Nov 04 2009

Hardly enough people for a decent party

Category: environment,Group-think — harmonicminer @ 9:08 am

Some people think there are just too many of us, and are telling us to do Family Planning to Save the Planet?

What’s the best way to save the planet? Don’t have kids, say researchers from Oregon State University.

“Clearly, the potential savings from reduced reproduction are huge compared to the savings that can be achieved by changes in lifestyle,” the report states.

Hmm. I suppose I’m OK with people who believe this being the ones doing the family planning.

The myth of over-population is exploded here.  But even the pessimists now accept that the world’s population will peak at around 9 billion at mid-century or so, and then begin a slow, steady decline.  Runaway population growth is no more a given than runaway global warming.

The worst thing is for people in developed nations to reduce their own numbers by reducing fertility, though exactly that is happening.  Yet, it is people in such nations who are the only ones likely to follow the benighted advice of the population doomsayers.  The maintenance of the technical and professional base that is required to feed and serve a large world population is crucial, and that technical and professional base will not be coming from the third world, even though third world population growth rates are higher.

At bottom, fear of greater human numbers is evidence of a kind of misanthropically misguided, myopic ideology that values worms, exotic rats, unusual trees and interesting insects more than it values humanity.  The earth is plenty big enough to hold and feed 10 billion people, the most we are ever likely to have. 

What’s more likely is that in about 70 years, real estate prices will start to drop as demand falls from the peak.  My great-grandkids will probably be able to pick up a mansion in sunny Wichita for a song….  right next to the super-farms that will have been feeding the world for decades.

Of course, people will have higher heating bills, due to the gradual onset of another ice age.

Oct 25 2009

Hello World Government? Goodbye freedom? UPDATE

Category: appeasement,Congress,corruption,economy,election 2008,environment,freedom,government,USA,White House — harmonicminer @ 9:17 am

Watch this, from Lord Christopher Monckton, chief policy advisor to the Science and Public Policy Institute.

I haven’t heard much about this from other sources…. I’m trying to get more information about it.  But if this fellow isn’t exaggerating, this is looking really ugly.

More info here and here and some especially scary nonsense from Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister.

Jul 09 2009

Yessir, we’re all going green

Category: economy,energy,environment — harmonicminer @ 9:57 am

Of course, green is the color of mold, really bad teeth, and gangrene.

Jun 27 2009

The Waxman-Markey Cap & Trade Energy Bill: part TWO

Category: economy,energy,environment — harmonicminer @ 9:59 am

This disastrous drag on the US economy has passed the House, narrowly.

The last chance to block it is in the Senate.  Don’t just assume that your senator can’t be moved.  Write them, evey day, to express your disapproval of a bill that even its proponents admit will make no significant difference to the climate, but which will weigh down an already struggling US economy.   This is purely a “feel good” bill for the eco-pagan elites, yet it is a bill which will hurt the poor more than anyone, because they are always the first hurt by a struggling economy.  The notion that only “the polluters” will pay more is risible.  Prices will be higher, and costs and fees will simply be passed on to the consumers, doing the most harm to those on the tightest budgets.  More subtle effects, but even more damaging to the poor, will be the jobs that will continue to move offshore, as the US becomes less competitive against other large economies that will never make such restrictions on their own producers.

Imagine a public pool that isn’t quite as perfectly clean as you’d like it to be.  Now imagine about 100 people in it, splashing around, many barely staying above water, but all required to be in the water, because there is simply nowhere else to be.  And now imagine throwing a 25 pound cleaning filter around the neck of one swimmer who is already struggling, a swimmer whose history is one of rescuing other swimmers, giving other swimmers short breathers while they hang on for a minute, even though you know that only an insignificant difference will be made by the 25 pound filter.

Now imagine being proud of your commitment to clean water, because you hung the filter around the neck of one swimmer.  Now imagine having friends in the press who are willing to repeat your line that “it won’t really hurt the swimmer who is carrying the extra weight” as if it’s true.  And imagine pretending that you’ve done a great service for the world, and being allowed to get away with it.

That’s about where we are today.

Call your senators.  Then write to them, or send email at least.  Then call them again.  You owe it to yourself, and anyone you care about.

Flotation devices are going to be in very short supply, and very expensive.

May 30 2009

An age now fading

Category: diversity,economy,environment,government,Group-think,Obama,race,racism,society — harmonicminer @ 9:04 am

Reflections On an Age Now Fading… Read it all.

On matter of race, one detects beneath the therapeutic calls for inclusiveness, an unfortunate renewal of identity politics with a new harder edge-we saw that in the campaign with the slips about reparations and oppression studies, the clingers speech, Rev. Wright, and the ‘typical white person’ put down. Then with Eric Holder’s blast about Americans as “cowards” and now with the Supreme Court nominee’s somewhat derogatory remarks about the proverbial white male judge. We are not hearing praise of the melting pot ideal of intermarriage, assimilation, or integration-even if such elites in their private lives do not predicate their daily regimens in terms of racialism. I spent 21 years in a university in which quite affluent elites sought any multicultural patina possible for an edge in professional advancement and general leverage–the hyphenated name, the addition of the accent mark on the name, the non-American accentuation, occasional ethnic dress, the relabeling of one as a designated minority who otherwise had not previously emphasized race, etc.—that would suggest they were not part of the popular capitalist culture-supposedly centered on the white male-around them. Yet I left sensing the industry of race was doomed, due to the power of popular culture, the unworkable labyrinth of racial identification due to intermarriage, the laughable contradictions (the jet-black immigrant from India got no favored treatment, the light-skinned Costa Rican name Jorge piggy-backed onto the Mexican-American experience), the son of the Mexican father who used his name Gomez was authentic, the son of the Mexican mother who carried his non-Mexican father’s name Wilson was not. And on and on with this ridiculous neo-Confederate practice of adjudicating percentages of race to the sixteenth, and drops of targeted minority blood—a racist enterprise to the core. The only constant? The white male was fair game. It mattered little that more women were graduating than men, that under the racial spoils system we were beginning to see white males in less percentages than those found in the general population at the university; instead, it was sort of OK to trash, as in the manner of Sotomayor’s comment, the proverbial white male, as if we are collectively ashamed of everyone from the Wright Brothers to Lincoln to John Wayne to JFK.

When so close an observer of history and modern life as Victor Davis Hanson is this pessimistic, I feel the need to go see an escapist movie or something.

Read his entire article. Then go get a massage or a pedicure and try not to think about it.

May 03 2009

Putting a smiley face on carbon taxes

Category: environment,funny but sad,global warming,Group-think,media,Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 9:26 am

As most of us know, half the battle is controlling the terms of the debate. And sometimes, it seems, if you want to sell something that few are buying, you need to consult a thesaurus.

Environmental issues consistently rate near the bottom of public worry, according to many public opinion polls. A Pew Research Center poll released in January found global warming last among 20 voter concerns; it trailed issues like addressing moral decline and decreasing the influence of lobbyists. “We know why it’s lowest,” said Mr. Perkowitz, a marketer of outdoor clothing and home furnishings before he started ecoAmerica, whose activities are financed by corporations, foundations and individuals. “When someone thinks of global warming, they think of a politicized, polarized argument. When you say ‘global warming,’ a certain group of Americans think that’s a code word for progressive liberals, gay marriage and other such issues.”

The answer, Mr. Perkowitz said in his presentation at the briefing, is to reframe the issue using different language. “Energy efficiency” makes people think of shivering in the dark. Instead, it is more effective to speak of “saving money for a more prosperous future.” In fact, the group’s surveys and focus groups found, it is time to drop the term “the environment” and talk about “the air we breathe, the water our children drink.”

“Another key finding: remember to speak in TALKING POINTS aspirational language about shared American ideals, like freedom, prosperity, independence and self-sufficiency while avoiding jargon and details about policy, science, economics or technology,” said the e-mail account of the group’s study.

Are Americans really this stupid?

Well, yes.  They elected Obama hoping for unspecified change.  Any old direction will do, it would seem.  They bought Clinton’s “contributions” for taxes, radical feminism’s “pro-choice” for anti-unborn child and pro-abortion, “gun control” for “guns for criminals only”, and “hate speech” for telling the truth, or at least exercising your First Amendment right to speak your mind.

One of the best ways to lie is just to pretend not to hear anyone who’s telling the truth, and keep right on as if they never spoke.  That’s exactly what’s happening in our national conversation, as the Left rules all the media but talk radio, and is gunning for that, too.  So “global warming” has morphed into “climate change” and “carbon taxes” is going to be “anti-pollution fees”, and so on.

In the meantime, if you had to bet, the smart money is that the earth is cooling, overall.  And the smarter money knows that even if it isn’t, the change is very gradual, probably has little to do with human activity, and it isn’t even clear that it will be a bad thing.

And by the way:  there were polar bears around when the earth was so warm that Greenland was verdant farm land, with nary a glacier in sight.  (That’s why it’s called GREENLAND.)   Somehow, the bears survived.

I suspect they will again.

Jan 18 2009

Our Socialist new Climate Czar

Category: economy,environment,global warming,left,socialism — harmonicminer @ 10:51 am

When you think about it, it’s kind of funny that anyone is called a “climate czar.” Generally, a czar is someone who had power over something, and I think it’s pretty obvious that humans have very little power over the climate. But Obama’s new “climate czarina” is Carol M. Browner, and she is a card carrying socialist with bad plans for U.S. sovereignty and our economy.  (Much more at the link.)

Until last week, Carol M. Browner, President-elect Barack Obama’s pick as global warming czar, was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for “global governance” and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change.

By Thursday, Mrs. Browner’s name and biography had been removed from Socialist International’s Web page, though a photo of her speaking June 30 to the group’s congress in Greece was still available.

Socialist International, an umbrella group for many of the world’s social democratic political parties such as Britain’s Labor Party, says it supports socialism and is harshly critical of U.S. policies.

The group’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, the organization’s action arm on climate change, says the developed world must reduce consumption and commit to binding and punitive limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

Many of us have long said that “climate change” is just a smokescreen for socialist takeovers of various aspects of the economy, or maybe just the whole thing. Obama’s appointment does nothing to allay such concerns.

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Jan 09 2009

What global warming? REDUX

Category: environment,global warming — harmonicminer @ 10:35 am

We’ve been commenting on this already. Here’s a Telegraph article saying that 2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the “hottest in history” and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free, as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.

Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to “natural factors” such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely “masking the underlying warming trend”, and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world’s most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that “consensus” which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month’s Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and “environmentalists” gathered to plan next year’s “son of Kyoto” treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for “combating climate change” with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

H/T: AzusaPacificAlumni

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Dec 23 2008

Time to get RADICAL?

Category: economy,energy,environment,global warming,Obama — harmonicminer @ 10:49 am

The last time I looked, Thomas Friedman is neither a climate scientist, meterologist, physicist, or economist.  His academic training is in “Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Studies”. He’s a journalist. That’s it. So I hope Obama is not taking seriously this advice from Friedman to him, which presupposes Friedman’s ability to make scientific and economic judgments:

[Friedman] insisted that the challenge facing Obama required a revolutionary attitude to environmental policy, if the new administration wanted to avoid the devastating effects of global warming.

“We can do it if our next president, who I have great hopes for, is ready to be as radical as the moment we are in,” Friedman, whose previous bestseller was “The World is Flat”, told a lunch hosted by The Asia Society.

“Our next president is going to be called on to be more radical — I am talking crazy, wild-hair, paint-on-your-face, ring-in-your-nose radical — in what he does, than any president since FDR,” he said, referring to Franklin D Roosevelt, US president during the 1930s depression and the Second World War.

Continue reading “Time to get RADICAL?”

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Dec 11 2008

Dividing the promised land part 2

Category: economy,environment,government,humor — harmonicminer @ 1:10 pm

This is about our adventures in dividing a 5 acre lot into two 2.5 acre lots, in San Bernardino County in southern California. It will include human folly, financial folly, governmental folly, economic folly, and environmental folly. Plenty of folly to go around. If you missed it, this post will make a lot more sense if you read Part 1 first.

So, we hired a real estate agent to help us through the land subdivision process. We were starting this about 2 years ago, when the real estate boom was in full flower, and everybody was very busy, including our agent, all the county offices and employees involved, and all the private companies the county engages to perform certain services for it. So, initially, we waited.

Then we waited some more.

What we didn’t know is that while we were waiting, the prices for every aspect of the process were going up, eventually reaching about $20,000, instead of the $14,000-$15,000 we were told initially.

Continue reading “Dividing the promised land part 2”

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