion. Capitalism, by its very definition, means free trade. That is all. That’s what capitalism is. It means that government stays out of commerce and industry, just as government stays out of religion, and for the exact same reasons. There is no middle ground to that: it’s either capitalistic, or its opposite: interventionist.
Which means mercantilist.
Which means protectionist.
“Capitalism is the economic manifestation of freedom” (Fredrick Bastiat).
“Capitalism is individual rights applied to the science of production and exchange” (George Reisman).
Capitalism, by definition, is “a network of free voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at” (Capitalism Versus Statism, Murray N. Rothbard).
The crux of capitalism, and thus freedom, is private property.
The only alternative to private property is communal ownership or governmental ownership, which is precisely what environmentalism advocates.
Communal ownership and government ownership are also called socialism. That, by definition, is what socialism is.
As a political philosophy, environmentalism is in every significant way indistinguishable from socialism. Indeed, as many commentators have noted, such as Patrick Moore, one of the cofounders of Green Peace, “environmentalism is repackaged Marxism.”
Socialism, as you presumably know, at least implicitly, is the opposite of capitalism.
Thus, if there is government intervention, it is, to that extent, not capitalism.
Regarding your own espousal of the precautionary principle, it’s not only anti-freedom — it’s deadly and dangerous, as the DDT fiasco more than demonstrates, to the tune of ten million and counting, or the Alar fiasco.
As the French heat-wave deaths also demonstrate. To wit:
The bulk of the victims—many of them elderly—died during the height of the heat wave, which brought suffocating temperatures of up to 104 degrees in a country where air conditioning is rare.” (Robert Bindinitto, “Death by Environmentalism”).
This prompts an obvious question: Why is air conditioning so rare in a technologically sophisticated country like France?
In an interview, Michaels told me that a major reason is the impact of environmentalism on government energy policy. To address the alleged threat of global warming, France, along with the rest of the European Union, has imposed steep energy taxes in order to reduce energy consumption. As a result, Michaels explained, energy costs to consumers in France are about 25 percent higher than to consumers in the United States. At the same time, average incomes in France are considerably lower than those in America, which, in relative terms, makes electricity there all the more expensive.
Sure enough, the high energy taxes have worked exactly as the environmentalists planned: they have reduced energy consumption. Seeking ways to cut their electric bills, French citizens realized that air conditioners consume more energy than almost any other household appliance. For the poor and the elderly, especially, air conditioning simply became unaffordable. So, by the millions, they decided to forgo the amenity that environmental taxes made so expensive. Air conditioning, so universal in America, became in France an indulgence of the well-to-do. As Chantal de Singly, director of the Saint-Antoine hospital in Paris, put it in Le Monde (August 19, 2003), the heat wave revealed two classes of French citizens: “the France of the air conditioned versus the France of the overheated.”
So, to address the purely hypothetical risks of possible future global temperature increases that might average a few piddling degrees, the greens imposed energy taxes that made it impossible for many of its most vulnerable citizens to protect themselves against the foreseeable and preventable impact of a summer heat wave.
However, in the green campaign against energy consumption, the fatalities caused by French environmentalists do not begin to rival those caused by their American blood brothers
Please stay tuned …
-
micky2 said,
Jeeez
-
antisocialist said,
Some final thoughts, if Eric will allow me to overwhelm his comment box, on Mr. McJones’s precautionary principle concerning global warming:
On October 19th, 2007, the Rocky Mountain News ran an op-ed piece entitled “Al Gore’s ignoble Nobel,” by Denver talkshow host Mike Rosen. Five days after that, a rebuttal appeared.
This rebuttal, “Mostly wrong on warming,” was written by a scientist named Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.
In turn, Dr. Trenberth’s article was rebutted by a man named Christopher Monckton, third Vicount of Benchley and Former Advisor to Margaret Thatcher. Mr. Trenberth’s article did not appear in the Rocky Mountain News; it was published on the Science and Public Policy website: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/23errors.html
Mr. Monckton, who, like Mike Rosen, is not a scientist, then appeared as a guest on Mike Rosen’s radio show, to discuss in greater detail what he calls the “swindle” of global warming.
It should also be noted that Dr. Trenberth was invited on the program to debate the issue with Mr. Monckton, but, as you might suspect, Trenberth declined – and did so, according to Mike Rosen’s producers, none too politely.
Among global warming alarmists, it’s become somewhat vogue to criticize the “credentials” of anyone, scientist and non-scientist alike, who disagrees with the catastrophic scenarios. Turnabout, as mentioned above, is only fair play.
“There is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.”
As Doctor Lindzen notes in the above-quoted passage, government-funded scientists depend entirely upon politicians for their research money. Science, therefore, which by definition is an objective discipline, is instantly politicized: i.e. science is made non-objective.
Science becomes a thing of consensus – which by definition means that science is no longer science.
Instead of rational debate and scientific inquiry, we’re subject to these endless lobby campaigns, these endless invectives, these endless personal smears against any scientist who dares to do her job — question and investigate — and this is the reason we now hear the constant authoritarian cry: “Silence! The debate is over.”
This kind of ad hominem attack is many things, but science is certainly not one of them. Nor is it going to get the world to a better place, as Mr. McJones imagines.
If you doubt my words, observe what Dr. Kevin Trenberth himself says in his Rocky Mountains News response: “Gore’s statement that ice-sheets melting in Greenland or the West Antarctic would raise sea level by 20 feet is correct, although it was misleading that he did not put a time-frame on this.”
Ask yourself: why didn’t Gore put a time-frame on it?
The answer: a twenty foot increase would, all things remaining equal, take millennia.
As Dr. Trenberth himself once stated: “… temperatures would have to remain 5.5 degrees Celsius higher than today’s for several millennia before the Greenland ice sheet would lose even half of its ice. The Greenland ice sheet has in fact recently thickened by 2 inches per year – a total of 20 inches in 10 years” (Johannesen et al., 2005).
Is that, as Dr. Trenberth says, merely “misleading” on Gore’s part?
Or is it an outright prevarication?
Dr. Vincent Gray, a New Zealand scientist who recently resigned from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where he had served as an expert from its inception, left because, in his words, “the world will slowly realize that the ‘predictions’ emanating from the IPCC will not happen. The absence of any global warming for the past 8 years is only the beginning. The whole process is a swindle. The IPCC from the beginning was given the license to use whatever methods would be necessary to provide evidence that carbon dioxide increases were harming the climate even if this involves manipulation of dubious data and using people’s opinions instead of science to prove their case.”
I wrote Dr. Kevin Trenberth a number of emails in which I asked him, among other things, why he’d declined Mike Rosen’s invitation to debate this issue on-air. His response, which came very rapidly, did not surprise me: he said that he’d been tied up in meetings that day, but more than that, these men, according to him, have no scientific credentials – which lack of credentials did not, however, preclude his original Rocky Mountain News response to Mike Rosen’s article. Nor, for that matter, his rather strident support of non-scientist Al Gore and Al Gore’s famous non-scientific melodrama: An Inconvenient Truth.
Dr. Trenberth, whom I paraphrase here for reasons I will make clear in a moment, also, in our email exchange, intimated that any non-scientist, no matter how erudite the person may (or may not) be, by virtue of being a non-scientist, is simply not qualified to raise objections to global warming scenarios.
Thus, we who are not scientists must simply take on faith what these men and women of “science” tell us, regardless of their politics, or their fraudulent premises.
What about the actual scientists who disagree with the alarmists?
I named a few of these thousands upon thousands to Dr. Trenberth – such as Dr. William Gray – and Trenberth, as you would also suspect, immediately called into question the “credentials” of such people. Dr. Gray, I was told, is “long-retired” and, anyway, has been “reprimanded by CSU.”
There is, in other words, no way for anyone, scientist or not, to debate the global warming alarmists. We must simply accept what they say without public discussion or debate.
Now that’s what I call convenient.
The following, however, is more convenient still:
When I asked Dr. Kevin Trenberth if I could quote our exchange, his response to me – and I’m paraphrasing, of course –was an unequivocal, no, you may not quote me from our exchange.
One is strangely reminded of W.H. Auden’s lines: “The blessed don’t care what angle they’re regarded from, having nothing to hide….”
You should realize also that environmentalism’s goal of global limits on carbon dioxide and other chemical emissions, as called for in the Kyoto protocol and certain other treaties, easily lends itself to the establishment of world-wide central planning with respect to a wide variety of essential means of production. Indeed, an explicit bridge between socialism and environmentalism is supplied by one of the most prominent theorists of the environmental movement, Barry Commoner, who was also the Green Party’s first candidate for President of the United States. The intellectuals, who insist that man must be forced to live for others and now for “the environment,” have kept the monstrous philosophy alive. It is a philosophy of slavery, and bandwagon thinking is what propogates it: the unanalyzed, unquestioned acceptance of environmental platitudes. We must, for instance, “save the planet” by carpooling and recycling. This is where your precautionary principle gets you.
The precautionary principle is Pascal’s famous wager applied to environmentalists. It is thus equally as absurd.
If socialism had died, the entire world, including the Third World, would now be moving toward unprecedented economic progress and prosperity.
Instead, the elitist intellectuals, who live off the fruits of technology, progress, and, in a phrase, free-market capitalism, have chosen to foist the doctrine of environmentalism onto the world, so that the Third World cannot develop but must (so say the intellectuals) be kept in grinding poverty, replete with disease and death — all because our “jeopardized planet” demands it, and because corporations are evil, and because, anyway, the elites say so. The environmental elites are the new socialist rulers.
This is the government that the people have turned to for ’social justice’; for protection and aid, in the form of labor and social legislation; for reason and order, in the form of government ‘planning.’ This is the government that has implemented progressive income taxation and inheritance taxation; minimum wage laws and maximum-hour laws; laws giving special privileges and immunities to labor unions; antitrust legislation; social security legislation; public education; public housing; socialized medicine; nationalized or municipalized post offices, utilities, railroads, subways, and buslines; subsidies for farmers, shippers, manufacturers, borrowers, lenders, the unemployed, students, tenants, and the ‘needy’ of every description. This is the government that has implemented food and drug regulation, building codes and zoning laws, occupational health and safety legislation, and more. This government has created arbitrary money and abolished the gold standard — to make possible the inflation of the money supply without limit. They have, in short, created over fifty thousand new laws and countless other regulations, which have swept across the country and the world with the force of a tidal wave, so that the concept of self-ownership, self-governance, and limited government seems antiquated to all but a handful who understand what’s at stake; thus, any mention of individual rights, the recognition of which is the only way for humans to actually live prosperously and freely, is now considered out-of-date. Yet if human freedom is ever to be won, it is only through the recognition of each individual’s absolute right to his or her own life and his or her own property that will accomplish it.’
Please think about that the next time you call from “more government involvement just in case, because, after all, what could the harm be?”
The harm is the piecemeal abolition of private property and, hence, freedom.
-
greg said,
As one of the resident Greeniacs on this blog who has worked on environmental law and policy issues for pretty much all of my adult life and from a number of different perspectives, there is SO much I’d like to respond to here, but, alas, I’ll start with only a few.
First, and this is I think the first time I’ve ever had occasion to say this, micky2 is right: science is indeed political and very much a product of society and culture, whether funding comes from government or private industry. And the issues that get raised about so-called scientific issues often get clouded when the politicians and the rest of society get involved. Global warming is a perfect example of that, and both sides of the issue are guilty of making broad sweeping generalizations and trying to arrive at a simple solution to what is really a very complicated problem.
Here’s where I see the problem of global warming, and it is very similar to eric’s. There are four aspects to the issue and both sides tend to conflate them into one, which just doesn’t work very well.
First, there is the question of whether global warming in fact exists. On this point, there really is no debate. Even the global warming skeptics like Bjorn Lonberg and Fred Singer admit that the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere is currently rising and has been for a number of years. And everyone agrees that global warming, regardless of its cause, is cyclical and rises and falls over time.
Second, there is the question of whether humans have caused global warming. This issue is probably the most misunderstood of the four. Again, there is little or no debate on the question of whether human activity causes global warming; even the skeptics agree here, too, that certain human activities do cause global warming. What gets confused is the fact that human activity is not the sole cause of global warming, nor is it even the biggest cause of global warming. However, the overwhelming majority of scientists agree that the additional insertion of greenhouse gases from human activity is responsible for the significantly higher rate of global warming that is taking place today.
Third, there is the question of “so what?” What are the potential impacts of the kind of global warming we are now seeing? What does this all mean? And on this question there is a great deal of scientific debate, as well there should be. So we see debates among prominent, respectable scientists debating the impact of global warming on hurricanes, for example, or what impacts will we see from melting polar ice caps. Without the benefit of prior experience with these kinds of issues, and given the complexity of the questions in issue and the scientific disciplines they cross, it is only natural that there is healthy debate on this question and like I said before, that is a very good thing.
Fourth, there is the question of what do we do about it. And this is really as much a political question as it a scientific one. And here is where we get into such issues as carbon trading, GHG reductions, hybrid vehicles, and a host of other kinds of ideas, some of which will be good ones and some of which will be bad ones, and most of which will need to be fleshed out and developed and refined over time.
So the frustration by us Greeniacs is that too many people are focused on focused on questions 1 and 2 and therefore refuse to engage in healthy and productive debate on questions 3 and 4 where we really need it, particularly on number 4.
And then we hear people like eric contradict themselves in the same paragraph, when he says: “Many conservatives do not hate liberals. We just want them to shut up and sit down. … Most importantly, we want the right to engage in legitimate socratic debate without being pilloried.” Eric, you can’t engage in legitimate socratic debate by telling the other side to shut up and sit down.
And then we constantly get hit with minor points that get raised beyond the level they’re entitled to as a way of obfuscating the real issues. Yes, global cooling was discussed briefly in the 1970s and even made it onto a magazine cover or two, but it never reached anywhere near the scientific consensus that global warming has. Yes, Al Gore flies in airplanes. The issue is not that humans have “to destroy all human and animal life to save the environment,” as eric says. No one criticized you for flying on September 11 just to make a political point (well, at least I don’t think anyone criticized you) and no one is really asking everyone to destroy their life to save the planet. That kind of false argument doesn’t move things forward.
I do want to comment on why giving the Nobel Peace Prize for work on global warming was a good thing. Many people have questioned what global warming has to do with peace, but when you think about it, it has everything to do with peace. Wars are fought over land, nations or people either wanting more of it or to protect some other nation or peoples from taking theirs. It’s not just the dirt they are fighting over – it’s what the land can do for them that is important, be it fertile land to grow food to sustain them, or the existence of clean water to drink, or animals to hunt. As global warming changes the landscape, perhaps by drying up what was once fertile land, or flooding out cities built next to an ocean that rises, conflict will arise as nations contend for usable land to replace what they have lost. That’s why the US Department of Defense declared in a report issued in 2003 that global warming was a bigger threat to American national security than terrorism.
-
greg said,
It’s hard to take antisocialist seriously but what he did say about paper is partially true. “The majority of paper most emphatically does not come from recycling,” which, of course, is not what JMJ said. Anyway, like JMJ said, the amount of recycled paper is increasing as industry deals with issues such as bleaching and ink, but the entire paper industry is in a downhill slide as the demand for all kinds of paper is diminishing.
antisocialist also says it is an “environmental myth” that forests are “mowed down” to produce paper. No it’s not. Environmentalists who know anything about forests know that they get mowed down not so much to produce paper but to increase the amount of land for agriculture and mining. Amazonian rainforests were not destroyed to create paper so much as to provide for cattle and soy. Another large source of dwindling forestry is for extractive industries such as mining and oil production, for example in the Canadian and Russian boreal.
-
Cobalt said,
Here’s a short response.
-
blacktygrrrr said,
I am beyond pleased with the debate today. This is exactly why I began blogging to begin with. Anyone can hurl insults, but I much prefer an intelligent civilized debate.
Let’s keep things on the high brow, and we will all grow richer intellectually.
eric
-
micky2 said,
Greg said;
“That’s why the US Department of Defense declared in a report issued in 2003 that global warming was a bigger threat to American national security than terrorism.”This is a complete falsehood
The US dept of defense did not say that, it was one of many declarations in the report made up of many different opinions and statistics.
That Greg was just one of a couple hundred contributions to the report that said that.December 2005: Exxon-Funded Organization Publishes Book on Climate Change The George C. Marshall Institute publishes a book titled, Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming. In its press release announcing the book, the institute says the book “demonstrates the remarkable disparities between so-called ‘consensus documents’ on global warming… and climate reality.” The book, edited by longtime climate contrarian Patrick Michaels, a meteorologist, features essays contributed by Sallie Baliunas, Robert Balling, Randall S. Cerveny, John Christy, Robert E. Davis, Oliver W. Frauenfeld, Ross McKitrick, Eric S. Posmentier, and Willie Soon. Michaels is affiliated with at least ten organizations that have been funded by ExxonMobil and the Marshall Institute has received some $630,000 from ExxonMobil in support of its climate change program (see Between 1998 and 2005). [George C. Marshall Institute, 12/14/2005; Union of Concerned Scientists, 2007, pp. 12
The US dept of defense did not declare this Greg, one of the contributing reports did.
Oh and by the way , Greg !
We have proof and results of terrorism being a threat, while you are scared of something that hasn’t even happened yet.
Has gerbil warming affected our nations security one iota as much as terrorism ?
Not! I didn’t think so. ( I found the report)
Part of it was put forth by Peter Schwartz, who just hosted a special on CNN questioning if Al Gore really deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.
He mentioned the questions but did nothing to confront or answer them.The report was not written by the pentagon, it was written for the pentagon by outside consultants. The pentagon commissions reports about a virtually endless list of “scenarios,” including (as mentioned above) scenarios in which we invade Canada. 3) The people who wrote the report are not scientists. Peter Schwartz is a “futurist,”, a scenario-dreamer-upper for Global Business Network, and the author of a pre-dot com-bust book The Long Boom. Amazon review: Among its predictions are a formulation of a “glass pipeline” that seamlessly tracks manufacturing and production processes, creation of a volunteer Global Corps to aid developing nations, the dawning of a true Space Age, and the birth of a unified worldwide society with “well-off people who share certain values that are transcending borders.” Heh heh heh. Doug Randall is another scenario-dreamer-upper with Global Business Network. In short, both these dudes are science-fiction writers, not scientists.
This is the conniving we see in the part of the enviromentalist, lying by omission of the truth.
-
arclightzero said,
interestingly, this was my topic of choice today as well, although I have been looking at environmentalism from a different perspective lately.
First off, there is a big problem with debate and environmentalism. It annoys me to no end that the consensus in the green community is that the debate is over and that there can be no other viewpoint. (especially if it contradicts the popular opinions of the greenies). I recently wrote a post on the topic of why people on the right (like myself) hate Al Gore. My rationale counters the overwhelming opinion from the left and the greenies that we hate the environment and are more concerned with money and helping out billionaires than with the Earth. Rather our beef with Gore and the pop-culture environmental movement is that they refuse to listen, they refuse to discuss, and when confronted they simply call anybody who carries a different opinion “sheep” who blindly follow the republicans. I agree with Eric here that we don’t hate the environment but we need to keep this environmental craze in check.
Second off, I am growing increasingly concerned that the line between pop-culture environmentalism and radical environmentalism (coincidentally, my topic of today) is growing increasingly thin. Yes, we can talk about recycling and deforestation until we;re blue in the face. We can talk carbon offsetting, hybrid cars and renewable energy… We can all be concerned with being more green and saving the environment. But as this sort of talk leads from one thing to another, I fear we are starting to see more people crossing the line into radicalism. The current rhetoric that we are getting from the mainstream environmentalists is that we are not doing enough is starting to drive people over the edge.
While there is no harm in trying to capitalize on the whole “green thing’” (lord knows I have invested in companies that are involved in renewable energy and green products), but things left unchecked and without debate like they currently are is dangerous. We are allowing for the creation of a radical movement that could make radical Islam look tame if we don’t start clamping down on this runaway environmentalism train.
-
deaconblue said,
I find all of this somewhat humorous. I get a kick out of the whole “the debate is closed” type arguments, or the minimizing of any sort of dissent (from either side). It’s an entertaining bit of melodrama, with no real appreciable resolutions to be had.
“Global Warming/Cooling” is a debate that is a cyclical as the arguments. You can track back for about 100 years the alternating scares. It runs in 20-25 year cycles, with the scare switching between warming and cooling. The science has always been “correct” each and every time, with “consensus” agreeing to what ever it is at the time. You can track this in just the front pages of the NY Times (back to about 1880), and in the Times of London (back to about 1870), as well as in other publications.
This is all about money folks. Doesn’t matter which side you are on, or what you believe. It’s about who stands to gain, not only economically, but politically as well. You cannot at this point, separate the politics from the science. They are so interwtined at this point, that one “taints” the other.
-
antisocialist said,
greg wrote: > It’s hard to take antisocialist seriously
And yet …
greg wrote: > but what he did say about paper is partially true.
I thank you for deigning to respond. It means a great deal to me, really, especially considering the source. Out of curiosity, have you yourself ever read the seminal work on the subject of garbage, the encyclopedic Rubbish? Or how about this brief article: http://www.ecoworld.com/home/articles2.cfm?tid=340?
greg wrote: > The majority of paper most emphatically does not come from recycling,” which, of course, is not what JMJ said.
“Of course,” you say?
JMJ wrote: > more and more paper is recycled today…. Eventually, the vast majority of paper will be recycled
greg wrote: > the entire paper industry is in a downhill slide as the demand for all kinds of paper is diminishing.
Well, not all kinds (of course). I suspect you will find this hard to take seriously, but there has, for instance, never been a greater demand for books — because there’s never been so many books published; because the demand for books has skyrocketed this past decade. It is, however, true that paper can be made these days without any wood at all, made possible by an evil little thing called technology, which environmentalism is (of course) statedly opposed to. Anyway, this “downhill slide,” as you elaborately call it, is the law of supply and demand at work, i.e. the free-market, which is precisely what the antisocialist advocates. The division-of-labor and the profit motive both ensure progress and the continual advancement of technology. That is how human civilization advances, certainly not through government regulations, strangulations, controls, and your vast environmental land-grabs and mandatory conservation measures.
greg wrote: > antisocialist also says it is an “environmental myth” that forests are “mowed down” to produce paper.
In developed countries, yes. And that’s true. Are you saying that in this country our forests are mowed down to produce paper? Are you aware that the latest satellite imagery shows, quote, “our forests are growing, and this despite greater timber harvests”? Or as the Council on Environmental Quality put it: “Trends in net annual timber growth show that the net annual growth of softwoods and hardwoods combined increased by 18 percent between 1952 and 1962 and another 14 percent between 1962 and 1970. This trend has steadily increased through 2005, and the increase is the result of expanded forest fire control, tree planting, and, most of all, measures from the foresters themselves.” (U.S. Council on Environmental Quality, p. 315. Emphasis mine.)
greg wrote: > Environmentalists who know anything about forests …
Which most of them do not. To wit: “History now shows us—as the math did then, but was ignored, of course, in favor of a more pessimistic viewpoint—that in the late 1980s, predictions that the world’s rainforests would ’soon’ be eliminated way overshot the mark. The famous statement made by biologist Norman Myers, which sent environmentalists everywhere scurrying to their soapboxes, that ‘2 percent of all tropical forest was being destroyed per year,’ and that by ‘2000 we will have lost a third of the world’s tropical forest’ (Myers cited in Goudie 1993:46.), has proved disgustingly inaccurate. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) puts tropical deforestation in the 1980s at 0.8 percent. In 2001, satellite imagery, which is precise, shows that tropical deforestation had declined to 0.46 percent” (Ultimate Resource). “Lack of property rights—i.e. private property—makes tropical deforestation worse.” Says your previously quoted Bjorn Lomborg.
greg wrote: > [forests] get mowed down not so much to produce paper but to increase the amount of land for agriculture and mining.
You’re talking about forests in non-developed or developing countries, which I specifically (and seriously) addressed. The United States is not third-world; that’s precisely the point, in fact.
greg wrote: > Amazonian rainforests were not destroyed to create paper so much as to provide for cattle and soy
“Were not,” you say? In fact, however — your conspicuous past-tense usage notwithstanding — when, in 1996, the World Wildlife Federation told us that Amazonian deforestation “increased by 34 percent since 1992,” we were understandably surprised to learn a year later that they did not tell us that the rate had fallen by over 50 percent, the second lowest amount since monitoring began, nor that the real estimate for 1999-2000 was about 17 million hectares, or, in other words, just below 0.5 percent per year. “In actual fact, overall Amazonian deforestation has only been about 14 percent since man has arrived. At least some three percent of this 14 percent has since been replaced by new forest” (Faminow 1999. See also Fearside, p. 1991, and The Skeptical Environmentalist p. 114-115). None of which of course addresses the fundamental issue here. And that is this: since when have government bureucrats ever proved themselves more capable of property allocation than private stewardship?(No doubt, you are familar with the “tragedy of the commons” and the principle at work behind it.) Nor does it address why I or anyone else should, to use your words, “take seriously” a movement guilty of so much proven prevarication and outright distortion.
-
Jersey McJones said,
Hey, the Tygrrrr chimed in!
Antisocialist,
As Greg said, I never said that the majority of paper comes from recycling. Please don’t put words in my mouth. As Tygrrrr said, “Let’s keep things on the high brow…”
I just happen to know a little about paper recycling because I worked for many years in the container line industry, and waste paper for recycling is a major American export. Waste paper is a big, albeit marginal, business. But as they say - if there’s money to be made…
Onto Global Warming - Okay, if the insurance sector doesn’t sway you how about this?
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39927
“WASHINGTON, Nov 5 (IPS) - Global climate change, if left unaddressed, is likely to pose “as a great or a greater foreign policy and national security challenge than any problem” the United States currently faces, according to a major new report released here Monday by two influential Washington think tanks.
Under a worst-case scenario, that nonetheless remains “plausible” given the latest scientific estimates, climate change’s impacts on global stability “would destabilise virtually every aspect of modern life,” according to the conclusions of a task force assembled by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies and the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS).”
This is a report just out today. There are studies coming from every direction, everyday, showing clearer and clear evidence that AGW is a real problem and must be addressed. Why people think this is just gloom and doom is beyond me. What ever happened to the great American entrepreneurial spirit? Capitalists should be grabbing this baby by the horns and figuring out ways to make some money making the Earth a clearer and safer place to live.
And it’s not just paper that’s mowing down the forests. The huge mistake known as Ethanol is also causing problems. Ever wonder where Brazil got all that cane and soy from?
http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0516-ethanol_amazon.html
Read my link and you’ll note that deforestation of the Amazon has been and continues to be one the rise both in rates and real numbers.
JMJ
-
micky2 said,
J said;
“But intertia is a fact of the universe so unless change is forced, intertia will prevent change”FORCED ?
Inertia promotes its own change, its called the movement of man as a society to go on to invent need by reason of demand. We have always come up with alternatives via the free market as opposed to “FORCE” which is the exact opposite of freedom.Js link said;
Global climate change, if left unaddressed, is likely to pose “as a great or a greater foreign policy and national security challenge than any problem” the United States currently faces, according to a major new report released here Monday by two influential Washington think tanks.Once again this is where debate is useless unless the word “LIKELY is taken out.
It is “LIKELY” that terrorist will blow us all up, but not probable.Also, the link that jersey provides are nothing but alarmists on the highest level.
Check out the third paragraph in this left wing enviro publishing.“The only comparable experience for many in the group was considering what the aftermath of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange might have entailed during the height of the Cold War,” according to the 119-page study, “The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change.”
What ? Thats just plain alarmist fear mongering. I found another one just like that, here.
“Climate change could have global security implications on a par with nuclear war unless urgent action is taken, a report said on Wednesday,” Jeremy Lovell of Reuters wrote on September 12. Lovell didn’t include any expert skeptical about climate change or its near-nuclear impact on the globe.
Also, the link that jersey provides are nothing but alarmists on the highest level.
Check out the third paragraph in this left wing enviro publishing.“The most recent international moves towards combating global warming represent a recognition … that if the emission of greenhouse gases … is allowed to continue unchecked, the effects will be catastrophic — on the level of nuclear war,” the IISS report said according to Reuters.
If you read anything on the link its full of words like “MIGHT”
“MAYBE”
“PROBABLY”
“SUGGEST”
“PLAUSIBLE”
“Under a worst-case scenario, that nonetheless remains “plausible” ”“The rising temperatures and sea levels that are caused by climate change will probably ”
“The more severe scenarios suggest the prospect of perhaps
And then theres this dead give away. ( with the word “potential”
“Global warming has the potential to destabilise the world,” said CNAS president Kurt Campbell, who served as deputy defence secretary under President Bill Clinton. “In my view, this will quickly become the defining issue of our age.”We have an old Clinton devotee in the works, so now we immediatly have politics in the mix which makes the whole arguement null and void. And absolutley biased.
Jerasey said;
Capitalists should be grabbing this baby by the horns and figuring out ways to make some money making the Earth a clearer and safer place to live.”Unfortunatly none of these who are already capitolizing on the green thing could care less about the enviroment.
Its evident for anyone to see that this capitalistic play on our emotions is already in full play, you cant get away from it, its everywhere, dont even get me started.As far as the Amazon deforestation goes, I see you failed to read the Antisocialists facts on the issue. He list 7 resources that totally displace any credibility your link offers.
They are blaming the US for what “MIGHT” happen on projected scales -
micky2 said,
I read the link that jersey supplied even further.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39927
The report, which comes as the Democratic-led Congress has begun moving legislation designed to reduce global warming emissions from power plants, factories and cars by as much as 60 percent under current levels by 2050, is aimed at what Campbell called the “surprising and alarming” lack of knowledge about climate change’s geo-political implications within the U.S. national security community.
Its publication follows the announcement last month that former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will receive the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to raise public awareness about climate change and its possible consequences.
Gee, which side do you think this publication is on ?
Antone who cares to read the article, please do .
It is so obviously bubbling over with politics (especially on the left) it cannot be taken seriously at all. -
Gayle said,
Like you, I’m no expert on this subject either Eric, and don’t really feel qualified to say much about it, other than the fact that China is adding to the problem much more than we are in North America, so I have to wonder why Gore doesn’t ever mention that? I did a post on it: “Come Home Batman. It’s Not Safe Over There!” Yeah…. I know it sounds weird, but it does come together.
-
micky2 said,
Gayle, Its always Americas fault.
If we didnt buy so many Batman dolls this problem wouldnt be.This is a list of the 9 most polluted cities in the world.
This planet has bigger problems such as these 9 mentioned which are not being addressed by the green hysteria at all.
Its a corporate/political/treehugger scheme to empty the wallets of Americans
by making us buy a load of products that really in the long run will not do a thing to prevent their intentional and falsely projected armageddon.the Chinese city of Linfen, located in the heat of the country’s coal region and chosen as an example of the severe pollution faced by many Chinese cities;
Haina, Dominican Republic, the site of a former automobile battery recycling smelter where residents suffer from widespread lead poisoning;
the Indian city of Ranipet, where some 3.5 million people are affected by tannery waste, which contains hexavalent chromium and azodyes.
Mailuu-Suu, Kyrgyzstan, home to a former Soviet uranium plant and severely contaminated with radioactive uranium mine wastes;
the Peruvian mining town of La Oroya, where residents have been exposed to toxic emissions from a poly-metallic smelter;
Dzerzinsk, Russia, the site of a Cold War-era chemical weapons facility;
the Russian industrial city of Norilsk, which houses the world’s largest heavy metals smelting complex and where more than 4 million tons of cadmium, copper, lead, nickel, arsenic, selenium and zinc emissions are released annually;
the Russian Far East towns of Dalnegorsk and Rudnaya Pristan, whose residents suffer from serious lead poisoning from an old smelter and the unsafe transport of lead concentrate from the local lead mining site;
and the city of Kabwe, Zambia, where mining and smelting operations have led to widespread lead and cadmium contamination.
You never hear about any of these places with the exception of China.
But America must tow the line, why ?
Because we are being convinced through green propoganda that we are the only ones who can help -
antisocialist said,
Mr. McJones,
I did not put words in your mouth. In fact, I quoted you exactly: “more and more paper is recycled today…. Eventually, the vast majority of paper will be recycled.”
Is quoting your words what you mean by ‘keeping things on the highbrow’?
You may indeed have worked in a “container line industry,” I don’t know. I myself worked in a recycling plant, and I promise you that if you had any idea how much waste goes on because of mandatory recycling laws, you’d be staggered. You’d be appalled. You’d be ashamed.
McJones wrote: > Onto Global Warming
But you didn’t even address the first issue! We’re moving on far too fast.
McJones wrote: > if the insurance sector doesn’t sway you how about this? http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39927
No, not remotely. Did you know that over the last century, global temperatures have risen about one degree, and that, furthermore, temperatures haven’t risen in about a decade? Did you know that two out of three scientists recently poled in each state of this country don’t believe that global warming is anything close to catastrophic? Did you know that over 17,000 scientists, ranging from climatologists to oceanographers to geophysicists, have signed the Oregon Petition, which declares that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of . . . greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate”?
Did you know that worldwide, that figure of scientists more than doubles?
Here’s a quote from our brilliant MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen (whom I trust far more than I trust your insurance companies):
There have been repeated claims that this past year’s hurricane activity was another sign of human-induced climate change. Everything from the heat wave in Paris to heavy snows in Buffalo has been blamed on people burning gasoline to fuel their cars, and coal and natural gas to heat, cool and electrify their homes. Yet how can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes?
McJones wrote: > Why people think this is just gloom and doom is beyond me.
That’s the whole problem: it’s beyond you. Many if not most scientists don’t think this kind of alarmism is at all justified. But if you and greg find me so difficult to take seriously, ignore me, please, and listen to the words of the enviros themselves:
From one of the High Priests of Environmentalism, Stephen Schneider, a “scientist” (and it will be clear in a moment why I put that word in quotation marks) at Stanford University, and also one of the main men at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. This is what he told Discover Magazine:
“On the one hand, as scientists, we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but.… On the other hand, we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we ourselves might have….Each of us has to decide” (as opposed to letting the actual facts dictate) “what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” (Discover, p. 47.)
“The ending of the human epoch on Earth” (writes philosopher Paul Taylor in Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics) “would most likely be greeted with a hearty ‘Good riddance!’”
Biologist David M. Graber of the U.S. National Park Services calls human beings a “cancer”; in the same article, he goes on to say: “I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true …Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to return to nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” (“Mother Nature as a Hothouse Flower,” Los Angles Times Book Review.)
The head of the 1992 Earth Summit asks in all seriousness: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
“In Los Angles, curbside recycling means that the city had to have eight hundred rather than four hundred trucks to pick up trash. And that city already has an air pollution problem.” (Facts Not Fear, p. 49.)
The ban on CFC chemicals, such as Freon, which is used for refrigeration, has, according to the New York Times, created a huge black market, not unlike the so-called war on drugs. “Law enforcement officials say the refrigerant has become the most lucrative contraband after illicit drugs.” (Judy Edelson Halpert, “Freon Smugglers Find Big Market,” New York Times.)
“In 1980 the late Julian Simon, economist and political philosopher, had, like many of us, grown frustrated with the Malthusian claims which in essence state that, because of population growth, the world is “soon” going to run out of food, oil, and other raw materials. Forget that the Malthusian predictions have never panned out and that Thomas Malthus himself was spectacularly wrong in his more immediate predictions—still the Malthusians keep proclaiming. So in 1980 Julian Simon made a $10,000 bet, open to any takers. He allowed his opponents to choose any raw materials, including grain and fossil fuels, and he wagered that, as long as the material wasn’t government controlled, the item or items chosen would have dropped in price at least one year later. He allowed his opponents also to choose the time of reckoning. [Environmental high priest] Paul Ehrlich, of Stanford University, had written in 1970: ‘I if were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.’ Fittingly, it was this same Mr. Ehrlich, along with two Stanford colleagues, Harte and Holdren, who accepted Julian Simon’s challenge, stating they would ‘accept Simon’s astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in.’ Ehrilich added: ‘The lure of easy money can be irresistible.’ They chose copper, chrome, nickel, tin, and tungsten, and a ten-year period.
“At settling time, in September of 1990, not only the sum of the prices, but also the price of each individual metal had fallen. Julian Simon offered to make the same bet again, at increased stakes, but the Ehrlich group never took him up on his second offer.” (Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2, p. 35-36.)
In 1980, the Global 2000 report predicted that “at least 500,000 to 600,000 species” would become extinct in the next twenty years. We now know that this was not only totally inaccurate, but had absolutely no factual basis to begin with. It was pure guess work, with a very specific agenda. “In the history of the planet earth, species have always come into and gone out of existence. The existing data on the observed rates of species extinction are fatuously incongruous with conservationist claims, as, in 1992, even the sympathetic World Conservation Monitoring Centre conceded.” Quoting their words: “In fact, these and other data indicate that the number of recorded extinctions for both plants and animals is very small….” (Heygood and Stuart 1992 p. 93.)
Here’s a little more (please note the dates):
“I take this opportunity to express my opinion in the strongest terms, that the amazing exhibition of oil which has characterized the last twenty, and will probably characterize the next ten or twenty years, is nevertheless, not only geologically but historically, a temporary and vanishing phenomenon—one which young men will live to see come to its natural end” (1886, J.P. Lesley, state geologist of Pennsylvania).
“There is little or no chance for more oil in California” (1886, U.S. Geological Survey).
“There is little or no chance for more oil in Kansas and Texas” (1891, U.S. Geological Survey).
“Total future production limit of 5.7 billion barrels of oil, perhaps a ten-year supply” (1914, U.S. Bureau of Mines).
“Reserves to last only thirteen years” (1939, Department of the Interior).
“Reserves to last thirteen years” (1951, Department of the Interior, Oil and Gas Division).
“We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade” (Former President Jimmy Carter speaking in 1978 to the entire world).
“At the present rate of use, it is estimated that coal reserves will last 200 more years. Petroleum may run out in 20 to 30 years, and natural gas may last only another 70 years” (1980, Merrill high school textbook Science Connections).
“At the current rate of consumption, some scientists estimate that the world’s known supplies of oil … will be used up within your lifetime” (1993, The United States and its People).
“The supply of fossil fuels is being used up at an alarming rate. Governments must help save our fossil fuel supply by passing laws limiting their use” (1993, Glenco textbook Biology, An Everyday Experience).
(Give particular heed to that last sentence.)
Quotes like these could fill a thousand pages easily. Here, for the hell of it, are a couple more:
The Sierra Club website has this resolution: “State and federal laws should be changed to encourage small families and discourage large families.”
(Government bureaucrats, in other words, should tell us how many children we are allowed to have. As they do in Communist China, for instance. Let it also be noted, however, that this is coming from a group whose founder, Mr. John Muir, wrote in 1894 that the Indians of Yosemite Valley were “mostly ugly, and some of them altogether hideous.” They “seemed to have no right place in the landscape,” and they disturbed his “solemn calm.”)“The technique is to introduce legislation to achieve some vague, positive-sounding generality, such as ‘worker safety’ or ‘environmental protection’—things no politician will want to go on record voting against. When the legislation is passed and a new regulatory agency is created to enforce it, that’s when the actual decisions are made about what specific restrictions will be imposed and which lands will be removed from human use. Governmental power is passed down to an army of minor bureaucrats who are not accountable to the people and only vaguely accountable to Congress and the president.
“Consider that federal regulatory agencies make thousands of rulings each year, adding about 80,000 pages annually to the Federal Register. Do you think Congress can exercise ‘oversight’ by debating all 80,000 pages of these regulations? Do you think the president, his advisors and his cabinet officers can consider and personally approve all of these decrees? Of course not. By its nature, the federal decree-issuing apparatus cannot be controlled, and it has only one tendency: to impose more regulations and, by filling the federal register with such restrictions, to make private activities like logging grind to a halt.
“These campaigns are proof of the greens’ real motives. They want to stop development and keep the Third World in a state of poverty—while they work to bring the same ideal of poverty to industrialized nations. Most environmentalists embrace this goal, but few dare to admit it openly—so they peddle a variety of ruses to hide their meaning, ranging from ‘sustainable development’ to ‘shrinkth,’ a term suggested by the editor of Earth Island Journal as a less negative-sounding ‘antonym for growth’.”
(Can you guess where that last one comes from? Hint: you agree with them.)
“Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is …” Mr. Albert Gore, ladies and gentleman, Grist magazine.
This tiny set of quotations, culled quickly and more or less at random, doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. If you’d like more, please let me know. I have notebooks full of them.
And so you would have us all now just go along with the latest in envirommental propaganda because you can’t undestand why many of us think it just more, as you say, “doom and gloom”?
Come, now. It hardly takes a genius of induction to learn something vital from so much outright disembling.
McJones wrote: > Ever wonder where Brazil got all that cane and soy from?
No. In fact, my ethanol article appeared months before yours.
McJones wrote: > Read my link and you’ll note that deforestation of the Amazon has been and continues to be one the rise both in rates and real numbers.
Read the FAO stats, which I cite above, and which are based on satellite imagery, as well as the Quality for Environmental Control stats, and you’ll get a clearer picture of actual forest depletion. None of which, incidentally, has anything to do with what I was talking about: namely, pulpwood in this country is specifically farmed for paper. I’m frankly not sure where you and greg got this Amazonian deforestation for mining and agriculture jag.
McJones wrote: > What ever happened to the great American entrepreneurial spirit?
It’s been strangled by mercantilism and interventionism, which you advocate, if you advocate government intervention in the economy. That’s where this great spirit you speak of went. It’s been killed by bigger and bigger government, whether that government is the environmental left or the mercantilistic right. You are, however, correct that the private sector can deal just fine with these “problems” — as long as that sector is left private.
In fact, that is my whole point.
-
micky2 said,
-
micky2 said,
-
greg said,
As for micky2’s comments about the 2003 climate change report, it was commissioned by Andrew Marshall of the Department of Defense. Since 1973 he headed a think tank within the Pentagon whose role was to envision future threats to national security. The DoD’s push on ballistic-missile defense is known as his brainchild. Donald Rumsfeld picked him to lead a sweeping review on military “transformation,” the shift toward nimble forces and smart weapons that was the hallmark of Rumsfeld’s strategic vision. He’s hardly a liberal pansy.
And yes, Schwartz and Randall are futurists, which is good because that was what the report was about – the future. That’s what we need from our governmental planners – vision and hard thinking about what the future holds. It’s better to be proactive than reactive and what would scare me is if no one in the military wasn’t thinking about the future.
The report’s conclusions have also been echoed by others in the defense industry. In March, the U.S. Army War College, again not your namby-pamby liberal front group, funded a two-day conference at the Triangle Institute for Security Studies titled “The National Security Implications of Global Climate Change.” In April, the Military Advisory Board, consisting of eleven senior retired U.S. admirals and generals, including some close advisers to VP Cheney, said much the same thing. Micky2, you may not like what the reports are saying but it’s really hard to deny that our military is paying serious attention to global warming.
What I don’t understand is why there is so much push-back on this issue. You (and I don’t mean to just single you out; it seems to be a widely held view) don’t want to wait for the terrorists to sneak up and destroy us, so we plan for the future. Why is it so hard to get behind the idea that global warming may do the same thing and we should be planning for it, as well? The terrorists may seek to destroy us by a nuclear bomb, they may seek to do it with a nerve gas or a smart bomb, they may crash more airplanes into strategic targets, they may try to assassinate President Bush or any one of a number of possibilities that may happen. I’m sure you wouldn’t suggest we just wait to see if it was certain which one they will try, but to plan for all contingencies. So why is it so difficult to imagine our military doing the same with global warming?
-
greg said,
Gayle said, “China is adding to the problem much more than we are in North America, so I have to wonder why Gore doesn’t ever mention that?” I think Al in fact does mention it.
You’re right, China is a major problem that even they are realizing. I forget who mentioned it but yes, many of the most polluted cities in the world are Chinese and from other countries besides the USA. Kyoto was not perfect by any means and one of the forseeable problems was the fact that emerging developing countries like India and China were not covered by the treaty. That’s why many environmentalists would say that while Kyoto might have been a nice start, it didn’t go far enough.
JMJ is correct in pointing out that insurance companies are among the most impacted industries concerning global warming, and so it should as no surprise that the industry, particularly the reinsurers (the insurance companies that insure the insurance companies) are some of the corporate leaders in global warming policies. So is the global finance industry, so, again, it is not surprising that major global financial institutions such as HSBC, ABN Amro, JPMorgan Chase, Citi and BofA are leaders in global warming initiatives. I have personally worked with all of these institutions on their environmental policies and as they grudgingly began to measure their own carbon footprints and calculate the costs, they discovered something we had been telling them all along: it is very cost-effective to be green. By adopting green building and operational policies within their massive corporate structures, they learned that they could save a whole lot of money and increase their return to their investors.
There is a reason big companies like Wal-Mart are going green. By going green they make more green. As is generally the case in things, if you want to see where environmental trends are headed, FOLLOW THE MONEY!
-
blacktygrrrr said,
I might have to drop by more often…haha.
Greg, I will field your question, since it is valid.
Planning against future threats from terrorism are valid because terrorism has actually happened.
Global warming apocalyptic catastrophes are still theoretical.
Nobody wants to wait for tragedy to say we wish we had acted sooner, but it is much easier to conceptualize future disastrous possibilities when actual atrocities have occurred.
That is just human nature.
eric
-
micky2 said,
Greg said;
As for micky2’s comments about the 2003 climate change report, it was commissioned by Andrew Marshall of the Department of Defense.First of all Greg , this issue goes to both sides of the aisle.
Just as the ethanol hustle was brought upon us after Carter ushered it in on fuel and oil shortage scares in the 70’s;
“We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade” (Former President Jimmy Carter speaking in 1978 to the entire world).Second of all, I would hardly take the word of a futurist , which is all that Marshall is.
Thirdly, He was brought in by Rumsfeld to brainstorm military strategies, not climate change issues and/or predictions.
He is just about anything but a scientistHis writings are more fit for sci fi movies rather than betting your life on something.
“The key, associates say, is to read the writings of his disciples. Or, as one Marshall friend framed it in a ‘Star Wars’ analogy, study the Jedis to learn the teachings of Yoda.
“One Jedi is Andrew F. Krepinevich, a former Army officer who worked with Mr. Marshall in the Net Assessment Office, a bastion of futuristic brainstorming.Greg said;
And yes, Schwartz and Randall are futurists, which is good because that was what the report was about – the future. That’s what we need from our governmental planners – vision and hard thinking about what the future holds. It’s better to be proactive than reactive and what would scare me is if no one in the military wasn’t thinking about the future.With this logic you only make my point for me.
We are talking about something that has not happened yet when the premise is that gerbil warming is a greater threat to our security than terrorism.
When anyone who has been alive at least 10 years knows that terrorism is a real and PRESENT danger that we must deal with today and tomorrow and has been promised in the words of racialist “Is here to stay”Schwartz and Randall are to science what clairvoyants are to police detectives, so please.
Greg said;
“The report’s conclusions have also been echoed by others in the defense industry. In March, the U.S. Army War College, again not your namby-pamby liberal front group, funded a two-day conference at the Triangle Institute for Security Studies titled “The National Security Implications of Global Climate Change.” In April, the Military Advisory Board, consisting of eleven senior retired U.S. admirals and generals, including some close advisers to VP Cheney, said much the same thing. Micky2, you may not like what the reports are saying but it’s really hard to deny that our military is paying serious attention to global warming.”“National security implications of global climate change?”
An implication is hardly fact
Greg said;
“So why is it so difficult to imagine our military doing the same with global warming?”Well, it hasnt attacked our ships , embassies, or flown jets into our buildings and killed thousands of people.
And please don’t throw the natural disasters at me, those were Bush’s faultGreg, terrorism is fact.
Gerbil warming threats are all predictions.Greg said;
don’t want to wait for the terrorists to sneak up and destroy us, so we plan Why is it so hard to get behind the idea that global warming may do the same thing and we should be planning for it, as well?The key word you use is “MAY”.
As opposed to terrorism “HAS” ( on plenty of occasions)In closing I would like to say that I have no problem with taking care of the planet.
As a matter of fact I would be the first one to advocate it.
But don’t scare me into buying a bunch of crap I don’t need. -
micky2 said,
Uh, the “racialist” mentioned above was supposed to be radicals, talk to my spell check about it.
-
greg said,
Antisocialist, again, it’s hard to know where to start here. As I first pointed out and you confirmed, JMJ did NOT say that the majority of paper comes from recycled sources. He said more and more of it comes from recycled sources, which is true, and that the vast majority of paper will be recycled. He’s talking about in the future and I suspect he’s right. It’s certainly the way the industry is moving, even in books. Even when he, too, pointed it out what he said, you still challenged him. Sorry but you’re simply wrong on this point.
As for my elaborately called downhill slide in the paper industry, you’re right on several fronts. Yes, there is a large demand for books, but there is a strong decline in newsprint and other kinds of paper supplies, so overall the industry is having trouble. And yes, it is the law of supply and demand. No surprise there, because the demand for paper is declining.
What you’re wrong about is your description of “an evil little thing called technology, which environmentalism is (of course) statedly opposed to.” Why would you think that? Environmentalism is not opposed to technology. Far from it.
With regard to the “environmental myth” that forests are “mowed down” to produce paper, what I was saying was it’s not an environmental myth that forests are being mowed down to produce paper anywhere in the world because paper is not the problem. Yes, trees are being felled to produce paper but a much greater problem is deforestation caused by other activities, namely agriculture, lumber and extractive industries. And you are right, forestation issues are not as big a concern in the US as they are in other countries, although I’m not sure the issue is between developed and undeveloped countries. Right now, hot spots in forestry issues are found, for example, in Canada, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Australia and China, i.e., a mixture of developed and developing countries.
-
greg said,
eric, welcome! I am for sure not saying that we shouldn’t plan for terrorism and while I don’t totally buy it, I appreciate the argument that global warming is less tangible a threat than terrorism. And I suspect you’re right that it is much easier to conceptualize future disastrous possibilities when actual atrocities have occurred.
But so what? Can’t we plan for both? Why do we have to raise the global warming threat to apocalyptic catastrophic levels before we take it seriously?
-
greg said,
Micky2, here is what former Army chief of staff General Gordon Sullivan said with regard to global warming:
“People are saying they want to be perfectly convinced about climate science projections. But speaking as a soldier, we never have 100 percent certainty. If you wait until you have 100 percent certainty, something bad is going to happen on the battlefield.”
-
antisocialist said,
The vast majority of paper will obviously be recycled if recycling is made mandatory. That’s not in question.
More and more paper comes from recycling only because more and more recycling regulations are being put into place. As stated in the very beginning of my comments, and as Doctor William Rathje points out over and over in Rubbish, and as virtually all waste managment specialists agree, “paper accounts for 40 percent or more of landfill volume. There simply isn’t a market for this amount of recycled paper. Nor are enough mills to process all the paper that could be collected. In addition, de-inking newspaper, which is necessary in order to recycle it, creates a potentially toxic sludge, which sludge, toxic or not, must somewhere be landfilled.”
That’s why this push for mandatory recycling laws leads to the gigantic wastes that it does — and not just waste of the actual products, but of the massive amounts of human time and labor and all the energy that goes into the process.
I’m not sure why you’re having so much difficulty taking this seriously, but that difficulty is a serious problem, and not just in this communication between us. I would challenge you, at the very least, to volunteer at a recycling plant for a few weeks. Honestly, it’s not for nothing that garbagemen the world over universally hate the recycling craze.
Most of all, remember this: you can be absolutely sure that if something is cost effective, it won’t need to be subsidized or made mandatory: the market will take care of it in an instant.
Recylcing is not new, greg. On the contrary, it’s as old as humankind herself.
It sounds, however, that as hard a time as you have taking what I wrote seriously, you by and large end up agreeing with what I’ve said.
However …
greg wrote: > Environmentalism is not opposed to technology. Far from it.
My God, can I please quote you on that?
To address your comment and your question, then — “What you’re wrong about is your description of ‘an evil little thing called technology, which environmentalism is (of course) statedly opposed to.’ Why would you think that? (you ask) — I’ll very happily answer that, and do so once again by giving you the actual words of the enviros, so as to avoid our pesky problem of credentials.
Earth First! (EF!), in their own words, “is a warrior society” that takes a “by any means necessary” approach to “defending mother earth.” The group, they themselves say, “declines to participate in the democratic process, preferring instead to damage, disable, and destroy the property of its ever-growing list of enemies: capitalists.”
“Environmental groups the world over, from greenpeace, to Sierra Club, to Sierra Club’s sister group Earth First! have attacked, verbally or physically, the entire industrial world. Targets include, but are by no means limited to, loggers, ranchers, and farmers — especially those who grow genetically modified crops …” (Readers Digest, Robert Bindinitto).
The Sierra Club website has this resolution: “State and federal laws should be changed to encourage small families and discourage large families.”
Government bureaucrats, in other words, should tell us how many children we are allowed to have. As they do in Communist China, for instance.Have you, greg, heard of the “No Growth Movement”? They, for one, would certainly be willing to debate you that environmentalism is, as you say, for technological progress. In fact, one of their primary tenets is to “revert.”
Private property is the crux of freedom, greg: you cannot, in any meaningful sense, be said to be free if you are not allowed to use the things that you own, including those things necessary to sustain your life. But in the words of one of several environmental groups, “private property is just a sacred cow.” (Greater Yellowstone Report, Greater Yellowstone Coalition.)
“The ending of the human epoch on Earth” (writes philosopher Paul Taylor in Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics) “would most likely be greeted with a hearty ‘Good riddance!’”
Biologist David M. Graber of the U.S. National Park Services calls human beings a “cancer”; in the same article, he goes on to say: “I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true …Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to return to nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” (“Mother Nature as a Hothouse Flower,” Los Angles Times Book Review.)
Do you call that pro-technology and pro-progress?
And these are by no means fringe environmentalists either.
The head of the 1992 Earth Summit asks in all seriousness: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
My lord, man. Do you call that pro-freedom and pro-technology?
Do you know who Dave Foreman is? He’s one of the founders of Earth First! and also has deep ties with Sierra Club, as mainstream as environmentalism gets. “Dave Foreman, in his book Ecodefense: A Field Guide To Monkeywrenching is a how-to for environmental saboteurs. It includes nine chapters of instructions on subjects ranging from tree spiking to destroying roads, from disabling equipment to making smoke bombs.”
Speaking of which, have you read the environmentalist bible The Monkeywrench Gang, by environmental high priest Ed Abbey? Do you, for goodness sake, call that book pro-technology and pro-progress? If you haven’t read it, as environmentalist you must. But I assure you, it’s about as far from pro-technology as it’s humanly possible to get.
How about this:
“Defectors from the environmental movement have told us that Earth First! founder Dave Foreman was approached by the Sierra Club and his employer, the Wilderness Society, in 1979 with an offer to fund a new extremist point group for the movement. It would serve the function of making their own demands look more reasonable … Defectors say that Foreman made the deal by himself in a comfortable Wilderness Society office, and accepted the offer on the condition that funding would be steady and adequate … ‘We thought it would have been useful to have a group to take a tougher position than the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society,’ Foreman remembers. ‘It could be sort of secretly controlled by the mainstream and trotted out at hearings to make the Sierra Club or Wilderness Society look moderate.’
“In his own book, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, Foreman brags: ‘A major accomplishment of Earth First! … has been to expand the environmental spectrum to where the Sierra Club and other groups are perceived as moderates….’” (Activist Cash, Earth First! Foundation).
An issue of the Earth First! journal has an article that reads:
“By every means necessary we will bring this and every other empire down!”“Mutiny and sabotage in defense of Mother Earth!” screamed another recent article. Elsewhere in that same issue: “A snitch is no longer entitled to basic expectations of safety. As such, it is righteous to hurt them, burn down their house or do similarly naughty things to them.”
In 2000, the 20th Anniversary issue of the Earth First! Journal bragged: “The simple idea of putting the earth first had drawn expanding crowds of hippies, anarchists, animal rights activists and all sorts of riffraff.” The kind of people who “riff” alphabet songs like this one:
I is incendiary, like burning ‘dozers
J is for jail time, and other enclosures
K is for kill, what they’ll do if they catch you.”You call that pro-progress?
How about this then:
In 2002, the Earth First! Journal published a two-page spread called “Most-Wanted Eco-terrorists: the Biotechnology Industry.” Claiming that “everyone at Monsanto is an eco-terrorist,” it opened with a line that has become emblematic of green radicals everywhere: “The Earth is not dying, it is being killed by corporations such as the biotechnology industries, and the people who are killing it have names and addresses.” The article then went on to list names and addresses.
But this is all academic. I could go on with these for days — I haven’t even flipped to page 3, honestly — but what, finally, is the point here? Do you really not know that environmentalism is antagonistic to human progress? But there is no real dispute that environmentalism is anti-growth and anti-technology, even, and especially, among the environmentalists themselves. Candidly, I’m astonished that you aren’t aware of this. The main thing is — and this is also in answer to your closing query to Eric — freedom versus coercion.
“The legitimate functions of our government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others,” said Thomas Jefferson.
That is government’s only function.
The function of government is not paternal, and it is not coercive. It does not expropriate property, or support environtmental land grabs. The United States Constitution makes the right to life, liberty, and property inalienable and absolute. Instead of telling me “You’re wrong on this, antisocialist, and you’re clearly wrong on that, antisocialist” why don’t you go back to the fundamentals: what are the proper functions of government and why? What does the inalienable right to life and property mean? What is property? What is a right?
As hard a time as you will have taking that seriously, I’m afraid it’s all Constitutional. Rather than trying to legislate away the Constitution with ersatz environmental laws and regulations, why don’t you people just move to a country whose constitution does not guarantee us the absolute right to our own lives, as we want to live them and not as the environmentalists want us to live them, and our own private property as well? Why?
In the words of Karl Marx, “Control the property, control the person.”
In the words of Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore: “Environmentalism is repackaged Marxism.”
-
Jersey McJones said,
Okay Micky, I am now going to attempt to debate all your good points while maintaining the Tygrrrr’s noted decorum. Let’s do it.
I said;
“But intertia is a fact of the universe so unless change is forced, intertia will prevent change”You said:
“FORCED ?
Inertia promotes its own change, its called the movement of man as a society to go on to invent need by reason of demand. We have always come up with alternatives via the free market as opposed to “FORCE” which is the exact opposite of freedom.”Please allow me to say that I thought it was clear that I was talking about a “fact of the universe” - a physical law - inertia opposes force. It seems clear to me that what you are saying involves inertia causing a force. Okay. In political debate, that’s fair. But also would it not be fair to say that there are political forces driving that political inertia? Certainly you can see that there are large vested polluting interests who are forcing back in the opposite direction.
I cited:
Global climate change, if left unaddressed, is likely to pose “as a great or a greater foreign policy and national security challenge than any problem” the United States currently faces, according to a major new report released here Monday by two influential Washington think tanks.
To whihc you said,
“Once again this is where debate is useless unless the word “LIKELY is taken out.
It is “LIKELY” that terrorist will blow us all up, but not probable.”Micky, likely and probable are the same. It is not likely that terrorists will blow us all up. It is likely, according to thousands of scientists, that we are effecting a change in world climate. As we have EVOLVED to adapt to particular climatic dynamics, a new set of dynmaics may well be very problematic to our survival.
You cited from my link,
“The only comparable experience for many in the group was considering what the aftermath of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange might have entailed during the height of the Cold War,” according to the 119-page study, “The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change.”
And then,
“Climate change could have global security implications on a par with nuclear war unless urgent action is taken, a report said on Wednesday,” Jeremy Lovell of Reuters wrote on September 12. Lovell didn’t include any expert skeptical about climate change or its near-nuclear impact on the globe.”
To which you said,
“If you read anything on the link its full of words like “MIGHT”
“MAYBE”
“PROBABLY”
“SUGGEST”
“PLAUSIBLE”
“Under a worst-case scenario, that nonetheless remains “plausible” ””That’s science, Micky. Unlike dogmatic religion or ideology, science does not always provide perfect surity of belief.
Then you do a 180 and say this,
“We have an old Clinton devotee in the works, so now we immediatly have politics in the mix which makes the whole arguement null and void. And absolutley biased.”
Which is it? Are we exploring probailities or laying out presumed surities? You can’t have it both ways. We are not the ones being dogmatic here, it seems.
I said,
“Capitalists should be grabbing this baby by the horns and figuring out ways to make some money making the Earth a clearer and safer place to live.”
To which you said,
“Unfortunatly none of these who are already capitolizing on the green thing could care less about the enviroment.
Its evident for anyone to see that this capitalistic play on our emotions is already in full play, you cant get away from it, its everywhere, dont even get me started.”I’m not sure what you’re saying here. You think the outreach to a capitalistic approach to dealing with the problem as playing on your heartstrings? I don’t know about that. All I was saying was that with the right incentives (that forcing metaphor I was using) and a little look to the future (science) we could see whole new industries and professions born of a serious take on this issue.
You said,
“As far as the Amazon deforestation goes, I see you failed to read the Antisocialists facts on the issue. He list 7 resources that totally displace any credibility your link offers.
They are blaming the US for what “MIGHT” happen on projected scales”No. My link did not “blame the US” for anything. It was simply pointing out that ethanol subsidies to Brazil are lending to the deforestation of the rainforest. It’s a three-way street at least. You have the ethanol crowd (not liberal lefties), the Free Traders, the US gov’t in their pockets, and a Brazil that’s weak on protecting the Amazon. That’s all. I can’t imagine arguing any of that. They are facts.
As for the political bent of the aforementioned study, these bodies are run and operated by profe