What A Different President Thinks

(It is maybe a bad sign that this is my fourth post today. Who knows? But I feel so strongly about what I buried in Post #2 that I cut and pasted it here. It's that important.)

Perhaps you have heard or read what the Czech President Vaclav Klaus has said in the past few days. President Klaus is ringing a different alarm. According to the Prague Daily Monitor, Klaus has written to the US Congress warning that "the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer forms." The biggest threat is "ambitious environmentalism." Klaus wrote:

"[I am] really concerned about the way the environmental topics have been misused by certain political pressure groups to attack fundamental principles underlying free society. …While discussing climate we are not witnessing a clash of views about the environment but a clash of views about human freedom. …the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central, now global, planning of the whole world."

But I need to quote even more of this fine article for our purposes here:

"[Klaus] noted that this ideology wants to replace 'the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central, now global, planning of the whole world.'

"Its followers, Klaus added, consider 'their ideas and arguments to be an undisputable truth' and use sophisticated methods of media manipulation to exert pressure on politicians to achieve their goals.

"Klaus claimed that the environmentalists' argumentation is based on the spreading of fear and panic, and in this atmosphere they continue pushing politicians to adopt 'illiberal measures, impose arbitrary limits, regulations, prohibitions, and restrictions on everyday human activities and make people subject to omnipotent bureaucratic decision-making.'

"Klaus also said that environmentalists 'neglect the fact that both nature and human society are in a process of permanent change,' that there is and has been no ideal state of the world, and they ignore the future economic and technological progress."

I find all of this philosophically fascinating. I wonder if you do too.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2007/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.

Important links relevant to this discussion: The Wizard, fkap (interesting story!); The Reference Frame (Klaus transcript!); Randall Sherman (hysterical!) [Nice job all!]

Goin' Up To The Scrubber In The Sky

Imagine all the deep-blue sky, free of CO2. It isn't hard to do. It's easy if you try. The clean blue sky, it's where I'm gonna go when I die.

Sir Richard Branson, music industry icon, billionaire tycoon, owner of an airline -- an ambitious man who has had big oil interests -- has called attention to his deep and generous concern. He wants a cleaner, healthier biosphere. He wants a cooler planet, one with thicker and broader ice caps; with shallower oceans. He wants longer, colder, more difficult winters. And he is willing to give away $25 million to the first person who can keep winter icy-hard.

The AP (and everyone else) reported this weekend that Sir Branson, of Virgin Atlantic Airlines (and Virgin everything else), hopes that his largesse shall spur on competition for a sort of atmospheric scrubber, or a sort of sponge, or a sort of respirator, that will remove harmful levels of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. One can't hardly be more impressed with such a noble call: Sir Branson has tapped into the deep reserves of scientific genius in the hopes of finding a cure for our self-inflicted malady.

That, I believe, is the big global warming story of the day.

But the real story is this, no?

Here we have a man who is heavily invested in the airline industry calling for someone -- anyone -- to bring forward some device or method that expurgates harmful levels of CO2 from the atmosphere. Now, let us imagine that I, of all people, have the answer to Sir Branson's challenge, and that I win his $25 million award; imagine that CO2 gases are indeed reduced, and the earth's atmosphere begins to cool to "normal" temperatures. What would happen?

What would happen is that people would not reduce their use of oil at all; rather, they would increase it. Find the certain cure for cancer and everyone starts smoking. In other words, Sir Branson's challenge is billowing with self-interest. He wants to destroy the effects of carbon-based fuel consumption in order to protect the use of carbon fuels. And even if that is NOT his motive, it will clearly be the motive for other people in similar industries. (Just forget about the political need to free the West of its dependence on Mid-East oil.) It hardly matters that Mr. Branson has also promised to invest in green fuels technologies (in his own Virgin Fuels), since that investment is also pure self-interest: he expects a return, and to cash in on popular anxieties.

Sir Branson's challenge certainly tickles the ears, but it is oozing with problems.

Or so it could be argued.

We could always just have people stop exhaling CO2 for half of each day. I mean, six billion CO2 pumps can't be one whit good. Or we could just put gels of algae over every mouth and every exhaust pipe on the planet, or fill the virgin atlantic with those great little creatures. That's it!

Peace.

BG

©Bill Gnade 2007/Contratimes. All rights reserved.

¶ Of The Day: Seeing Clearly Through The Radiant Gas

Today's ¶ Of the Day is really but a sentence. But it is a really good sentence.

In Tuesday's Wall Street Journal editorial, "Legal Hot Air" (2.6.07), which discusses, in part, California Attorney General Jerry Brown's intent to sue the auto industry for making cars (that spew greenhouse gases), the editors make this solid point about suing one part of the greenhouse gas-belching industry complex:

In short, there's scarcely any economic activity imaginable that doesn't somehow affect the balance of greenhouse gases, which is why a "nuisance" complaint against any single industry doesn't make sense. It's also why the judiciary has so far wisely refused to get drawn into this kind of game. ...

In any case, as global warming alarmists never tire of reminding us, any serious attempt to control greenhouse gas levels would have to be an international one. [emphasis added]

Amazingly, the Wall Street Journal does not -- apparently -- see what I see in this bold quote; I hope you at least see it, for it is buried right there before our eyes.

What is evident -- even if the most dire predictions of global warming are perfectly true -- is that global warming rhetoric is being used to foment discontent over the idea of separate nation states. In other words, what the WSJ has missed is that this is all about creating one great overseer, one great political monolith: Global warming is so dire we all must work together, now, under one set of rules, and under one enforcing body.

I am surprised I had not seen this before.

Perhaps I do not see as clearly as I believe I do. Of course I don't.

One.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2007/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.
And all lefts.

"Don't Eat The Meat": Passing Gas At The Butcher's

In a casual on-line conversation this past week, I made mention of the Biblical prophecy that proclaims -- in the end times -- that eating meat will be forbidden. There was a small scrum over this, with one writer doubting that the world could ever become -- by law -- a strictly vegetarian planet. Of course, none of us in our conversation were talking much about the end of the world; nor was I hurling Biblical verses about with attendant claps of thunder.

But I just picked this off of the FoxNews website. It is, at least apparently, rooted in some fact, namely a United Nations report. Moreover, I have seen a few other news reports over the last few days discussing the same matter. And the matter is hardly new. I mean, even Canada's legendary singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn referred to the cattle industry as the harvesting of "methane dispensers" in a song, If A Tree Falls, nearly 20 years ago. But this news clip is so gloriously interesting I can barely contain myself.

Read the brief report for yourself:

Livestock Worse Than Humanity?

A report by the United Nations' Food and Agricultural Organization says cattle and other livestock cause more greenhouse gases than cars, planes, and all other forms of transportation put together. Britain's Independent News says the report blames cow flatulence and manure for one-third of all methane emissions — which warm the earth 20 times faster than carbon dioxide.

The world's 1.5 billion cows are also blamed for everything from acid rain to desertification and the destruction of coral reefs. And while cows are taking the heat in one U.N. report, another says humans are doing less harm to the environment than previously thought. The Sunday Telegraph says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reduced its estimate of human affect on global warming by 25 percent. And it has lowered its prediction of how much sea levels will rise by half. The Panel cites improved data for the revisions.

So much for hamburgers, bacon, leg of lamb. We're talking about a world where mint jelly is all that's left on one's dinner plate (assuming, of course, that there were no insects involved in the process).

As one restaurateur said to me, her face turned up in a sneer when I asked her for some honey, "Der! Bees aren't vegan!"

Please, pass the methane dispenser before it is all gone.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.