Posted on 03/31/2008 3:05:08 PM PDT by Crazieman
A group of environmental activists has enlisted Google to help flood the congressional switchboard with one million phone calls on Earth Day urging lawmakers to enact eco-friendly measures.
"We're really excited about this because Congress keeps saying they don't hear from the American public on climate change," said Kathleen Rogers, president of Earth Day Network, which bills itself as an eco-activism group connecting some 17,000 organizations in 174 countries. "The [presidential] candidates are not being asked about climate change. Climate change is the biggest threat to humanity that we've ever faced."
Rogers said her group is finalizing talks with Internet giant Google to coordinate online advertisements and other publicity measures in support of the calls. Details of the arrangement are still being worked out and are scheduled to be released on April 14.
Google has consistently shown support for environmental causes, most recently on Saturday night when its homepage went dark in support of Earth Hour, an hour when cities around the globe went dark to draw attention to the issue of climate change. On Earth Day in the past, Google has decorated its homepage to highlight the event as well. Google did not respond to requests for comment.
Rogers said she wasn't worried about the switchboard being overwhelmed by the calls. She said she was assured by the office handling congressional calls that staff could handle 1.3 million calls during a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. period.
(Excerpt) Read more at video1.washingtontimes.com ...
With our good friend Juan McAmnesty, Google’s environuts will be heard and given laws the laws they want.
Sickening. The inmates are running the asylum.
Is google planning to instigate a denial-of-service attack on the capitol switchboard?
I hope that is not the case.
If so, every Blog or political website the promotes call to the White House or Capitol switchboard would face the same charges.
LOL.
Sometimes there's nothing to do but laugh and point.
I see the Gorebot in on this for sure; Chicken Little Lunacy beyond limit.
After the Sun slows down from it’s recent hyper activity, (Probably happening now) expect much cooler temps, more wet weather and long cold winters in the next several years.
The latest report was that scientists have not seen such a lack of Solar activity since the Little Ice Age. They fear another Solar minimum. Hopefully, this will happen rapidly to quell the stupidity of these idiots before they do us irreparable damage.
But realistically, they will blame Gorebull Warming for what ever happens, and the stupid public will believe them.
Or else they will take credit for having made a difference so quickly in order to keep hold of their political power.
I suppose any company with a motto of “do no evil”, sets a pretty unachievable standard. But for “Google™ the good’, the corporate image is rapidly becoming more tarnished. Quite apart from the controversial debates about supporting censorship in China, we are seeing the increasing tensions between Google as the liberal promoter of scientific neutrality, and Google as the global, corporate juggernaut. What is becoming apparent is the need for online search engines to adopt a moral and ethical code relating to the use of information as both a raw material and a fertile mine collated from other sources.
Google's motto of Do No Evil is taking a beating
Now they are taking positions on controversial issues
And acting more and more socialist every day...
Losing even the moral high-ground of intellectual neutrality
One million calls? Good. Maybe it will shut the damn thing down for a while.
I think we should shut down every possible phone number we can find for Google itself.
How many boats will it take to ship one million socialist idiots one-way to North Korea?
The possibility of anthropogenic climate change is enough to concern any reasonable person who does not restrict his/her reading to Exxon/Heritage Foundation’s talking points. Just because climate change plays right into the hands of global socialists—doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Sure the likely effects have been exaggerated (or disregarded) by those with an agenda. But, you don’t raise greehouse gas in the atmosphere by 40%, watch temperatures increase by 1.5 degrees in a century, and bury your head in the sand. Google is well within its rights to support a cause it believes in—and unlike Exxon, it is not doing so for personal gain. Good job Google.
Whether this is true, is not the point
Google can best advance the aggregate knowledge and wisdom of this generation by standing by their self stated mission to “Do No Harm” and remain an impartial arbiter of information. By “Taking Stands”, they lose the robust moral high-ground of intellectual neutrality, and sacrifice themselves of the rocks of political stands.
Truth, when made widely available, will win out
Falsehood will wither...
For a bunch of PHDs in CS, these guys are idiots. Making too much money playing on computers. Or just trying to inflate stock in “green” companies they have invested in.
So is that after we burned their phone lines down over the immigration thing and they upgraded...or does that mean over 1.3 million people called during the immigration thing?
Climate change is the biggest threat to humanity that we’ve ever faced.”
***********
Madness. People have lost their marbles.
In other words, a big business.
That’s probably the most presumptious thing I have ever read. You are going to tell Google that it shouldn’t have a voice in its world. I applaud those companies that try to use their influence to accomplish what they believe is good for humanity. Do you feel the same way when they honor the 4th of July, honor the troops, support breast cancer awareness? Of course not. The content is what you object to—make no mistake about it.
Or maybe they heard somewhere that the National Academy of Science, the Bush Administration, NOAA, the overwhelming majority of scientists, and the US Supreme Court suggested that there is enough evidence to take the concern of climate change very seriously.
Hi lefty! Nice knowing you’re in here.
How about we just return to stone knives and bearskins?
Guaruntee that won’t work. That giant ball of fire in the sky might have something to do with it, you know.
I have made many personal changes in an attempt to be a better steward of our aggregate Earth-based resources. I am, by training, both a Physician, and a Nuclear Engineer. The international issues of use and misuse of energy are of great interest to me. It is a Conservative ideal to Conserve.
Google has set itself up as an impartial arbiter of information
I use that data daily.
The best way they can help this discussion is to be themselves
Let Politicians be politicians,
Google does best when it gives all available data as efficiently as possible
Not by attempting to direct policy
Natural variation has dwarfed that even alleged to have occurred as a result of AGW.
And if the noise is greater than the signal, you're screwed.
Cheers!
Please give citations -- and then the evidence that there are both
a) sufficient qualifications on the part of each group cited (WTF does the Supreme Court know of meteorology and magnetohydrodynamics?)
b) sufficient evidence of no ulterior motives or conflicts of interest (NOAA stands to get a LOT more funding if they propose doomsday scenarios).
If you allow yourself the liberty to dismiss the work of Exxon scientists out of hand (or Phillip Morris, or Schering-Plough, or...), and act as though the mere name-dropping is disposative of the issue, you're going to get it right back.
Cheers!
Time to ungoogle.
Yup, Google's name is derived from zeros for followers.
The {World-Wide Web} {search engine} that indexes the greatest number of web pages - over two billion by December 2001 and provides a free service that searches this index in less than a second. The site's name is apparently derived from "{googol}", but note the difference in spelling. The "Google" spelling is also used in "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams, in which one of Deep Thought's designers asks, "And are you not," said Fook, leaning anxiously foward, "a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?"
Yup, I googled this info.
This lefty has been here since 2001, believes that he who governs least governs best, supports the right to bear arms, stands at the polls for Republicans in every election, and has a dartboard with Bill Maher’s face on it. I don’t want to go back to the stone age, or even see the US adopt a carbon market. I do however, want to take serious issues seriously—and I won’t bury my head in the sand because I am scared or because liberals got to the issue first.
Not sure I am ready to dictate to Google when it should be socially conscious—but I am impressed by your background and commitment, and appreciate the respectful nature of your post. Best regards.
If you don’t already know the difference in credentials between the Academy of Science and Exxon, I can’t help you. Do you think comparing NOAA or the Natural Academy to the tobacco “scientists” is some kind of a zinger? The Supreme Court case is Massachusetts v. EPA (2007). I think the Justices do a good job of identify the issues, especially Justice Roberts. He’s a pretty bright guy. If you seriously doubt what the majority of scientists think, go to anything national conference where the sponsors don’t hide behind a discreet foundation or institute. At the same time the Heartland Circus in New York had no non-anonomous corporate sponsors, WIREC was supported by just about every major energy company, state, and nation. You don’t need a degree in magnetohydrodynmics to understand why.
Recall the IPCC and how many of the scientists claim that the boilerplate conclusions on the outside contradicted their own findings on the inside. The mere imprimatur of some organization on the outside is not enough, for me, to guarantee objectivity on such a topic where the flow of grant $$$ is likely to be affected.
The general rule is, "The more someone knows about a subject, the greater the potential for conflicts of interest."
This goes in *both* directions, with governmental funding as well as corporate funding, as government is just as anxious to increase its power and scope, as a company to maintain market share and prevent regulatory costs.
The Supreme Court case is Massachusetts v. EPA (2007).
Can you give me a link? Did the Supremes act as "finders of fact" or handle arcane legal points? -- choosing between Massachusetts and the EPA (on its face) seems like choosing between Hillary and Obama.
If you seriously doubt what the majority of scientists think, go to anything national conference where the sponsors don’t hide behind a discreet foundation or institute. At the same time the Heartland Circus in New York had no non-anonomous corporate sponsors, WIREC was supported by just about every major energy company, state, and nation.
Ahh, argument by consensus, or argument by authority?
The mere presence of a majority is not a valid scientific argument; the state of the art in climatology is not at a point where the relative importance of all the variables are agreed upon, let alone correctly modeled (e.g. cloud formation acts to either increase or decrease temperatures, depending on which behaviours of clouds are being considered); and open sponsorship by companies and nations could just as well be hoping to advance agendas dependent upon acceptance of global warming, as evidence of the 'truth' of the phenomenon.
I have not heard a call from any of the usual suspects asking for drastic reductions in emissions by India, China, or the rest of the Third World, despite their increasing consumption of fossil fuels; nor any consideration of the relative *inefficiency* of ethanol to fuel automobiles.
If the supporters of the AGW hypothesis didn't jump on every anti-Western solution as a matter of course, and if they were more critical of proposed solutions, to see if the proposals would actually be cost-effective, it would be easier to accept that they were motivated by trying to "save the planet". But even then, the admissions of outright exaggerations and lies, justified in order to perform 'consciousness raising', lead me to believe that they are guided primarily by ulterior motives.
Hint: if we're really at "peak oil" as so many of the self-annointed seem to claim, then AGW is self-limiting.
Cheers!
NAS - political
Bush Admin - political
NOAA - maybe
Overwhelming majority of scientists - not even.
SCOTUS - Huh??? And they know Earth Science, how?
Look, when the solutions proposed are real solutions that involve money laundering (transfer), getting rich off of nothing, and destroying the lifestyle of the middle class and poor, then I will believe GW. How does “transferring credits” actually slow down or reduce greenhouse gases?? Company A gives Company B money for its credits. Company is still producing too much greenhouse gas and Company B now has the money to increase production which will just produce more gas!!
GW
Your post makes a lot of sense. Note that I, like you, don’t favor a carbon market. I am not a fan of the UN or the IPCC by extension—but most of the contradictions came from a small minority of vocal individuals. I hate to say this, but the easiest way to pull the Mass v. EPA decision is to just google those terms plus “supreme court.” There is, in fact, a growing cry for some third world reductions, but there is a problem with us telling them that they can’t have our standard of living because we got there first. I am in full agreement that any efforts to “save the planet” must be circumspect and fair. I just think that it benefits us all to acknoweledge that there is a potential problem with AGW.
I want to think carefully how to respond, lest I ruin a good thing.
Cheers!
Fortunately for her, but not for you, today is my daughter's birthday and I will be leaving for festivities soon.
I promise I have not forgotten your post -- can you wait until this evening?
Cheers!
Take your time. I hope the ankle improves quickly.
Placemarker.
Bookmark for belated reply #2
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