A lefty critique of cap and trade
This is actually a good explanation of the evil economy-raping Enron-inspired resource-suck that is Cap & Trade, but from the lefty perspective. So it accurately portrays the mischief in the system, but in a framework of CO2-phobic, capitalism-hating, bleeding-heart boneheaded hippie shit.
Notice the expression “climate justice” in there. You’ll hear those words again in future. It’s our old friend redistribution of wealth dressed up in her new environmentalist togs.
Anyhow, this is worth ten minutes of your time, if you want a quick rundown of where the holes are. Annie Leonard, the narrator, is better known for a similar film called The Story of Stuff, which is chock-full of so much stupid I’m surprised it can drag its stupid ass out of its stupid bed in the morning.
Edit: my bad. I just watched it again. She doesn’t use the expression “climate justice” in this one. She says “pay back ecological debt.” Man, all the new names for old concepts…I get so confused.
December 3, 2009 — 8:26 pm
Comments: 24
Save a tree — wipe your ass with a hippie
It’s obvious the media made up a whole batch of warmist stories for the run-up to the Copenhagen summit, and they’re by-god going to run them — Climategate be damned. The New Scientist has an article hilariously titled Five eco-crimes we commit every day.
Eco-crimes. Gosh, that sounds super science-y.
Anyhow, it’s a list of things that produce more CO2 than you think (you do think about how much CO2 you’re pumping out, don’t you?). You might’ve knowed it would be a list of everyday things life would be perfectly fucking miserable with less of. New clothes before your old ones have totally worn out. Doing the laundry. Letting food go to waste. Coffee (dear sweet Jesus…coffee).
And, yes. Toilet paper.
It seems long fibers from freshly cut trees are needed to make soft bog-roll. As paper is recycled, the fibers get shorter and harsher. One hundred percent recycled TP is probably like burnishing your asshole with a windowscreen, but…hey. Polar bears, dude.
Polar.
Bears.
Hooray! Greenpeace gives us a guide to environmentalist-approved toilet paper, including a handy .pdf you can print out and carry with you. In case of shock toilet-paper-buying opportunities, I guess.
Incidentally, if Greenpeace is accurately describing the situation — if Kimberly-Clark really was needlessly cutting down old-growth forests to make toilet paper — then I guess I’m glad they got nagged into stopping. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find they had been harvesting trees in a responsible way on the advice of wise forest managers. And indian shamans.
If I had to play who-do-you-trust between Big Business and Big Eco…meh.
December 1, 2009 — 7:22 pm
Comments: 42
Hockey stick? I’ll give you a hockey stick!!!!!1!
I cannot POSSIBLY be the first to think of this.
November 24, 2009 — 12:03 pm
Comments: 39
Schadenfreude Monday!
It’s a vile day here — wet, wild and windy (though I must say, unseasonably warm) — and I’ve spent the whole of it piled up on the couch reading the leaked emails and datafiles from the University of East Anglia. I love this kind of shitstorm. And the lame-o spin that goes with.
There won’t be a “hey, kids, let’s put on a giant hoax!” message. Not the point. The most scandalous bits are incontrovertible. To wit:
The Warmists are a small, insular crowd. It’s no use saying these were only a few scientists; they’re all on each other’s Rolodexes. The data these guys were pushing underpins mucho research. If that data is sloppy or nonexistent, it discredits a LOT of the science.
They leaned on journalists and editors. There’s not much virtue in “peer reviewed” papers if editors are pressured into or out of reviewing particular scientists.
They broke the law. Destroying information that is the subject of a Freedom of Information request is flat-out illegal. Also, some of the grant money discussion looked a little…fiddly.
They are fucking morons. Seriously. You don’t ever, EVER, EVARRRR put anything into writing that you wouldn’t want to read on the internet. I knew that. Didn’t you?
Journalists (particularly ones mentioned by name) will work hard to keep this information out of the funny papers, and they may succeed. Maybe. But the scientific community will be rocked by this. At the very least, it hamstrings the ability of these particular guys to strongarm editors and dismiss the opposition as beneath notice.
When Copenhagen fizzles, we’re going to see a lot more crude activist tearjerking bullshit like the stupid raining bears ad. Because — robbed of their extra-super-powerful 100% dissent-free global scientific consensus — that’s the best they’ve got.
Follow along at Watt’s Up With That and Climate Audit (among others). And remember, the good stuff is often in the comments.
November 23, 2009 — 4:19 pm
Comments: 28
Unintended consequences
HAVE you ever noticed a friend or neighbour driving a new hybrid car and felt pressure to trade in your gas guzzler? Or worried about what people might think when you drive up to the office in an SUV?
That’s the question in a New Scientist article on how we could cut down on damage to the environment by making people ‘fess up to what they consume. HotAir ran it under the headline Newest solution to global warming: Shame.
The author studied the way subjects would selfishly abuse shared resources — basically, the tragedy of the commons — but could be persuaded not to if everyone was aware how much everyone else was consuming.
See, this is why the excess of liberals in academia is a problem. You miss subtle data points, like MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT ASHAMED OF HOW MUCH ENERGY THEY USE. We pay for what we get, fair and square. Through the nose, even. What’s to be ashamed?
Energy consumption is a proxy for success. Bigger cars, bigger houses, maybe a boat or motorbike, lots of air travel — the good life is hell on your carbon footprint. Arch warmist and soon-to-be green billionaire Al Gore has a fucking GIGANTIC carbon footprint (I remind you, one of his three mansions uses twenty times the energy of the average American family home). If he’s not ashamed, why would I be?
Only in a leftist’s — or Christian missionary’s — dream world is a thin, dry, gray life of parsimony a status symbol. For the rest of us, we’re pretty proud of our toys. I predict outting the carbon exploiters wouldn’t play out quite the way it did in a university lab.
Say, did you catch yourself thinking, “gosh, I wish there was a range of quality merchandise with this logo or design emblazoned on it?” Well, it’s your lucky day!
November 17, 2009 — 5:04 pm
Comments: 36
You know, that title could be taken another way
We visited friends in Alfriston Sunday, and they were like, “there’s a free screening of the Age of Stupid here today. You should go!” And we’re, like, “oh! Ummm…ha. Yeah. Ah. Mmmm. Heh heh heh.”
Have you heard of this turkey? It’s an indy film about an archivist from 2055 who looks back at footage of our time and wonders, “ZOMG, why didn’t they listen to the hippies about globular warmening????” It’s got all the important scientific issues: Iraq, Nigeria, wind farms, hurricane Katrina. McDonald’s and Wal*Mart (probably. Just guessing here).
It’s less charty and graphy than An Inconvenient Truth; it’s more an attempt to put a human face on pants-peeing alarmism. As one user on IMDB put it, “it’s possible that even Sarah Palin herself could not fail to be affected by the story of Fernand Pareau, an octogenarian French mountain guide, showing us the glacier he loves as it withers away before his eyes.”
Whoof. Excuse me. Just step around that for now and I’ll clean it up in a sec.
The film premiered in New York on September 21 and all the world’s most prominent scientists were there: Kofi Annan, Gillian Anderson. Moby. That freaky-looking dude from Radiohead.
Anyhoo, in case this embarrassing invitation crops up again, I’ve pre-jiggered five reasons I can’t go see your stupid global warmening movie:
1 My mom was so terrified by The Population Bomb, she had an abortion rather than let me be one of the hundreds of millions who starved in the 1970s.
2 In 1983, I went out into the new Ice Age, licked a flagpole and I’ve been stuck to it ever since. Please come get me; I’m cold and lonely.
3 I ate a delicious t-bone steak in a restaurant London in 1998 and was one of the 100,000 to die horribly of Mad Cow disease.
4 Dude! Are you kidding? The grid hasn’t worked around here since the Y2K disaster. I’ve spent the last nine years living in a yurt eating treebark sammiches.
5 I gots de swine flu. Okay, strike that one. The flu pandemic still has time to be an actual catastrophe, for reals this time.
In case I’m being too fucking subtle here the professional catastrophe-mongers are always wrong. Bad scientists and conmen have been trying to sell the apocalypse to a weary public over and over again since…since science overtook Jesus as the main faith of the West.
Man-made global warmening is just the most recent. They’ve gotten clever with this con, though — the deadline is far, far in the future. We must act RIGHT NOW…but we’ll never know for sure how much they’ve played us for chumps. We won’t live that long.
October 5, 2009 — 3:33 pm
Comments: 51
Thirty five minutes of rambling stoner gibberish
Did you follow the Al Gore link I put in yesterday’s post? No. Of course you didn’t. See, this is why we can’t have nice things.
Well, I just listened to the full 34 minutes and 57 seconds of Al’s address to Oxford, and I’m half dead of bullshit poisonining. I tried writing some of it down, but it doesn’t sound half as crazy in print as it does in Al’s inimitable lisping, halting, rambling stream-of-consciousness, bizarre emphasis on the wrong syllABLEs, crazy-ass numbtarded fucknut delivery. What a maroon.
I think I can translate: if we can scare people enough, we have a fantastic opportunity to take shit away from rich bastards and give it to poor people. (Don’t believe me? Listen to the damn thing yourself). Uncle B and I differ on whether he’s dumber than he is dishonest, or crookeder than he is dumb. I’m on the “dumb” side of the argument.
I know stoner bullshit when I step in it: this is the voice of a dumb guy who hangs around science nerds long enough to pick up a few phrases to impress his fellow dumb guys. Here, have some:
We have to connect the soils with the trees and the vegetation and the energy sources the built environment and the human system including population. Population is a success story. It’s a success story in slow motion. But we are bending the curve and the old models of what people once thought worked to stabilize population have thankfully been discarded in favor of a model that works. It’s a common system that shifts from one equilibrium to another.
Aw, see…that’s a lot funnier when Al says it. Though, come to think of it, some of this gobbledygook is probably because he’s talking to people who already know what he’s talking about, and he doesn’t want anything leaking to the straights.
No. Dumb. I’m still going with dumb.
The part of our consciousness that feels and expresses and acts upon urgency is tied to the recognition of those ancient threats and when one of those appears then that part of our consciousness that is aroused and alerted can instantly activate the reasoning process and we can respond instantly and then we can respond in a more deliberative way. But when the threat itself can only be perceived with the instrument of reason, pushing that recognition into that part of our awareness that activates urgency is an entirely different proposition.
Had enough? Ready to confess?
The connecting lines between the amygdala and the neocortex are asymmetrical. The flow of information from the urgency center to the reasoning center is quite robust, but the flow in the opposite direction is just a little footpath. And that really is at the heart of the problem. But it is for us as a civilization the aggregate bandwidth that really matters, because when enough people make that connection and when that connection with all its import is held in common, then consciousness can focus on the danger we face and the solutions that are available to us.
I think what he’s saying is, if you scare somebody you can get him to reason, but if you reason with somebody, you can’t scare him.
Only a man who never had a mortgage could believe that shit.
July 8, 2009 — 7:37 pm
Comments: 34
Senate Underpants Gnomes debate global warmening
“This is easily the largest income redistribution scheme since the income tax.”
That’s from the excellent Wall Street Journal article on the Lieberman/Warner You Don’t Hate Unicorns, Do You? economic rape and pillage bill before the Senate today. Everyone acknowledges this one doesn’t have a prayer; they’re just softening us up for the real bill next year.
Because — back up and cover your buttholes, ladies and gentlemen — the next President of the United States believes in this shit.
Not global warmening — that’s just stupid. If people really believed that rubbish, they’d behave differently (I’m looking at you, Mister Gore). But there’s nothing a Senator believes in more passionately than sucking money out of the productive sector and blowing it into the hands of government, and this sucker would blow to the tune of THREE POINT THREE TWO TRILLION DOLLARS by 2050.
The floor fights aren’t about whether this economic ass-raping is a good idea, but about who gets how much for what. John Kerry, for example, is concerned about the effect of global warmening on “crustaceans” — shitting you I am not — so Boston lobstermen are in. There’s $802 billion for low income tax relief, which is odd since low income households pay little or no tax as it is. Walking around money, I guess.
There’s $190 billion to train people for ‘green-collar’ jobs (has any government training program other than the GI Bill ever done anything good for anybody?) and another $171 billion for mass transit project (yeah, those always work). There’s half a trillion dollars allocated for “wildlife adaptation” (which I guess means shuttling hippies and spotted owls around the country in brightly painted school buses) and $342 billion for international aid (wait, don’t we do that already?). There’s ice cream and bouncy castles and…oh, what fun we shall have!
I’m guessing the point of this trial balloon of a bill is to see how we, who are about to be reamed good and proper, react. I suggest we do so.
June 3, 2008 — 10:14 am
Comments: 40
My daddy didn’t buy a cow, and I won’t either
Ten years ago, I bought a six-shooter in a little shop in Alexandria, Tennessee. Buying a gun is a wingnut bonding ritual; it involves telling each other progressively wingnuttier stories for an hour or two before getting down to bidness. Thus, the buyer knows the seller is an honest man and the seller knows the buyer isn’t a BATF agent trying to trip him up and nick his license.
Anyhow, the shopkeep told me that Al Gore, Sr, ran a crooked cattle auction in nearby Carthage. People would come from all over (“desert sheiks in robes and all kind of thing”) to pay way over the odds for an angus cow that they, like as not, never even picked up. One man, asked on the way out what to do with the grievously overpriced cow he’d just bought, shrugged and said, “throw it in the grinder, I guess.” He didn’t buy a cow, he bought a sitting Senator.
I didn’t think much of the story, but last time I was home, I remembered to ask my dad if it was true. His face lit up, “you bet it’s true!” When he came to Nashville in the ’60s to take a position in Democrat Frank Clement’s government (my dad’s a Republican, duh), somebody took him aside and told him, “Son, you’d better buy a cow.”
Al Senior was a slick, sharp, old school Southern fraud. His son is a different flavor of phony altogether. I’ve never met him, but he’s a sort of a FOAF. My impression? Sharp as a bag of wet mice; a cipher; a bozo; an empty vessel, hollowed out to hold his father’s ambitions.
Politicians have issues the way the Senior Prom has a theme. Ex-military men become the military guy, unchallengable on all things military. Ex-doctors are experts not just on medical issues, they are the compassion guy. Women and minorities are women and minorities.
Legislators without a built-in hook generally pick one at random (this helpful video explains the process). Al picked the environment.
I believe he is genuinely puzzled that anyone would take him to task for flying around the world to tell people not to fly so much. So what if one of his three mansions uses twenty times the electricity of the average family? Don’t you get it? He’s the Environment Guy. Except when he’s wearing an eyepatch — then he’s a pirate!
That was my rambling preamble for grassfire.org‘s Carbon Belch Day. Thursday, June 12th, turn on your space heaters, open a window, set fire to something (or someone!), fart, drive around in circles, eat meat, mow the lawn. Take the pledge! DO NOT BUY THE GORE FAMBLY COW!
May 29, 2008 — 10:47 am
Comments: 72
Let’s kill stuff — for Gaia!
Happy Earth Day! Yes, today’s the actual date, though NPR is pretty much observing Earth Week. (I listen to NPR so you don’t have to. You’re welcome).
Yesterday they ran a little feature called Food Footprint: Minimizing Greenhouse Gasses (yes, with “gasses” spelled like that…when did that become okay?).
Did you know that 18% of the world’s greenhouse gases are produced by “animal agriculture”? Animal agriculture: making and moving meat.
Turns out cows are especially bad, because hippies hate beef. Raising a cow and bringing it to market releases thirty six pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for every pound of edible meat.
So I’m thinking…hunting has got to be the greenest thing on Gaia’s green earth. It tranforms dangerous wild animals — animals that would otherwise spend their lives destroying nascent forests and emitting harmful fumes into the atmosphere — into healthful, planet-saving food.
Why let Al Gore have all the fun? Once we work out the lifetime carbon load of various animals, every hunter is his own one-man carbon credits business.
“Mornin’, Sir. I’m taking carbon orders. Will you be needing a rabbit-sized credit or the deer-sized credit today?”
April 22, 2008 — 12:28 pm
Comments: 102