Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 11/05/2009 5:34:38 AM PST by Kaslin
The ABC News headline this week said it all: “U.S. Must Lead Way in Clean Energy Technology, Agency Heads Say; Administration Officials Push for the Swift Passing of Kerry-Boxer Climate Change Legislation.”
It’s that second part—about the need for swift passage of global warming legislation—that tells the whole story.
Of course President Obama wants quick passage. For months the public has focused on the bruising health care fight taking place in Washington. Along with congressional allies like John Kerry, Barbara Boxer, and Nancy Pelosi, Obama would like nothing better than to rush global warming regulation through congress before the public can turn proper attention to a proposal under which, as the President himself has put it, “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”
But that’s just part of what proponents of a costly cap-and-trade system would rather the public not hear. The president’s advisers would like to ram through their climate proposals before the public catches wind of the overwrought rhetoric bubbling up from the fevered swamps of global warming alarmism.
Consider the interview Lord Nicholas Stern gave to The Times of London decrying the carbon content of people’s food. “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases,” he said. “I am not sure that people fully understand what we are talking about or the kind of changes that will be necessary” to stave off global warming.
Give up meat to save the planet? That seems to be what he is saying. The old saw used to be that meat is murder. Now it’s suicide. Lord Stern is no gadfly crank, either. He is the most distinguished authority on climate change in the United Kingdom, and authored a landmark 2006 study on global warming economics. More than anyone, Lord Stern advanced the controversial notion that we can constrain our economies today to ward off tomorrow’s climate catastrophe. Now he says we must become vegetarians too.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, meanwhile, claims failure to pass a new Kyoto-style agreement at December’s global warming summit will doom us. Literally. “If we do not reach a deal at this time, let us be in no doubt: once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no retrospective global agreement, in some future period, can undo that choice,” he said. Hear that? We have just weeks to save the planet.
Issuing imprudent and hyperbolic rhetoric about climate is not solely a British disease, of course. Consider the warning issued by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in the New York Times recently. He called global warming an “existential threat to humankind.” Maybe it is, maybe it’s not. But if the Secretary General wishes to sound alarms with Americans, he may be doing so unwittingly with another line from his op-ed: “A deal must include an equitable global governance structure.” In a country whose existence is rooted in its struggle for independence, many Americans will be put off by such a claim.
Unfortunately for those who would like to see climate change regulation enacted, there are numerous other statements from allies that would turn off a public paying greater attention to the issue. Noted climate scientist Ken Caldeira, for instance, recently declared, “I believe that we should be outlawing the production of devices that emit carbon dioxide.” Think about that next time you drive your car.
In his books and columns, the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman pines for the authority held by China’s communist autocrats. He wishes enlightened leaders could simply impose global warming solutions on the American economy rather than having to approve them democratically. Meanwhile a popular book by environmentalists Robert and Brenda Vale, entitled Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living, argues that owning pets is even worse for the planet than an SUV.
While certainly tongue-in-cheek compared to Friedman’s paean to enlightened dictatorship or Lord Stern’s screed against meat, Time to Eat the Dog shares their same worry, i.e., that people in their daily lives are the planet’s gravest threat, and must be stopped.
Give them credit for candor. But don’t expect the larger public to sympathize with those beliefs. That’s why team Obama wants to ram cap-and-trade through quickly, obscured by the smokescreen of the healthcare debate. The president understands that an informed national discussion on global warming will expose the radical statements of global warming regulation’s most prominent proponents, which is not conducive to getting the bill he wants. That’s democracy for you.
Because they won't have the votes in 2010?
1-There is no “global warming”, in fact we’re on the down slope of a cyclical event.
2 - The Cap ‘n Trade bill will do NOTHING to reduce pollution or produce energy. It will ONLY destroy American industry and spread our money around the world.
3 - Obama is using these issues to gain control over the American people. PERIOD!
Global warming alarmism has gone into lunacy and more and more people are growing skeptical. It is obvious that the latest round of global warming carbon sins, eating meat, having pets and even having children are so over the top that no rational person would take them seriously. It is also obvious that those who would have us live like paupers to save the planet, for example Prince Charles and Al Gore would themselves not change their lifestyles.
Are we going to ask this question of EVERYTHING the Obama admin pushes?
Because once any of this is made into law, it will be hard and take years to reverse.
15 minutes of glory for Pols.
The Country is bankrupt and half are out of work. So now, 0bama and his thugs wants to ram through “Cap and Trade” so that we won’t have any factories, any small businesses and no one will be working.
Can someone in Congress/the Senate not introduce a bill that requires - by law - some “contemplation period” to examine major legislation before it can be voted on?!
Say, one day for every $10 million of bill expenditures - so a billion-dollar health bill would REQUIRE 100 days (over 3 months) of study?
I realize I’m just a know-nothing sitting here at home, not as smart as those geniuses in Congress, but c’mon - SIMPLE COMMON SENSE, people!!!
The cap and tax money our statists would get from it would forestall the coming “Great Depression 2.0” financial disaster they have set into motion, while making the gullible feel warm and fuzzy that we are “saving the planet” from we humans.
The world’s climate is cyclical. For politicians to think they can order anything to be change that is supreme arrogance. It’s a scam to gain control of the sheeple.
That's why the push to control the internet is so powerful in Congress.
The internet is the CB of our time and we need to fiercely protect it.
Charlton Heston reads from Jurassic Park:
HESTON: You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity! Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time.
It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. Might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. You think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine.
When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. Hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.
Global warming is a big crock of bull hockey. They want us all down to third world status.
That waht I mean (:
The ostensible credentials of various “Global Change” Advocates, or alarmists restrain one’s first and strongest reaction to news that we are about to have history’s greatest hoax imposed upon us. Yet, this is exactly what is happening. This feat of deceit will stifle any and all attempts at economic innovation because its rules and structure will be completely arbitrary. Since it is not based on any tangible reality, but on the dictates of capricious technocrats, the market will fail to adjust to the new circumstances, resulting in stagnation and decline. In decline, the crucial technological advances necessary to mitigate “climate change”, will be impossible. A return to a Luddite 18th Century economy will exacerbate rather than solve the imagined problem, as CO2 from wood fireplaces and unregulated coal burning will not adhere any eco-agenda. Stupidity is costly, and this time it will cost us everything.
He didn’t even mention the lunacy recently discussed in the press: Several alarmist scientists have proposed methods of injecting solid particles or chemicals into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight before it gets to the earth.
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