When the idiotic Kyoto Protocol was put before the US Senate, 95 senators voted against this confused and destructive initiative on the grounds that, as designed, the measure would simply ship American jobs to China and other countries without reducing greenhouse gasses.
For years, green activists have mourned and bemoaned the shortsightedness of the US. How could we sit out from something so noble, so planet saving, so wise as the sacred Kyoto Protocol? We have been listening to the green moral scolds for twenty years: those fat, dumb and ignorant Americans are simply too stupid and too selfish to save Planet Earth.
The EU, where disingenuous politicians are forced to demagogue green issues because addlepated proportional representation rules empower the lunatic eco-fringe in key countries, ratified Kyoto, and Americans were then treated to years of vainglorious Euro-puffery about the nobility, the wisdom and the self-sacrificial idealism of the cutting edge eco-warriors of the Green Continent.
The Kyoto climate change conference, December 1997 (Credit: UN Photo)
Over the years, some of the Kyoto fairy dust had begun to wear off. Global greenhouse emissions did not in fact appear to be declining very much. Many of the EU cuts were accounting tricks; counting the closure of inefficient, money-losing industrial dinosaurs in East Germany that were doomed to close anyway towards Germany’s greenhouse targets was a fairly typical example.
But a couple of recent studies now seem to show that Kyoto was as big a fraud as the most militant enviro-skeptics ever suspected. And it looks as if the 95 American senators were 100 percent right: the much heralded Protocol was a singularly stupid piece of counterproductive social engineering that encouraged the migration of good jobs to China and other low wage countries — without helping the environment at all.
The left leaning Guardian newspaper in Britain let the cat out of the bag yesterday, reporting that while the EU’s emission of CO2 declined by 17% between 1990 and 2010, this apparent progress was bogus. If you add up the CO2 released by the goods and services Europeans consumed, as opposed to the CO2 thrown off by the goods and services they produced, the EU was responsible for 40% more CO2 in 2010 than in 1990. The EU, as the Guardian puts it, has been outsourcing pollution — and jobs — rather than cutting back on greenhouse gasses.
EU “progress” on greenhouse gasses in the last twenty years was a mirage. And the only reason that the EU can pretend to look green is that it was outsourcing economic growth to countries like China. Those 95 US senators were totally right; twenty years of the Kyoto Protocol have brought the world twenty years of rising greenhouse gas emissions and twenty years of job migration to low wage, low regulation havens in the Third World.
It is extremely rare for 95 US senators to be right about anything; it is not, unfortunately, rare for environmentalists to come up with grotesquely bad policy ideas. Worse, it is routine for the media to give those grotesquely dumb ideas uncritical support. For twenty years, the mainstream media has (with a few noble exceptions like the New York Times‘ Andrew Revkin) largely repeated green propaganda as straight news. How many irreplaceable acres (or, for our European friends, hectares) of vital, carbon fixing forest have been destroyed to print editorials and columns hailing the intellectual and moral grandeur of the Kyoto Protocol and denouncing the know-nothingism and short-sightedness of the Neanderthals who dared to oppose it?
Almost any bad idea from a ‘respectable’ green source — like the monumentally foolish drive for a Grand Global Treaty that derailed so spectacularly at Copenhagen last year — gets a free ride from most of the mainstream media and also the mainstream intellectual establishment. The syllogism seems to be this: the environment is good, X says that Y is good for the environment, therefore Y must be good. The fallacy is painfully obvious when put in this form, but painfully obvious doesn’t seem to be obvious enough for most of the world’s pundits and editorial writers.
People who care about the environment, who worry about the potential harm that our increasingly technological civilization can do to the natural systems on which we all depend, are making a literally planet-threatening mistake when they fail to subject policy proposals to serious analysis and critique because those proposals are labeled ‘green’. I don’t know what it will take to get this simple lesson through the surprisingly thick heads of the chattering classes. How many times do widely hailed, ritualistically praised and endorsed green policy initiatives have to go down in flames before the press realizes that the way to help the environment is to subject such proposals to critical scrutiny before they flop?
How long will it be before serious people who seriously care about the environment realize that the clowns, poseurs and hotheads currently shaping the movement’s public agenda constitute a grave and urgent threat to the health of the only planet we’ve got?
How high a price must the world pay for green folly? How many years will be lost, how much credibility forfeited, how much money wasted before we have an environmental movement that has the intellectual rigor, political wisdom and mature, sober judgment needed to address the great issues we face?
Fulfilling our duty as good stewards of the bountiful garden in which the good Lord has placed us is hard. The science is hard. The politics, the economics, the diplomacy: they are all hard. Even the morals are hard. The relationship between natural systems and human activity is complex and, despite all the scientific progress that has been made, important aspects of the relationship remain poorly understood. The forces — economic, political, cultural — that shape human industrial and economic activity are also very complex, and important dimensions of their interactions remain extremely poorly understood. The international political system is not very flexible and not very powerful, and the political forces that define the limits of the possible in the world’s different countries are difficult to understand and virtually impossible to predict as circumstances and extraneous variables constantly intrude into the already turbulent mix.
There are irreducible unknowns in the mix. Should we allocate scarce economic and political resources toward climate change or toward nuclear disarmament? Should we allocate those resources toward raising the living standards of the poor, perhaps reducing the threat of terrorism and war — or toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions, thereby perhaps creating more favorable conditions for solving these other problems down the road? What new knowledge and new possibilities — and new dangers — will come on line as new and unpredictable technological innovations appear?
Environmentalists, motivated no doubt in many cases by a genuine sense of urgency, have fallen into a pattern of overlooking and assuming away complexities and difficulties to build public support for catchy, headline grabbing Big Ideas. But those complexities and difficulties are real and in the end they emerge and wreak a horrid revenge. The Kyoto Protocol failed; the Copenhagen Summit failed; the entire global treaty movement continues to plumb new depths of failure from week to week; cap and trade went down to ignominious and even toxic defeat.
Environmentalists will only be able to help the world when they grow up. And they will only grow up when the rest of the world — and especially the mainstream press and serious writers and thinkers — start holding them to serious, grown up standards. Screwy but superficially appealing ideas like the Kyoto Protocol should be mercilessly criticized and all their flawed assumptions and wishful thinking be held up for the whole world to see — when they are first proposed and debated, not after twenty years of uncritical praise ending in failure. The green agenda and the environmental movement are victims of ‘social promotion’; their self esteem has been stoked and their grades inflated — and nobody has ever explained the hard facts of life, or equipped them with the skills needed for actual, as opposed to virtual, success.
Tough love is now the only way to help the greens: we must challenge the greens, mock their uncritical embrace of dumb ideas, point out their failures, their pretensions, their wishful thinking, their political blindness, their clueless arrogance and all the other shortcomings that lead them, time and time again, down the Good Intentions Highway to the same old Great Abyss. The way to hurt them is to tell them it isn’t their fault, to ignore the movement’s stunning record of serial failure, to blame the oil companies for all that is wrong with the world — and to do all the other comforting, enabling things that help keep people and political movements infantilized and ineffective.
Fortunately, the Guardian newspaper and a handful of writers like Rivkin seem to understand the need for serious reporting. The cascade of green failure is going to waken a critical spirit more widely; failure this flagrant becomes progressively harder to ignore. One suspects (indeed one hopes) that the money spigots will turn off for a while; even foundations sometimes weary of throwing good money after bad. That will also lead to some badly needed soul searching among the incompetent green pooh-bahs who have done so little with so much.
The green movement is still very young by historical standards. It is not yet time to give up the hope that it can someday grow into a solid and useful world citizen, its youthful freaks and follies left behind. But for that to happen, its friends are going to have to administer some very serious doses of tough love.
the green movement is old.it is anti-human.Rousseau needs a smack .petroleum is huge watts/lb.wind is tiny watts/ton. nuke is HUGE watts/gram.
[...] RUSSELL MEAD: Kyoto Fraud Revealed. “The left leaning Guardian newspaper in Britain let the cat out of the bag yesterday, [...]
[...] Kyoto Fraud Revealed [...]
What gavin said. It’s just that simple.
I read somewhere that 300 million residents of India are without electrical power. The arrogant Greens think that it is politically feasible for India to deny its people the basics in order to reduce greenhouse gases? The only way forward for them to meet both greenhouse gas reduction and development is nuclear power…and I understand they are now leaders!
Now if only Obama would get out of his coccoon and show a little leadership himself! Maybe fund thorium nuclear power for example? (A potentially much cheaper form of nuclear power with decreased proliferation risk.)
Mr. Mead, what you meant to write was “the unsurprisingly thick heads of the chattering classes”, was it not?
You know, they are the same boneheaded poultry who said that cellphones cause cancer, the surge couldn’t possibly work, the Euro couldn’t fail, nuclear energy can’t be safe, the USSR would be with us forever, that it was the insurgents, not the NVA regulars that conquered South Vietnam, that was afraid of Global Cooling (oops), and on down, and on down … to Mussolini makes the trains run on time, Stalin isn’t a dictator and nothing untoward is happening in the Ukraine.
Earlier still, we can find most of the earlier version of the chattering classes cheering on the great citizen armies in WW I, the greatest war fought over an accepted ultimatum.
You must go as far back as the Dreyfus Affair or the Scopes Monkey Trial to see the majority of the chattering classes aligned for a good cause.
Indeed. I am likely stating the obvious, but from my experience, the rank-and-file “green” is driven to their positions by emotional rather than logical (or data-driven) scientific reasoning. It saddens me to some extent. I *like* trees, I might even have hugged a few in my past; but the “greens” make supporting their position extremely unpalatable and rarely acknowledge any merits of environmental policies that offer alternatives to those that they advance.
In the bigger picture, as you mention, much of our environment (both in absence of Man and in interaction with Man) is relatively poorly understood. In many disciplines, our micro-level models are relatively good, but we run into critical complexity problems as we scale up from micro to macro scales. We see this again and again in environment, economics, etc – where we often are far more confident of our models than we have reason to be.
I have to wonder what a thorough review of Mr. Mead’s work would yield, as I have no doubt that he has opined upon the value of the Kyoto treaty before.
(Though, I am prepared to be slapped down over my admitted assumption without evidence.)
(A (very) little google searching shows that Mead has at least mentioned Kyoto (http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/Mead/mead-con3.html) though, at this link, he makes no determination as to its value)
Yet in the spirit of Mead’s new approach, at least on this issue, of examining easily foreseen consequences of ‘green’ policies, I would ask him to inventory his house for CFLs, (Compact Florescent Light-bulbs), which are purported to use less energy and last longer than the usual incandescents. (Again an assumption, but I would bet that for reading Mead prefers (and insists upon) an incandescent.
I have no doubt that, like the rest of us, Mead has on occasion either changed a burnt out incandescent bulb or cleaned up after a broken one and, in either event, disposed the resulting trash in the usual manner.
But has he had occasion to dispose of a CFL, I wonder? The instructions regarding disposal clearly state that using a vacuum or even a broom is contraindicated, as this will force the mercury contained by the CFL into the local airspace and disperse it around the room, and cause a hazard to health. A filter mask is recommended. A dampened paper towel should be used to blot up the pieces and the result should be disposed of as toxic waste (in a red plastic bag , appropriately labeled), and must not be included with the more prosaic refuse of daily living. These disposal requirements notwithstanding, my assumption is that over 95% of all CFLs have been or will be cast out with the common trash.
I find it curious and, somewhat dismaying, that a celebrated intellect such as Mead’s arrived at his conclusions regarding Kyoto with 20/20 hindsight as opposed to so many others who had a negative view before it was yet to be implemented.
One may find that in the future Mead will also be commenting on the problems of mercury ground water contamination from the easily foreseen problems CFL disposal.
Mead criticizes the Green Movement mercilessly. I think he’s right. But criticism is cheap. One searches in vain in this post and in his other posts on the subject for constructive suggestions that might succeed where the Green Movement’s policy suggestions have failed.
The planet is getting hotter and the etiology of the global temperature increase is at least plausibly rooted in human behavior. There is very little debate that the consequences of a hotter planet will benefit some regions of the world while proving potentially catastrophic for others.
Mead may find ridiculing the folly of the Greens entertaining; doing so may even be modestly useful. But his post adds nothing to the debate about intelligent strategies to ameliorate a significant and growing problem that has to be confronted whether it is manmade or not.
Critics of the Green Movement (although not necessarily Mead) often insist that there is no evidence that the global increase in temperature is caused by human activity; they suggest that if the increase in global temperature is a natural phenomenon there is no reason to try to ameliorate it. This argument is profoundly ignorant.
If global temperature rise is caused by human activity than a change in human behavior can have a positive impact. If global temperature rise is a natural phenomenon than positive action by humans can still potentially have a positive impact. After all, viruses and bacteria are natural phenomena; we don’t let the fact that they are not manmade stand in the way of interventions like immunization or antibiotics to reduce or even eliminate their negative consequences for human health and well-being. Devastating floods are a natural phenomenon; we don’t let that stand in the way of human interventions like dikes and levees to reduce the destructive effects that this natural phenomenon has on society.
Mead criticizes the Greens vociferously. Doesn’t he realize that the arguments made by opponents of the Greens are frequently as dimwitted or even more dimwitted? Is he willing to entertain the possibility that while the Green Movement may be motivated by an ideology that sees very little reason to actually refer to the facts, opponents of the Greens are often equally ideological and are as hostile to a fact based analysis as the Greens might be? Does Mead realize that industries that make their money by producing energy, the natural consequence of which is the release of greenhouse gasses, might have a financial motivation to insist that greenhouse gasses are irrelevant to global warming?
If he realizes it, he never acknowledges it or comments on it.
I wonder why.
The official EU emission of CO2 declined by 17% between 1990 and 2010, but EU-wide that reduction can be more than accounted for by shuttering of dirty industry in post-soviet states.
After Clinton/Gore, the US didn’t quite manage to have any reduction but did manage a nearly 0% increase in CO2 before the economy crashed.
Some of that success can also be attributed to export of industry. It is interesting, however, that the US, as a side effect of the clean-air act years before, had already been working to minimize the amount of CO2 released — so the US was starting from a higher benchmark than Europe.
I find it amusing that if you leave out the post-soviet states and compare growth of CO2 output between the EU14 and the USA during the administration of that evil anti-environmentalist Bush, The USA did better.
[...] Kyoto Fraud Revealed: The left leaning Guardian newspaper in Britain let the cat out of the bag yesterday, reporting that while the EU’s emission of CO2 declined by 17% between 1990 and 2010, this apparent progress was bogus. If you add up the CO2 released by the goods and services Europeans consumed, as opposed to the CO2 thrown off by the goods and services they produced, the EU was responsible for 40% more CO2 in 2010 than in 1990. The EU, as the Guardian puts it, has been outsourcing pollution — and jobs — rather than cutting back on greenhouse gasses. [...]
Wrong, wrong, wrong!
Kyoto was never “put before” the US Senate!
After Al Gore went off and signed it, the Senate adopted the Byrd-Hagel Resolution by a vote of 95-0 expressing the sense of the Senate that the US should not be a party to the treaty. See http://www.nationalcenter.org/KyotoSenate.html
As a result, President Clinton never submitted the treaty to the Senate for ratification.
My impression is that Mead is only recently come to be a vociferous critic of green policies.
But let us now look at some things that Greens and WigWag generally fail to address.
Windfarms: Greens ignore the bird deaths, the sub-sonic noise, maintenance/transmission/land requirements and the intermittent utility of wind generation systems. (Though the Kennedy family does concern itself with their view from their family manse in Hyannis Port, which they have fought to keep unobstrcted).
Solar panels: Greens ignore things like the pollution caused by material and panel manufacturing, energy density and energy footprint, impacts of precipitation of rain, snow, dust,and the impacts of clouds on generation, and the fact that the sun shines only intermittently. They also ignore the needs of transmission lines from solar farms, except when they campaign against those same transmission lines.
Nuclear: Greens ignore the current state of reactor design (much improved), thorium reactors(much safer with no uranium as by-product), and total waste output and ease of proper and permanent storage of actual radioactive waste. The also ignore the favorable energy density and energy footprint of nuclear facilities, which by comparison are in fact several orders of magnitude smaller than either wind or solar facilities.
Or, lets take a look at the hypocrisy of the Obama administration, which in the same 18 month period forced a moratorium on off shore US drilling, with at least some cause one must admit, while lending two billion dollars to Brazil’s Petrobas to finance off shore drilling off the coast of Brazil.
The current Green solutions for the most part seems to be either 1) pay poor people to burn wood, dung and charcoal (which by the way creates far more pollution and CO2 than even coal plants) rather than develop industrial electrical generation of any type, or 2) Export manufacturing processes, and resulting pollution, to countries like China that have few if any environmental protections due to the totalitarian nature of its government, paeans to the contrary by Thomas Friedman notwithstanding, or 3) allow and support oil drilling and exploration in foreign countries, by foreign companies,(which are thus insulated from US courts and Green lawfare) with far worse records on the environment than either the US government or US companies.
(Not is there any mention of the corruption, lack of transparency, support for terrorism, abysmal human rights and environmental records of Nigeria, Venezuela, China, and Saudi Arabia, just to name a few.) And let us not forget the current disaster Spain is experiencing as its fanciful green economy encounters, what is for them, the unexpected and unforeseen realities of physics, natural law, and the vicissitudes of human nature, which bizarrely resulted in the owners of solar generation plants running gas powered generators to power lights to shine on solar panels to generate “solar” power.
With such an ability to ignore reality, is it any wonder that that so many green policies are collapsing as it becomes clear to all that wishing, wanting and, most importantly, feeling, does not make it so?
I’m afraid that Dr. Mead is being a bit naive in his assessment of environmentalists.
In my extensive experience, the most penetrating insight is “Scratch an environmentalist, find a wannabe tyrant.”
Maybe he is just being overly diplomatic, not wanting to “hurt” anyone’s feelings or displease a future funding source.
After reading a number of his columns (always a pleasure, BTW), I am reminded of the truism that the guy standing in the middle of the road gets hit from BOTH sides.
I’m a political conservative, an ardent birder for forty years, and someone who’s worked on environmental issues on both sides of the Atlantic. Sadly, I have never met anyone else – not even remotely – who fits this same description.
I grew up not far from Sagamore Hill and I have no bias to contradict my hunch that conservatives would make the wisest conservationists.
Leaving aside everyone’s ignorance about the natural world – in my ample experience, this general ignorance is no less prominent on the Left than on the Right – It is the hard work of subtle trade-offs that absolutely no one wants to face, as Dr. Meade suggests.
But harder still, and worrying in its broader implications, is the seeming inability of the Right to work out a philosophical basis and accompanying language for what constitutes a positive concept for revision, of “progress,” aside from its strong defense of liberty of which I am also a champion.
It is entirely unconvincing to say that the environment will be managed by “a thousand points of light.” However, I discover my American environmentalist heritage in the early and mid-20th century, before the reifications of the “preservationists” overtook and effaced the earlier “conservationist” ethos, which had accomplished so much. Does anyone remember the Weeks-McLean Act, of 1913? (Weeks and McLean were Republicans.) The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 surpasses anything the EU is capable of drafting even today, but you wouldn’t think that speaking to your average “environmentalist” on either side of the Atlantic.
Thank you for the opportunity to record these despairing thoughts.
The issue, as usual, is watermelon environmentalism: green on the outside, red on the inside. The true impetus behind the modern environmental movement is the same command-and-control agenda the left has always had. The goal is a communal form of societal structure backed by the rigid, oppressive enforcement of state power over people’s private lives and choices. As a side benefit, the proponents of this ideology get to wrap themselves in self-righteous puffery.
Back when communism was en vogue, the far-left could claim to be trying to save the common man from the oppressive forces of the capitalist system. After the failure of communism, they adopted a green veneer and upped the ante — now they are SAVING THE PLANET.
Either way, it leads to the same place: tyranny.
As far as I remember, your first sentence is incorrect. No one warned that all the jobs would go to China if Kyoto was passed. There’s nothing in the statement that you link to about losing jobs to China.
Quoth JohnG,
“Wrong, wrong, wrong!
Kyoto was never “put before” the US Senate!”
This is a distinction without a difference. H-B was a resolution stating that the sense of the Senate was to reject the Kyoto protocol as it was constructed at the time, that is, unless Developing countries had to obey it.
Since governments of these nations are not fools, and would never agree to the KP nonsense, our senators did the right thing, for once.
By the way, I wonder who the 5 abstainees were?
[...] Kyoto Fraud Revealed [...]
The Kyoto Fraud…
Mead explains that all it does is to export pollution and jobs to places like China….
Over the years, on message boards, I was excoriated by canadians who chastized me, an America, for not supporting the kyoto treaty.
Now I read a few months ago that canada, under criticism for not meeting their treaty obligations (gosh, aren’t tar sand taxes great) told the authorities to go pound sand. LOL at the hypocrites.
Maybe I should increase my carbon footprint, like nobel winner gore.
interesting article, however it should be noted that…
…the referenced Guardian article actually is a Marxist critique – that Europe is exploiting the Third World for their carbon emission – just one group of socialists griping about another – their only solution is a plunge into a Cuban like poverty complete with locally grown urban vegetables
the quickest and most effective thing the world can do is substitute coal burning with natural gas for electricity, and the good news is natural gas resources are extensive and pipelines can be extended into China and India
[...] Fraud Revealed. See here. Posted in Science | No Comments » Leave a [...]
Many of the “greens” have it backwards. The cleanest counties in the world are the richest. Conversely, the poorest the most polluted. If you are poor, you don’t care about global warming, you care about surviving another day.
It takes money, lots of it, to clean up factories, strip mines and coal fired plants. It takes money to build wind farms, geothermal plants, and solar generating plants. The research to make these practical and work better takes money. If you choke off economic activity through lawsuits and excessive regulation, then you will also eventually stop progress on the pollution front as well.
EARTH FIRST!
We’ll strip mine the other planets later.
The problem with good science is, it is work requiring a long attention span. Also, we find that the more we discover, the less we actually know. The truth about environmental science is, No Big Splash – No Funding!
Environmentalism has become a cash cow. Academics use it to get grants from the same corporations they vilify. The psychology of this is staggering because they have allowed common themes to seep down through the population. Thus, where formerly we would see red and orange boxes on the detergent aisle symbolizing their power, we now see blue and green boxes, with almost exactly the same product within. Nobody wants to be ungreen, yet the green alternatives are costly and largely inefficient at this time. Currently the largest solar array in the world can only power a small military town. Can you imagine how many deserts would be removed in the name of creating a solar array for LA? Yet this doesn’t seem to stagger some environmentalists because at some level nothing will ever be good enough for them. Remember, these are the same people who would actually welcome zero population growth, some of them even to the point to selecting which humans are permitted to have children. If that’s not science fiction come to life, I don’t know what is.
Bill,
The 5 who didn’t vote are listed on the roll call that you can see here: http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=105&session=1&vote=00205
Bryan (D-NV)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Grams (R-MN)
Harkin (D-IA)
Reid (D-NV)
Can we now all agree to THANK former President G.W. Bush for his NOT agreeing to Kyoto?!?!? He was bashed unmercifully for not signing up with all the other nations by the press, and many in the Democratic Party, not to mention all the militant environmentalists. Turns out his position was right all along . . . .
We need a scientific approach to the environment which most environmentalists are incapable of because they have turned environmentalism into a fundamentalist religion. The mainstream media certainly acts as an enabler, but until the environmental movement changes their approach they will only succeed in tyrannizing the planet.
The environment is always changing, and our understanding of the environment is always changing. We need to admit when we’re wrong. We need to try different things. We need to occasionally change course. We need to question our assumptions. These are all things fundamentalist religions have a very difficult time doing. And, because environmentalism behaves like a fundamentalist religion, they have become a global laughing stock. Their suggestions have no credibility. I have more confidence in a used car salesman.
The problem with good science is that too many of our scientific institutions are dominated by the politically correct.
95 wise senators voted again Kyoto, so who were the 5 morons that vote for Kyoto?
OK, so Kyoto is no good. What’s the alternative? It’s far easier to cast dispersions than to propose solutions that will then be open to criticisms by others.
The Kyoto Protocol was never submitted to the U.S. Sentae for ratification. The ’95 senators’ the author speaks of did take a vote on a resolution offered by Byrd and Hagel to the effect that they would not agree to a global emission reduction treaty that did nit include China. But the Senate also voted eight years later on a resolution by Bingaman that asked weather the Senate approves of a market-based approach to reduce emissions, and the Senate voted 54-43 in support of such a scheme.
unions, environ wackos, lawyers, and liberals are the problem. vote out all liberals and demoncats and labor party goions. save the world now.
A bit of a strawmwan in the article, and a lot of it in the comments. The portion of the environmental movement that is concerned about global warming is in fact scientifically literate, moreso that the ‘skeptics’ or the general population. Cap-and-trade as a solution is NOT the environmentalists’ prescription of choice … that was the 1st Bush administration’s choice to deal with SOx, it was a GOP free-market alternative to EPA command-and-control regulation. The Kyoto reps adopted it to combat GHGs because it worked with acid rain. The traditional environmentalist prefers EPA regs and/or a straight carbon tax.
You can criticize some bug group with the name “environmentalists’ or “green movement,” but you can’t just make up what it is “they” believe.
Now that a plaque of bedbugs is spreading amongst us might it not be time to look at the total ban on DDT which was the first case of worldwide environmental hysteria. There was never a serious scientific effort to explore any option other than a complete ban. Millions have died of possibly controllable malaria. Now, as I said, we have bedbugs returning and spreading. This ties right in with Mr. Reed’s point about the quasi-religious nature of a lot of the tenets of environmentalism. Why the total ban on non-greenhouse nuclear power plants? The greenies have joined with the other luddite, anti-progress groups to weaken and impoverish our societies.
chez nation;
Actually, India has found local shale gas reserves sufficient for itself, thankyewverymuch. (As has Israel!) And China has barely started looking, but prospects are good.
The world is beginning to look universally gassy.
The only point I question is that we live in a garden that God gave us. As I recall, man was kicked out of that and has been out of it ever since.
I have to laugh at the fellow who assumes the writer of this article prefers incandescent to “good” light bulbs.
There must be *something* wrong with his argument! Let’s try building an ad hominem attack out of a straw man!
(When I was young enough to be that naive, it was cloth diapers. You could save the planet by attacking people who were using paper diapers. Except, of course, that it was eventually revealed that cloth diapers have a huge environmental cost too – oh but who cares, as long as I can feel good by attacking someone else for not adhering to Today’s Symbol Of Green?)
Buzz, “the alternative” is to actually ADDRESS THE PROBLEM.
Coming up with a solution that doesn’t actually address the problems associated with the situation is not a solution.
Scolding people, scapegoating people, suggesting we can just do without economic growth – or suggesting huge swathes of population should simply be 10:10′d – this is not a solution.
If it’s really important, then it’s time to get busy, isn’t it?
And if you aren’t ready to seriously solve the problem, then don’t pretend to have a solution, don’t misrepresent what you’ve got as if it were an actual solution. Just get out of the way until someone real comes along.
Harry Reid. Of course.
Angle, add another round to your magazine.
How do these ‘Greenhouse Nuts’ explain that the ice borings taken in Greenland and Antartica have shown that during the last two ‘Great Ice Ages’ the carbon based gasses in the atmosphere were 10 times greater than they are today. Scientist say this is an aerial fertilizer for plant life. I personally have noticed that trees and plants seem greener today than just 20 years ago. The last 8-9 years the earths average temperature has been declining, how do they explain that? Today there is a group of scientist that predict the earth is heading into another small ‘Ice Age’, like the one during the ‘Dark Ages’, sometime in the years of 2050-70 if the temperture keeps declining as it is now. But Al Gore made over 150 million dollars on this scam and the United Nations head scientist on ‘Global Warming’, who owns two ‘Carbon Credit’ companies, has made in the billions. That is what all this ‘Greenhouse Gas’ scam is all about.
The global warming crowd is in it for the money. Follow the dollar signs. Google “Chicago Climate Exchange” or “CCX” and follow the dollar signs. See who is puttiing the dollars into their pockets. Gore should be gored.
The Kyoto Treaty was an attempt, by global competitors, to get the US to abandon our coal reserves. We have more energy, in the form of coal, than Arabia has in oil. The treaty was a teaser offer, painless at first, then growing teeth toward the back end of the treaty, 2012. The sole purpose, by VP Al Gore, was to get us on board. There were accounting gimmicks, largely defining paper reductions based on closed Warsaw Pact factories, uncompetitive globally after the USSR collapsed. But, not withstanding the political debacle within the UN IPPC, the results of real CO2 reductions, by signatory nations, must be accomplished over the next two years.
We know that several dozen coal miners are killed in Chinese mines every day. They start a new coal fired power plant every few days.
The US has not built a large unit since the mid 1970s. If it would work, the EPA would run an extension cord to China, and forbid all combustion in the US. Our leaders knowingly forced millions of heavy industry jobs off shore.
We will shortly see which nations will cripple their economies over climate change. Or lie.
In a few weeks, we will know whether the climate, the US Congress, or our economy, will change faster.
In fact, there is not enough evidence to support that conclusion. Believe it or not, most of the evidence shows that the planet is actually cooling … not warming.
As a result, “human generated Global Warming” is more of a religious belief than science.
“…their clueless arrogance and all the other shortcomings that lead them, time and time again, down the Good Intentions Highway to the same old Great Abyss.”
I’m not so sure about the “Good Intentions Highway.” After seeing the green movement for several years, I’ve come to believe that the health of the environment is merely a tool – not an end game goal. The end goal is social and political control over the citizenry, which is always the goal of the Left. The environment is just the latest “victim” that requires govt sponsored justice.
The most poignant manifestation of this was the reaction of the greens (and the collective Left) to the Climategate emails. Not a single one breathed a sigh of relief that it seemed as though the earth was apparently going to survive. The reactions were either to dismiss the significance of the emails, angrily demagogue as “deniers” those that cited the emails as proof that global warming was a fraud, double down on statistics that were “proof” of global warming, or trot out some combination of all three. The most intellectually honest of them morosely conceded that it seemed as though global warming wasn’t really all that it was cracked up to be.
Why the horror rather than glee? Because the grand plans and goals of the political Left to assert social and political control over the country/planet have been dealt what might be a mortal blow.
Another way to assess the true goals of the greens can be performed by asking a simple hypothetical question. In its heart of hearts, would the left be thrilled if Rush Limbaugh snapped his fingers and fixed all that ailed the earth?
I don’t think so either.
[...] Russell Mead comments on this topic. « EPA Ozone Standard Would Destroy 7.3 Million Jobs, Study [...]
Humans are bad for the world. Let’ us save the world by doing away with humans altogether.
“Fortunately, the Guardian newspaper…….seems to understand the need for serious reporting.”
Honest, I was with you until the Guardian “Serious reporting” bit and then I fell about laughing. The Guardian rag is the biggest joke in the newspaper world when it comes to green issues! I always wonder why the near bankrupt rag is not printed on green paper!
Other than that, a good article.
By the way R. L. Hails Sr. P. E. – October 17, 2010 @ 1:46 pm, Can you tell me how “We know several dozen coal miners are killed in Chinese mines every day”. Who is this “We” you refer to? Certainly not me and I work in China! Okay, they have safety problems with their mining industry but “several dozen everyday” requires you to give me (not we) evidence.
Co2 Gas–a Threat or an “Economic Hoax”–!
Co2 gas does not burn kids playing outdoors-!
An Easy Science Experiment, which anyone can do–gives same result to all Researchers! About 3 pm on a summer-day, go to a ‘Shop-
ping Center, which is paved by Black Asphalt!
(Bring oil ointment for burns with you!) Remove
your socks & shoes, & “Walk” about 40 yds.
“Bare-foot” on the hot asphalt–& wave your right hand briskly thru the Air to contact as much Co2 gas as you can–as you walk-! Now
let ‘your’ nerves ‘tell’ you–Did your Hand get Burned, that you waved thru the Air-!? Nope-! Then you found the Co2 gas didn’t have much effect! How about your FEET-!? Did they get burned from the HEAT-?? Yep-! So now we find the Co2 gas can be compressed in a small container the size of a “Plum”–but this won’t heat any room-area in a house!
We’ve used Coke-size Fire Extinquishers in High School Chemistry-! press the ‘Trigger’–the ‘clear’ Co2 rushes out, & forms “Frost” on the nozzle-! (This means the Co2 ‘cools’–not Heats the Air-!)
Composition of Air–only has .031% Co2 gas! This means, you can triple the amount of Co2 Gas, & still Not have a tenth of 1%-! “Common
-Sense” of “Scientific Research” is proving that
Al Gore published a Hoax-! And Obama buys it-! In this Science Experiment, observers get the same Results each time–including Blind-
men, or a 3rd Grader in Grade School–You do
not need to be a PhD-! If you doubt the Result
you got–you & your friends need to “Repeat” the experiment of getting “Heat to the Feet”–until you’re sure that you got Results!
Congressmen–especially, “Need to do this Walk–before they do the Talk-” We should Let the Media “Record” those Politicians & Lawyers give themselves–A Taxable Hot-Foot!
The fact that “Black Asphalt” can gain heat temperatures in excess of 130 degrees under a ‘hot summer sun’ & the thinner Air with less weight-mass doesn’t–are basic facts in Science-! We’ve 5.7 million miles of Highways
& Streets in the U.S.–without counting all of the “Black-Asphalt” ‘Parking-Lots’-!! The rolled
paving is over 6″ thick, because cars & Trucks
drive on them-! There’s enough asphalt-paving
to completely cover the State of IOWA–which has 56,274 sq. miles, or 15% of the U.S. land-area. That 6″ thickness provides the Weight-Mass needed for a ‘hot-sun’ to heat up asphalt
temperatures–to a point, where the ground & air, gets a temp-rise of over 2 degrees for Global-Warming Change-! But it’s not the Co2
Gas that did IT-! It was the ‘Billions of Tons’ of
“Solid” Carbon-Asphalt–That DID IT-! Obama wants to “Tax the Co2 Gas” & it “Trades & Trickles Down” to the consumers of Electric & Gas Industries, & when they (Pay?) the Co2
“Fines”, it passes down to Tax-Payers, who make less than $100,000 a year, who then get
their Gas & Electric Bills–”Doubled”!! (Is that a Fair Trade!?) You get your “Hidden-Taxes”
raised–because He’s lied Again-!
(I’m sure that your nerves told you the Truth–
each time-your Feet got burned–but your hand
didn’t-!) Obama promised “8 times’ He would not raise Taxes on anyone who got less than
$100,000-! Did he find Suckers in our Family?
(Does your Wallet have a burning sensation-?)
Do climate change fools have a problem with
-”tearing up our Highways & using Horses-?”
(They still be trying to Tax the Free Air–that you Breathe-! That’s what Cap & Trade Does-!
[...] This is a prime example how the media, having long given the IPCC a free ride, has significantly contributed to these problems. (Walter Russell Mead persuasively makes that case here.) [...]
GLOBAL COOLING
CO2e SAVED = CER 9 BnT/Yr
OXYGEN SAVED = 5 BnT/Yr
FUEL BURNT: OIL 12, COAL 9 MnT/Day
INV 700 Bn$ RETURN 5400 Bn$/Yr
PROFIT 15 Bn$/Day
ANDY TECHNOLOGY
DOUBLE SPEED, 1/3 FUEL for SAME TON-HP
AUTOMOTIVE, RAIL, SHIP, POWER PLANT
NO BOILER, NO TURBINE. Rotary Engine
ALL FUEL S L G .Nuclear
.
GLOBAL OIL 12 MnT/Day, CO2e= 6000 MnT/Yr
GLOBAL COAL 9 MnT/Day, CO2e = 7500 MnT/Yr
GLOBAL CO2e = 13,500 MnT= 13.5 BnT/Yr
ANDY TECH 1/3 FUEL, CO2e = 13.5/3= 4.5 BnT/Yr
CER = 13.5-4.5 = 9 BnT/Yr
OXYGEN USED FOR BURNING IS REDUCED FROM
21 MnT/Day TO 7 MnT/Day. SAVED 5088 MnT/Yr
ROTARY ENGINE 6 M Dia, 1.2 M Thk, 12 kL- 1000 MW
VC Fund 15 Mn$ RP 30 Mn$ in 3 Yrs
M A Appan, M E. 919840463337 niraima1@gmail.com
[...] twenty years, the mainstream media has…largely repeated green propaganda as straight news. [Kyoto Fraud Revealed October, [...]
[...] In July 1997, five months prior to the fanfare in Kyoto, the US Senate had already passed the Byrd-Hagel resolution. The vote was 95-0. Let me repeat: the vote was unanimous. It was bi-partisan. This resolution made it clear that not a single Democrat or Republican senator was prepared to support an emissions agreement that would harm the US economy while ignoring the growing emissions of up-and-coming economies such as China and India (see here, here, and here). [...]