Posts filed under 'Environment'
Al Gore’s new boat - the B.S. One:
But the question persists as to whether he (Gore) actually buys into what he is selling. His own behavior clearly indicates that he doesn’t believe we are at a “tipping point” of worldwide environmental destruction. While he preaches that the rest of us must dramatically change our lifestyles and lower our standards of living to “save the planet” he lives by another set of rules himself.
It happens in the air, where he jets about in private planes that consume massive amounts of energy to spread his message of “conservation.”
His hypocrisy is revealed on land, where he travels in fleets of limos and SUVs to deliver speeches about the dire consequences of ignoring “man-made global warming” — and leaves the cars running throughout his entire speech in order to ensure that they will be nice and cool when he exits the building and returns to his gas-guzzling vehicles.
His supposedly “green” mansion consumes electricity that dwarfs the consumption of the typical family home.
And now, in order to complete his hypocrisy trifecta, Al Gore may now be extending his excessive consumption to the water as well. In an amazing display of conspicuous consumption, even for Al Gore, his new 100-foot houseboat that docks at the Hurricane Marina in Smithville, Tennessee is creating a critical buzz among many of his former congressional constituents. Dubbed “Bio-Solar One,” which may reflect some latent Air Force One envy, Gore has proudly strutted the small-town dock claiming that his monstrous houseboat is environmentally friendly. (Only Al Gore would name his boat B.S. One and not get the joke. Or perhaps the joke is on us?)
There really is a sucker born every five minutes and these days they are easily identifiable - they are all leftwingers.
Tags: Al Gore, liberal lies
August 10th, 2008
While I’ve admired President Bush for many reasons, what I could never understand was the President’s reluctance to answer the many unfounded, over-the-top criticisms and out-and-out attacks that were foisted upon him by the left of this nation.
Paul Kengor addresses this in a must-read piece at the American Thinker. For all of the Bush Administration’s successes, most notably his success via perseverance of his Iraq war policy, President Bush’s “new tone” policy set the stage for the relentless, unanswered barrages of assaults by the leftists of this nation and around the world.
The “feel-good” language espoused by many democrats regarding “getting along” and their supposed pining to end the “politics of personal destruction,” in the end, of course, was so much political puffery. On the other hand, George Bush’s “new tone” was not only a buzzword, but S.O.P. for his administration. As with nearly every aspect of his administration (and what those on the left could never fathom nor abide), Bush actually meant what he said and said what he meant when he proclaimed that he would establish “a new tone” in Washington.
Paul Kengor asserts that Bush’s “new tone” was a spinoff of his adherence to his evangelical Christian roots; specifically with regard to the principle of “turning the other cheek (Luke 6:29).”
While a president’s abiding by principle is certainly to be lauded, the application of this principle to Bush’s leftist detractors during his administration yielded disastrous, and yes, even dangerous results. Turning the other cheek allowed the leftists to set the agenda for debate, and allowed them relatively free rein in their efforts to dangerously damage the morale of this country with carte-blanche levels of seditious rhetoric and out-and-out falsehoods. Bush’s “new tone” allowed the leftist elements of this country to give licentious aid and comfort to America’s enemies during a time when our sons and daughters were in harm’s way, giving our enemies encouragement to climb out of their caves and kill another day. Bush’s “new tone” has made it much easier for democrats and other leftist elements to continue relatively unabated on a roll of propaganda based on contrivances that continues to this day, on every issue from energy to foreign policy.
Unfortunately, the Bush Administration’s failure to utilize the bully pulpit to answer unjust criticism and attacks from detractors has left those of us on the right side of the aisle to do all the heavy lifting; which was all well and good, but not enough.
President Bush has many legislative and policy accomplishments for which to be proud. But public opinion and debate in the arena of ideas are also matters of import.
It is my opinion that President Bush’s “new tone” policy is a virtual handbook of how not to play the game.
Tags: Leftwing Alternate Universe, President Bush, The Fifth Column
July 21st, 2008
Ah, what a wonderous thing is global warming - it even causes glaciers:
The glaciers on Mount Shasta in California are growing because of global warming, experts say.
“When people look at glaciers around the world, the majority of them are shrinking,” said Slawek Tulaczyk, a University of California, Santa Cruz, professor who studied the glaciers.
But the seven glaciers on Shasta, part of the Cascade mountains in northern California, “seem to be benefiting from the warming ocean,” he said.
As the ocean warms, more moisture evaporates. As moisture moves inland, it falls as snow — enough on Shasta to more than offset a 1 C temperature rise in the past century.
The three smallest of the Shasta glaciers are more than twice the length they were in 1950.
Other glaciers in Norway, Sweden, New Zealand and Pakistan were in the same position as Shasta, but are now shrinking because rising temperatures have more than offset the increased snowfall.
Of course, they go on to say that 90% of the world’s glaciers are shrinking - which sounds like a made-up stat simply because most glaciers are in pretty inaccessible areas and thus can’t be measured and, more importantly, haven’t really been measured for any length of time which would permit us to say, definitively, that Glacier A is getting smaller overall than it used to be.
But is there anything that global warming can’t be used for? I heard on the radio the other day that global warming is causing a rise in kidney stones…I fully expect that global warming will eventually be blamed for literally everything…and the coolest thing about it is that no matter what happens, the global warming zealots can say it proves they are right…glaciers shrinking? Global warming. Glaciers growing? Global warming…and no fair pointing out that is some are growing and some are shrinking, wouldn’t this tend to indicate a cyclical nature of our climate rather than a theory that we’re all gonna die unless we listen to Al Gore?
Tags: Climate Change, global warming
July 16th, 2008
Can’t win for losing with these nuts:
Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years.
The Bureau of Land Management says an extensive environmental study is needed to determine how large solar plants might affect millions of acres it oversees in six Western states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.
But the decision to freeze new solar proposals temporarily, reached late last month, has caused widespread concern in the alternative-energy industry, as fledgling solar companies must wait to see if they can realize their hopes of harnessing power from swaths of sun-baked public land, just as the demand for viable alternative energy is accelerating.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Holly Gordon, vice president for legislative and regulatory affairs for Ausra, a solar thermal energy company in Palo Alto, Calif. “The Bureau of Land Management land has some of the best solar resources in the world. This could completely stunt the growth of the industry”…
…Alex Daue, an outreach coordinator for the Wilderness Society, an environmental conservation group, praised the government for assessing the implications of large-scale solar development.
Some enviros say “go solar” and then other say “halt construction because there’s a squirrel out there”(and yes, the fate of a rat with a fluffy tail - ie, a squirrel - is one of the concerns). Pick one, already. Life ain’t perfect and there’s always a trade-off - in order to go solor we are going to have to actually build stuff, which will mean that part of that natural environment you whackos are always on about will have to be modified for human use…but the payoff will be less greenhouse emissions and thus we’ll be “fixing” that global warming nonsense you’ve been having a heart attack about lately.
Tags: Climate Change, global warming, oil price, solar energy
June 27th, 2008
From NRO’s The Corner:
A friend on the Hill writes:
Today marked a new low for the way congressional Democrats deal with national security. This morning, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a joint hearing on a “National Intelligence Assessment” on global climate change. This analysis was ordered by the Democratic Congress last year and was issued a few weeks ago. Some highlights (or low-lights) from the hearing:
1) In response to a question by Global Warming Committee member Greg Walden (R-OR), the Intelligence Community admitted they had “low to medium confidence” in the accuracy of this estimate because intelligence officers lack the expertise to write such an estimate (it was mostly contracted out to other organizations) and climate change science is so uncertain. As Walden started to ask about why an analysis of such low reliability was issued, Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA), the Global Warming Committee Chairman, cut him off and told him he was out of time even though Markey let all the previous Democrats speak substantially past their time limits.
2) Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Peter asked what intelligence was used for this estimate and whether intelligence collection requirements were prepared. National Intelligence Council Chairman Thomas Fingar said no clandestine intelligence was used and that intelligence officers extrapolated what would happen if the “mid-level estimates” by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were correct. When Hoekstra asked why the U.S. Intelligence Community would write an major analysis of low to medium confidence that contained no intelligence, Fingar answered, “because you [Congress] told us to.”
3) Hoekstra noted that intelligence assessments of high confidence have proven to be wrong and he wondered why an intelligence assessment of low to medium confidence would even be published. In an attempt to dispel the debate over confidence, Intelligence Committee member Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (D-CA) responded by noting that the 2002 Iraq WMD NIE had high confidence in its findings. Some Republicans thought Rep. Eshoo’s statement actually made their case about the futility of issuing an intelligence assessment that intelligence officers cannot fully back.
If Obama gets in, we can expect mountains of nonsense like this - a whole slew of laws, hearings, regulations and campaigns which sound like they’re about something, but are really about liberals burnishing their own self-image. One of the many problems with liberals is that their ranks are heavily laced with bureaucrats, lawyers, judges, activists, community organizers…people who, in short, don’t actually do anything in the sense of actually producing an end product usable by Joe Average. Of course there is an intelligence estimate on global warming…because it is the biggest threat we face, and we’re going to really go after it, including the CIA! And liberals who thought this up will pat themselves on the back and thing they’ve done something - just as they do after they recycle, or vote for a guy who will increase government spending.
The irrationality here is astounding, but not actually surprising - given that the Democrats (who absurdly call themselves “the reality based community” on the strength of their rejection of Christian teaching on abortion and sexuality) have cut themselves off from the source of reason and are adrift on a sea of inconsequential, mental cobweb spinning. The more one thinks about it, the more silly the whole concept of allowing a Democrat to run the show becomes - they just don’t have what it takes to run a government…heck, they don’t have what it takes to run a boy scout troop (that does take some personal responsibility, ya know?).
Tags: Climate Change, global warming, liberal lies
June 26th, 2008
After years of propaganda even more relentless than that we’ve had in the United States, turns out that most Brits still doubt the enviro-whacko global warming narrative:
Ipsos MORI polled 1,039 adults and found that six out of 10 agreed that ‘many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change’, and that four out of 10 ’sometimes think climate change might not be as bad as people say’. In both cases, another 20 per cent were not convinced either way. Despite this, three quarters still professed to be concerned about climate change.
Those most worried were more likely to have a degree, be in social classes A or B, have a higher income, said Phil Downing, Ipsos MORI’s head of environmental research.
‘People are broadly concerned, but not entirely convinced,’ said Downing. ‘Despite many attempts to broaden the environment movement, it doesn’t seem to have become fully embedded as a mainstream concern,’ he said.
The common sense of the average person just doesn’t swallow this sort of nonsense - as Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time. Average temperaturs - as far as we know, and to call our data “incomplete” is to over-state our knowledge - have rise, but over the past 10 years they’ve been stable, which is something absolutely impossible if the anthropogenic global warming theory is correct. And yet there go the environmentalists and various cheerleaders saying it is real and we must act fast. Its gotten so bad that even President Bush and John McCain have signed off on this, though I wonder if part of the motivation for this would be a desire to get past an un-winnable debate (we long ago lost the global warming debates to the enviro-whackos - only time and the actual fact that we don’t all die will prove them wrong) and move forward on to environmental clean up on the perfectly reasonable position that its good to clean up messes and, meanwhile, if we GOPers stay in charge of it we won’t get regressive, impoverishing, anti-human laws and regulations as the left fanatically desires.
Tags: Climate Change, global warming
June 22nd, 2008
Excellent:
It takes a very short leap in logic to wonder why we produce less and less crude oil, while we use more and more of it, or why politicians talk so much about promoting alternative energy sources, but often do so little to promote these alternatives. A reasonable observer, presented only with these numbers of consumption and production, might draw the conclusion that America has accepted this fate because we have no choice in the matter, or because we have no resources of our own. But just the opposite is true: We do have resources, and we do have a choice.
In oil, gas, and coal deposits, we have enormous energy reserves of our own. And we are gaining the means to use these resources in cleaner, more responsible ways. As for offshore drilling, it’s safe enough these days that not even Hurricanes Katrina and Rita could cause significant spillage from the battered rigs off the coasts of New Orleans and Houston. Yet for reasons that become less convincing with every rise in the price of foreign oil, the federal government discourages offshore production.
At the very least, one might assume, America had surely been building new refineries to achieve a more efficient delivery of gasoline to market, and thereby to lower the prices paid by the American people — especially in the summer season. But the policymakers in Washington haven’t got around to that, either. There’s so much regulation of the industry that the last American refinery was built when Jerry Ford was president.
As for nuclear energy — a proven energy source that requires zero emissions — we haven’t built a new reactor in 31 years. In Europe and elsewhere, they have been expanding their use of nuclear energy. But we’ve waited so long that we’ve lost our domestic capability to even build these power plants. Nuclear power is among the surest ways to gain a clean, abundant, and stable energy supply, as other nations understand. One nation today has plans to build almost 50 new reactors by 2020. Another country plans to build 26 major nuclear stations. A third nation plans to build enough nuclear plants to meet one quarter of all the electricity needs of its people — a population of more than a billion people. Those three countries are China, Russia, and India. And if they have the vision to set and carry out great goals in energy policy, then why don’t we?
So, taking stock of our energy situation, it is time we draw a few sensible conclusions of our own. In their sum effect on the American economy, the policies of our government could hardly have left us more dependent had they been designed to do precisely that.
There is plenty of blame to go around here - GOPers and Democrats have been remiss in their responsibilities to the nation as a whole as it relates to energy policy. Again and again President Bush proposed various measures we could have been taking over the past 7 years to reduce our dependency on oil and cut our oil imports, but no action has been taken - not under the GOP Congress, not under the Democratic Congress. That $50 you just shovelled into your gas tank is the result of decade after decade of doing nothing - or, worse, actually working against energy independence by over-concern about overblown environmentalist fearmongers and/or the worst sort of “nimbyism” which makes out that everyone wants energy, but no one wants it produced within a country mile of themselves.
It is time for a change - a real change; not more of the same from Obama and not pie-in-the-sky hopes for the future…we have oil, gas, coal and nuclear power sources, and we should be working out ways to maximize domestic energy production, while the high technology change over to new sources of energy is placed on the back burner until we get our energy house in order. McCain proposes to hit the problem head on and deal with it in a realistic manner - in spite of his bows to the global warming zealots, it is clear that he’s not going to allow environmentalist whackos to set energy policy. Clean, yes; but not so clean that nothing gets done. Human activity will always produce waste, and things like this are always a series of trade-offs with no perfect solution possible. Absent a few billion of us dying, we’re just going to have to work with things as they are, not as we might wish them to be.
Tags: energy policy, John McCain, oil price
June 19th, 2008
According to this rather nasty greenhouse calculator courtesy of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation - the test is a series of questions entirely loaded towards proving any normal person to be an environmental cretin. The more normal you are, the larger the pig you’ll be and thus the earlier you should have croaked so that you can save the planet - though in all the times I’ve heard us being told to save the planet, I’ve never really heard a good explanation of what we’re saving it for…given that the inevitible end of the earth is, well, the end of the earth and that pile of recycled soda cans won’t be doing anyone a bit of good when that happens.
Anyways, if you live in an apartment with four or more people, always walk/bike, spend less than 10 grand a year and donate money to enviornmentalist causes, then the calculator will tell you that you can live forever; the new sainthood for our secular materialists is St. Sustainable…the belief in nothing outside the material world and in the utter worthlessness of mankind and his wicked deeds.
Thanks, but I think I’ll remain human…
Tags: Climate Change, global warming, junk science
June 14th, 2008
The news story:
Each April, weather wizard William Gray emerges from his burrow near the Rocky Mountains to offer his forecast for the six-month hurricane season that starts June 1. And the news media are there, breathlessly awaiting his every word.
It’s a lot like Groundhog Day - and the results are worth just about as much.
“The hairs on the back of my neck don’t stand up,” ho-hums Craig Fugate, director of emergency management for Florida, the state that got raked by four hurricanes - three of them “major” - in 2004. When it comes to preparing, he says, these long-range forecasts “are not useful at all.”
But climate models which claim to tell us what the global average temperature will be in 50 years are useful?
The problem the anthropogenic global warming enthusiasts have is that anyone who actually sits down and thinks about will come to the “you can’t possibly know that” conclusion.
Tags: Climate Change, global warming
May 31st, 2008
Lets see if the Goron has any guts at all:
Washington - Czech President Vaclav Klaus said Tuesday he is ready to debate Al Gore about global warming, as he presented the English version of his latest book that argues environmentalism poses a threat to basic human freedoms. “I many times tried to talk to have a public exchange of views with him, and he’s not too much willing to make such a conversation,” Klaus said. “So I’m ready to do it.”
Klaus was speaking a the National Press Building in Washington to present his new book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles - What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?, before meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney Wednesday.
“My answer is it is our freedom and, I might add, and our prosperity,” he said.
Gore a former US vice president who has become a leading international voice in the cause against global warming, was co-winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Gore’s effort was highlighted by his Oscar winning documentary film An Inconvienent Truth.
Klaus, an economist, said he opposed the “climate alarmism” perpetuated by environmentalism trying to impose their ideals, comparing it to the decades of communist rule he experienced growing up in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia.
“Like their (communist) predecessors, they will be certain that they have the right to sacrifice man and his freedom to make their idea reality,” he said.
“In the past, it was in the name of the Marxists or of the proletariat - this time, in the name of the planet,” he added.
Klaus said a free market should be used to address environmental concerns and said he oppposed as unrealistic regulations or greenhouse gas capping systems designed to reduce the impact of climate change.
“It could be even true that we are now at a stage where mere facts, reason and truths are powerless in the face of the global warming propaganda,” he said.
Klaus alleged that the global warming was being championed by scientists and other environmentalists whose careers and funding requires selling the public on global warming.
That pretty much says it all about the motivations behind global warming alarmism - just another attempt at making a utopia on earth, and the only thing we have to sacrifice is the Common Man…’cause the elites, once again, have need of his blood and treasure for one more attempt at getting it right.
I think, though, that Klaus is right about facts and reason having no place here - it is my view that we have utterly lost the global warming debate; not on facts and reason, but because of relentless, alarmist propaganda, all too often joined in by politicians on the make and grant-mongering institutions and individuals. But if Gore has the courage of his convictions - if he really thinks that the truths of global warming are so solid - then he’ll take Klaus up on his challenge…and if he doesn’t, then just what are we to make of such an act of cowardice?
Tags: Al Gore, Climate Change, global warming, liberal lies, Vaclav Klaus
May 28th, 2008
Older Posts
