Environment

Quote of the Day

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When I try explaining “global warming” to people in Iran or Turkey they have no idea what I’m talking about. Their life is about getting through to the next day, finding their next meal. Eco-guilt is a first-world luxury. It’s the new religion for urban populations which have lost their faith in Christianity. The IPCC report is their Bible. Al Gore and Lord Stern are their prophets.

Ian Plimer, author of Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science .

See also, Climate change: The sun and the oceans do not lie.

Hat tip: Michael Barone

Urban Wildlife Update

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There has been a bear sighting in the Cleveland area.

Now, God bless ’em, local TV crews need work too, but someone please tell me that this is a joke.

As a side note, my grandmother still lives in the northwoods of Wisconsin and black bear sightings have been common up there for a very long time.  They love garbage and even knock down my grandmother’s bird feeder from time to time.

Demonizing Energy Producers

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In a statement intended to help justify the proposed “cap and trade” energy tax, Barack Obama said:

At a time of great fiscal challenges, this legislation is paid for by the polluters who currently emit the dangerous carbon emissions that contaminate the water we drink and pollute the air we breathe.

There are so many things wrong with this that one scarcely knows where to begin.

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You Can’t Have it Both Ways

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A left-wing guest on “Hannity” tonight said we should stop enriching OPEC. He also said oil drilling off of the US coast is unacceptable because drilling platforms spoil the view. So which is it? Either energy production is most important or the esthetic values of people like him are most important. He can’t have it both ways. (The Left’s third alternative — forcing automobile companies to sell more small cars, hybrids and plug-in electric vehicles — is a false one, because Americans prefer larger vehicles and because increased vehicle efficiency leads to more driving.)

So much of leftist thought comes down to a childish unwillingness to acknowledge real-world tradeoffs.

Gasping For Air and Energy

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Environmentalists claim they aren’t extremist. They claim they don’t want to make radical and dangerous changes to our technological life-support systems, they just want to make a few minor adjustments to protect not only the environment but the health and safety of humans as well.  

They’re lying. When it comes down to it in the real world, environmentalists will kill people just to gain an utterly trivial  environmental  benefit. As a political movement, environmentalism has crossed over into a kind of religious fetishism.  

Look at the example of the banning of CFC asthma inhalers. [h/t Instapundit] Here we have a clear-cut tradeoff between the deaths of thousands of asthmatics and prevention of a degree of damage to the ozone layer that is so small that we can’t even begin to consider measuring it.  

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