» 2008 » April

Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves.

I don’t worry about the earth. I’m pretty certain the earth will survive the worst we can do to it. I’m very certain the earth doesn’t worry about us. I’m not alone. People got more riled up when scientists removed Pluto from the list of planets than they do when scientists warn that our greenhouse gas emissions are poised to turn the earth into a barely habitable planet.

The earth is certainly not important enough to qualify for an ABC debate question. Who wears an Earth lapel pin? Arguably, concern over the earth is elitist, something people can afford to spend their time on when every other need is met. But elitism is out these days. Only bitter environmentalists cling to Earth Day. We need a new way to make people care about the nasty things we’re doing with our cars and power plants. At the very least, we need a new name.

Source: www.salon.com/…

LS »  How about we call it “Save My @#$%ing Grandkids Day”?

Earth Hour could have been sold so much better.

Reading about this Saturday’s international Earth Hour in the Globe and Mail leads me to one conclusion: it’s time to invest in Saskatchewan prairie, because it’s bound to be waterfront.

Am I alone in thinking the environmental movement is doomed to fail because it just doesn’t understand that most people are not interested in donning hair-shirts for carbon reduction?

When the World Wildlife Fund asks us to turn out the lights for an hour on Sat., March 29 at 8 p.m. local time, what do they propose we do instead? Other than virtuously calculate the impact our actions will have on the collective carbon footprint, that is.

They suggest organizing our very own Earth Hour events with humiliation parties including karaoke or trivia games. Suffering-with-questions? What is this: the Environmental Inquisition?

Source : www.thetyee.ca/…

LS » An excellent idea, as we know, sex sells. The only problem is that the last thing this planet needs is a human population explosion, there is already going to be 9 billion of us within a hundred years or something and if we are all living in Saskatchewan I don’t know how we are going to feed everybody.

… But my attempt to maintain a skeptical stance melted away faster than a Greenland glacier when I took a closer look at the source of Greenie Watch’s contrarian take, a Web site called ICECAP run by a retired meteorologist named Joseph D’Aleo.

ICECAP is an acronym for International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, and it is as festering a hotbed for notorious climate change denialists as I have seen outside of JunkScience. On its home page, ICECAP prominently features articles by Christopher Monckton and D’Aleo, both of whom are closely associated with the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI). SPPI, in turn, is an offshoot of the right-wing Frontiers of Freedom think tank. According to Wikipedia, SPPI was formerly named the Center for Science and Public Policy and was originally created with the help of a $100,000 donation from ExxonMobil.

It’s amazing, really. Pick a random datapoint of climate skepticism floating through the infosphere, and you can almost invariably connect the dots back to Exxon.

Source: www..salon.com/…

LS » You can read the first part of the article at the above link but it is the last 3 paragraphs that are most interesting. What is it that they say in cop shows, ‘always follow the money’?