Tag Archives: Global Warming

Commentary

What are the real goals of environmentalist radicals?

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UPDATE: Welcome visitors from In Haught Pursuit! Thanks for the link!

Today I’ve been listening to the audio book version of Christopher C. Horner’s “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism”. And I thought that I would share with you some quotations from the environmentalist radicals to shed some light on their real motivations.

In the audio book, Horner is tracing the evolution of the modern environmentalist movement back to two failed groups: 1) people who predicted overpopulation and 2) people who advocated for communism. Both of these groups failed, but their aims (mass murder) live on in the abortion and environmentalist movements. Let’s take a look at the real views of environmentalists.

Economist Walter Williams puts it this way:

The authors of the study don’t quite reach a conclusion that I’ve reached about environmental activists, whose agenda calls for private property confiscation and control over the lives of ordinary citizens. Back in the 60s and 70s, America’s leftists called themselves socialists and communists. They were the people who paraded around college campuses singing praises of support to tyrants like Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Pol Pot. Today, the communist system and its promises have been revealed as both a miserable failure and a system of unprecedented brutality. Thus, communism and socialism have become an embarrassment, so environmentalism is the name for an old agenda.

Here is an article by Mr. Horner from the National Review to help us with some actual quotations by environmentalists.

1. Radical environmentalists hate capitalism because it helps the poor.

“Giving society cheap, abundant energy… would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun,” says green godfather Paul Ehrlich. Oh, the horrors of subjecting millions to affordable heating, lighting and cooling, transportation, and other freedoms.

…the greens [affirmed] their agenda at the August World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg… Among their projects: impeding technology that increases agricultural abundance, even the shipment of food to famine-stricken countries like Zimbabwe; lamenting the pernicious influence of indoor plumbing; and complaining that the poor shouldn’t want (or get) such comforts as electricity because there are larger, Gaia-centric considerations at play.

2. Radical environmentalists favor mass murder of the poor, and not just by abortion and technological regress.

  • “To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem.” Lamont Cole (as quoted by Elizabeth Whelan in her book Toxic Terror)
  • “This is as good a way to get rid of them as any.” Charles Wursta, Chief Scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, commenting on the likelihood of millions dying from a global ban on DDT (also quoted in Toxic Terror)
  • “I got the impression that instead of going out to shoot birds, I should go out and shoot the kids who shoot birds.” Paul Watson, founder of Greenpeace (quoted in Access to Energy, vol. 10, no. 4, Dec. 1982)
  • “The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state.” Kenneth Boulding, originator of the “Spaceship Earth” concept (quoted by William Tucker in Progress and Privilege, 1982)
  • “The only real good technology is no technology at all. Technology is taxation without representation, imposed by our elitist species [man] upon the rest of the natural world.” John Shuttleworth, Friends of the Earth manual writer

And In the Walter Williams article I cited earlier, he adds a couple more:

Then there are statements like those of David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth, and former executive director of Sierra Club: “While the death of young men in war is unfortunate, it is no more serious than the touching of mountains and wilderness areas by humankind.” David M. Graber, research biologist with the National Park Service wrote, “Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet.” John Davis, editor of Earth First Journal, says, “Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.” Davis also opined, “I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”

These people have an abiding contempt for humankind. They seek to accomplish their agenda with useful idiots in and out of government and make use of what H.L. Mencken warned us about, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Environmentalism is really about controlling others. And when your kids go to public schools to be taught by the left, they are indoctrinated to have these environmentalist beliefs: that humans are bad and that we need to die. The mass murders that emerged from the secular-left are not aberrations – they really do believe in killing hundreds of millions of innocent people with communism, abortion DDT bans, etc.

News

Obama’s car regulations will kill more Americans than the Iraq war

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The Heritage Foundation reports on Obama’s proposed regulations on fuel economy.

Time for practice. Time to pile into the…Toyota Prius? Maybe the Yaris. Or surely the Smart Car will do. Those are three of eleven cars that meet President Obama’s new emissions standards that include “nothing larger than a midsize sedan, even when you include hybrids.”

Eleven choices of vehicle? The soccer moms will not be liking that.

But it gets worse. It’s going to cost another 50,000 jobs added on to Obama’s massive count.

Keith Henessey writes: (H/T Competitive Enterprise Institute)

NHTSA estimated that a similar option would cost almost 50,000 U.S. auto manufacturing jobs over five years.

See Table VII-1 on page 586 of the NHTSA analysis.  NHTSA estimated that the TC=TB option, which I’m using as a proxy for the Obama plan, would result in the following job losses among U.S. auto workers:

MY 2011

MY 2012

MY 2013

MY 2014

MY 2015

8,232

24,610

30,545

36,106

48,847

Compared to the Bush draft final rule, this is 37,000 more jobs lost.

Since I know this table is inflammatory, I will anticipate some of the responses:

  • This is an estimate for the job loss from the TC=TB option analyzed by NHTSA in 2007.  This is the closest proxy for the Obama rule, and I’m convinced it’s a good proxy until someone demonstrates otherwise.  But technically, it’s not a job loss estimate for the Obama proposal.
  • This estimate was done in a different economic environment (late 2008), and before the U.S. government owned 1.5 major U.S. auto manufacturers.  My guess, however, is that these changed conditions should push the estimated job loss up from the above estimate, rather than down.
  • There’s a false precision in the above table.  It’s just what NHTSA’s model spits out.  …I don’t put any weight on the precise annual estimates.

And it gets even worse than that.

Steve Milloy writes about the really bad problem on Green Hell blog: (H/T Gateway Pundit)

The Obama administration’s proposed mileage standards that will be announced today may kill more Americans at a faster rate than the Iraq War — his signature issue in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Obama’s standards will require automakers to meet a 35 miles-per-gallon standard by 2016 — four years earlier than the same standard imposed by the Energy Security and Independence Act of 2007.

As discussed in my new book Green Hell, the only way for carmakers to meet these standard is to make smaller, lighter and deadlier cars.

The National Academy of Sciences has linked mileage standards with about 2,000 deaths per year. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that every 100-pound reduction in the weight of small cars increases annual traffic fatalities by as much as 715.

In contrast in the more than six years since the Iraq war began, there have been 4,296 deaths among American military personnel.

The Iraq war cost 550 billion and 4300 lives. And for this we got more liberty and security. Obama is spending trillions and trillions of dollars, and he wants to kill 2,000 Americans per year? I am not even talking about his subsidies to kill more unborn babies at home and abroad. This is on top of that!

News

Are the oceans warming?

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We actually have a pretty comprehensive way of measuring the changes in the temperature of the oceans. We use a submersible sensor called an “Argo Buoy” in order to do the measurements. Since 2003, 3000 of them have been taking measurements in all the oceans of the world. The purpose of the buoys is to provide scientists with confirmation that the globe is really warming. But all was not well.

But the Vancouver Sun reports: (H/T Commenter ECM)

So why are some scientists now beginning to question the buoys’ findings? Because in five years the little blighters have failed to detect any global warming. They are not reinforcing the scientific orthodoxy of the day, namely that man is causing the planet to warm dangerously. They are not proving the predetermined conclusions of their human masters. Therefore they, and not their masters’ hypotheses, must be wrong.

In fact, “there has been a very slight cooling,” according to a U.S. National Public Radio (NPR) interview with Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a scientist who keeps close watch on the Argo findings.

Well, maybe the climate models predicted some cooling?

The big problem with the Argo findings is that all the major climate computer models postulate that as much as 80-90 per cent of global warming will result from the oceans warming rapidly then releasing their heat into the atmosphere.

But surely the other models are being confirmed by observations?

Modellers are also perplexed by the findings of NASA’s eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily over the entire surface of the Earth, versus approximately 7,000 random readings from Earth stations.

In nearly 30 years of operation, the satellites have discovered a warming trend of just 0.14 C per decade, less than the models and well within the natural range of temperature variation.

But maybe if we wait for a while, scientists will discover new measurements that are the opposite of these measurements. The new measurements will confirm that global warming is real, that scientists need more grant money, and that socialists must take control of the economy right now in order to save us from the horrible Flying Spaghetti Global Warming Monster! Those 700 dissenting scientists? Paid off by big oil! All of them!

The polar ice caps were also paid off by big oil. How else do you explain their refusal to melt?

UPDATE: NASA study shows that solar activity is responsible for past global warming.