Some Rational Discussions on Climate Change

Tags

climate change, environmentalism

 

Top Five Environmental Disasters That Didn’t Happen

Tags

environmental hoax, environmentalism

Not the best predictive track record…

What They Really Want Is For You To Live Like a Pauper

Tags

collectivism, environmentalism, government corruption, government regulation, statism

Increasingly, the actions of the political class and the meddlesome Progressive tits they represent are taking a familiar shape. Don’t eat this, don’t drink that, don’t feed your child from a bottle — it’s got to be breast milk or you’re not a real woman (or a responsible parent); you can’t travel without special permission or harassment and now the EU wants to tax international flights to raise the prices and limit your ability to move about the planet; you must conform to increasingly arcane regulation and tax laws that these would-be aristocrats can avoid; you can’t ride in a cheap limo — take the taxi, that’s for plebeians.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the environmental movement, where wealthy and connected folks couple with useful, alarmist idiots to try and “preserve” the planet from the evils of modern civilization. You should live in reasonable sized housing: treehugger.com’s founder tells us 420 square feet is more than enough (if you’re a rich single or couple with no kids, maybe) and we live in far too large domiciles. I have a 1700sf home or so…two adults and a 15 month old tornado barely fit.

Of course, if you don’t have a kitchen full of appliances — like a stove (Why do you need that? You’ll be eating garden fresh home-grown sustainable organic vegetables!) or microwave (radiation!), or a dishwasher…just a small refrigerator should do, right? Bill McKibbben of 350.org would love to see you emulating your 13th Century ancestors, “Forget your computer, your TV, your stereo, your stove, your dishwasher, your water heater, your microwave, your water pump, your clock. Forget your light bulbs, compact fluorescent or not…slash your stock of clothes to a comfortable (or even uncomfortable) minimum.”

Why would you want to have light? To read? You’ll be working in your garden, saving the planet! Computer, TV, stereo…those aren’t for you! Leave that to the important folks running things. You’ll be happy with a slower pace of life and not distractions — like gather ing information to make informed decisions or engage in the political sphere. Clothes!?! Peasants wore a set of clothes, maybe two. They were happy, were they not? (No…they weren’t.) Ride a bike to work, if you must labor outside of your postage-stamp sized croft. Cars are dangerous and dirty (but the politicians will need them to get around quickly — they have much more important work to do!)

Meanwhile, these “experts” and “leaders” spend our hard-earned money on ridiculous programs, projects, in meddling (unsuccessfully) in “investment” of sectors of the economy where their friends and family are ensconced…much like Louis XVI or George III.

But sooner or later, collectivist and statists get the same lesson taught (they never learn from it, mind you): society is made of individuals. And when you piss enough of them off, you’re for the chop.

Is Ice Melt “Unprecedented” If It Happens Every Century or So?

Tags

climate change, environmentalism, global warming, greenland

The New York Times — hardly a bastion of conservative, anti-environmental politics — has a nice piece on the “unprecedented” ice melt in Greenland…the one that environmental “scientists” would have us think is going to lead to a real-life Waterworld, complete with the horrors of Kevin Coster acting.

Except, oops!, “the last wide surface melt was in 1889, recorded in separate ice cores at the Greenland ice-sheet summit and in the northwestern part of the vast frozen expanse — and has happened roughly every 150 years over a long stretch of centuries, as recorded deeper in the ice.” Hmm…could this be one of the reasons the Vikings called Grenland Greenland? They had working farm colonies for several centuries, then had to abandon the massive island because of the rapid change in climate toward the icy.

I guess the climate change back then was due to the massive use of diesel powered longboats. Damned Vikings breaking the planet!

Tombstone AZ Being Left Dry By Park Service

Tags

environmentalism, government corruption, government regulations, tombstone arizona

The Department of Agriculture has been preventing Tombstone, Arizona from repairing water pipes to the city, demanding that they use horses and hand tools to fix the damage. The reason? To protect a few species which aren’t there anymore, since their habitat burned down.

I’m beginning to think the proper response to this is to hang the officials that come out to stop them.

Obama Set to Destroy Another Industry: Fishing

Tags

environmentalism, fishing industry, port of maine, regulations

Not content to destroy the energy sector with his permitorium, nor content to wreck small and medium businesses with excessive regulations, higher taxes, and the unconstitutional Obamacare, not content to assault the firearms industry by illegally selling weapons and grenades to Mexican drug cartels in an effort to pin the blame on the gun rights of the People, Obama has now set his sights on another group of Americans he can impoverish: Maine fishermen.

In an effort to protect an abundant species of porpoise, the administration is angling to shut down the Port of Maine. Of course, this is the fault of the fishermen, according to government types: “The industry has done itself a great disfavor, at least this segment of the industry, by not going up full bore … with compliance…” of the use of “pingers”, an electronic noise emitter that keeps the creatures from getting snagged in the stationary nets. Never mind that electronics only do so well in water, and batteries have a tendency to run down; the government would have fishermen spend their time tending to the pingers than doing the job that feeds their families.

The shutdown will cost about $4 million to fishermen in the area — not a group of people known for their extravagant lifestyle and income.

Reminder: Environmentalists Don’t Want ANY Kind of Energy Production

Tags

environmentalism, wind power

Now they’re opposing wind farms for the exact reasons I pointed out here.

Greenpeace Overstates Its Case, Yet Again

Tags

apple, environmentalism, greenpeace, icloud, utopianism

There’s a point where you have to ask, “When the hell are you people going to realize you’re nuts?” for me, that time passed a while ago, but here’s a good example of how inanely desperate the envrionuts are to drag us back to the medieval age (because life was much, much better then…)

Now the next big danger to the environment is not cars, but the iCloud! That’s right, your free 5GB of networked storage is dirty and unsustainable. You see the new data centers are located on the lower Eastern seaboard, and that means their electricity (like most of us in the US) was generated by coal-fired  plants. (the ones that Obama’s EPA is trying to “nudge” us away from…enjoy those “necessarily skyrocket”ing energy prices, America!) So ever view of Star Wars we’re told, is destroying the Appalachians. Better, we’re told, would be wind or solar power.

1) The Appalachians are doing just fine. 2) The only thing Star Wars (the prequels, at least; the original trilogy only excels due to The Empire Strikes Back — the only movie that George Lucas had minimal involvement with) destroy is narrative sense and character development. 3) The winds in the Carolinas aren’t adequate to power the area and solar is a no go, since they don’t receive the saturation of, say, Arizona. Even more importantly, if they tried a massive wind or solar park, environmentalists would do like they did in California and scotch the idea because of ground squirrel habitat, bird deaths,  or some other “save the animals” nonsense.

If anything, their endless winging about Apple — whether its the Foxxcom factories where workers make more than they would starving in inner China, or their idiotic conflation of environmental destruction with a service that was already being provided by Dropbox and other companies — makes me want to buy more Apple products. I wish I’d had stock in 2007 prior to the iPhone release. I’d probably be retired now.

So buy iPads and MacBook Airs –they’re surprisingly well made, the employ people that would have been otherwise locked into rural servitude, and it pisses off the environmentalists.

Greenpeace, like every other portion of the environmentalist movement, are half-witted, ill-informed folks that seek to return us to an agrarian paradise that never existed. It’s easy to have this ideologically created utopia in mind if you’ve never had to scrabble for existence farming or scavenging. Even when these activists are exposed to this lifestyle — in Africa or Central America — they want to “preserve” these cultures and prevent the locals from using their local resources for their benefit. It’s the arrogance of prosperity and limited consequence that they can look down on the desire to have the creature comforts that these spoiled Western tits take for granted.

ManBearPig, Climategate and Watermelons: A conversation with author James Delingpole

Tags

environmentalism, government corruption

Spread it Around:

Tags

environmentalism, government corruption, solyndra

I’d like to know how much of the $535 million Solyndra got when into the pockets of the owners and officers of the company before they folded.