Al Gore Ruins Everything

Even Simcha Fischer's Marriage (h/t Insty):

MY KIDS: Ooh, a lamp! Let’s kick it until it’s dead!
LAMP: Smash.
ME: (lying on the couch dying with morning sickness): . . .I didn’t hear anything. . . [promptly manages to actually forget about everything]
LAMP: I guess I’ll just lie here and bleed poison all over your house, you dirty breeders.
KIDS: Yay, let’s throw stuff around!
HUSBAND: Hi, I’m home! Hey, there’s broken glass all over the room. There’s mercury mixed in with the six bags of winter clothes you were sorting, and it’s all over the portacrib. Okay, well, you lie there, I’ll take care of it.

This is going to be the tip of the iceberg. When the incandescent ban becomes fully felt, ManBearPig is getting the blame. And people will say "Bush did some crazy things, but he didn't fill my house with mercury."

And the 2000 election will finally be over.

Walter Russel Mead on Al Gore

Read the Whole Thing, but here's the Knife Point:

The green movement’s core tactic is not to “hide the decline” or otherwise to cook the books of science. Its core tactic to cloak a comically absurd, impossibly complex and obviously impractical political program in the authority of science. Let anyone attack the cretinous and rickety construct of policies, trade-offs, offsets and bribes by which the greens plan to govern the world economy in the twenty first century, and they attack you as an anti-science bigot.
To argue with these people about science is to miss the core point. Even if the science is exactly as Mr. Gore claims, his policies are still useless. His advocacy is still a distraction. The movement he heads is still a ship of fools.

And that's where environmentalism fundamentally errs. They cannot trust that humans, left to their own devices, will solve a problem. They insist on slapping some make-up on the Hegelian God-State, that it might fix it for us.

Fukushima Demonstrates That Nuclear Power Works

George "Moonbat" Monbiot (h/t Insty):

[T]he average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.
If other forms of energy production caused no damage, these impacts would weigh more heavily. But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn't work.

Read the whole thing, in which he points out that renewable energy carries it's own costs. Basically, Fukushima got hit with a perfect storm of disasters, and to date, no one is going to die.

GE Enjoys its Benefices

Serve the realm, and the king will reward you.

Of course, once again, as a GE stockholder, a bit of these plums will eventually trickle down to the likes of me. Beggin' yer pardon, milord...

What's the Difference Between a Developer and an Environmentalist?

A developer is someone who wants to build a house in the woods.

An environmentalist is someone who already owns a house in the woods.

Via Ace, Patrick Moore's Confessions of a Greenpeace Founder. Moore has been out and proud from Greenpeace for some time, but here he spells out where things went wrong:

Some activists simply couldn't make the transition from confrontation to consensus; it was as if they needed a common enemy. When a majority of people decide they agree with all your reasonable ideas the only way you can remain confrontational and antiestablishment is to adopt ever more extreme positions, eventually abandoning science and logic altogether in favour of zero-tolerance policies.

And this is precisely what people don't like about environmentalists: their zealotry and puritanical will to damn the Industrial Revolution. They're angry Romantics with a furry fetish.

The idea that we cannot pollute our land has taken hold. But some pollution will continue as long as humans will need a source of energy. And I am deeply suspicious of any alternative fuel that requires massive government support. If it truly works, it will work on its own.

The Industiral Revolution has created problems for the planet, but it is also the only way to address those problems. If the Environmentalists really cared about the earth, they'd stop standing in the way of its saviors.

Who will Reform the Reformers?

The American Interest:

“What are you kids doing down there,” ask the voters, who’ve noticed some banging and crashing in the basement.  “Are you kids writing a Carbon Tax?”

The greens check quickly with the focus groups and pollsters before shouting back up, “No, Mommy, of course not.  We aren’t playing Carbon Tax.  We’re playing Cap and Trade.”

Read the whole thing.

A Moment of Honesty about the Gulf Spill..

Obama Finds Gulf Oil on His Cape

Slipping the phrase "Obama's Katrina" into Google yields about 1.8 million results. Such ought not surprise; if every President runs against his predecessor, the latter's follies serve to flail the former. But in Obama's case, the nature of the problem strikes at the heart of his presidency.

When Hurricane Katrina wrecked New Orleans, we wingnuts were quick to draw distinctions between acts of Nature and acts of Bush. I myself, at this very blog, put it thusly:

I'm not of the species that seems to want to blame the New Orleans Water Park on FEMA. I've yet to see anything from a source I trust that indicates that FEMA did anything different in regards to Katrina than they did with regard to any other natural disaster in living memory, and I'm pretty well convinced that the caterwauling to that end is a cynical manipulation by a bored press and a frustrated opposition upon discovering that the Cindy Sheehan and Hokum and Wailing Circus wasn't going to be the spark that lit the Bonfire of Bush's Vanities.

Conservatives do not believe that government exists to prevent bad things from happening, and they certainly don't expect the federal government to fill roles that belong to state and local governments. So we defended Bush during Katrina, because we were not surprised.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, came to the White House preaching the virtues of government as an agency of righteousness, a means for the general will to achieve its ends. His supporters likewise desire a government that acts, instantaneously, to do Good Things. And with every day that the crude continues flooding into the gulf, that vision becomes the weaker. Lo and behold, the President cannot fly below the surface of the earth and plug the leak with his eye-beams. He cannot, by virtue of his sonorous voice, make BP work any faster to plug the leak than they already are (you do realize that every drop of oil that ends up not in BP's tankers is lost money to them, right?). He's just a president; the waves do not, in fact, obey him.

And while this King-Canute moment is satisfying to conservatives, like Mark Steyn and Charles Krauthammer, it is gall and wormwood to progressives, who find themselves with nothing to do or say than "why can't somebody do something?" They do not appreciate being made to feel this way by a Democratic President with a Democratic Congress. They may not revenge themselves upon him for this, but their anger is palpable, and their hearts may not be his much longer.

The Stuff We Use.

Earth Day inevitably inspires a re-assessment of our economic life; this remains the only thing about Earth Day that I respect. A few months ago, I was musing about phosphorous, food, and the remains of this cycle, suggesting that we might have to re-use what our bodies produce. And in the wake of Earth Day, Reason Magazine suggests that not just phosphorous, but a host of substances might become too costly due to current use:

“Is it realistic to predict that knowledge accumulation is so powerful as to outweigh the physical limits of physical capital services and the limited substitution possibilities for natural resources?” In other words, can increasing scientific knowledge and technological innovation overcome any limitations to economic growth posed by the depletion of non-renewable resources?
The debate over peak oil is heavily politicized, so let's set it aside and test the idea of imminent resource peaks and their consequences for economic growth on three other non-renewable resources: lithium, neodymium, and phosphorus.

 The solutions are:

• Reduce the use of Neodymium by putting AC-Induction motors in our Priuses instead.
• Re-use materials to make zinc-air or metal-air batteries instead of lithium.
• Recycle the phosphorous in our waste with NoMix toilets and improve the efficiency of fertilizer.

The key element to remember is the one truly re-usable resource: the human mind.

And Your Farts Smell Bad, Too...

The Clean Car Myth, exploded.

Phosphorus and the Poop Problem

In the history of civilization, cities have never been as densely populated as they are now. The reason is twofold: 1) industrialized agriculture spares human labor from needing to be on the farm, and 2) modern sewers cause the rivers of human waste that would otherwise kill everyone in cholera epidemics and the like to be kept away. Food goes into the city, poop comes out of the city, everyone wins.

Except there's a coming resource shortage that may monkey-wrench the whole cycle: Phosphorous. It's what we use to make fertilizer; it's the element that allows farmland to be used again and again. It's the stuff that runs off and causes problems in the Chesapeake. We get it largely from phosphate rock, and our use of it is incredibly innefficient:

Worldwide, according to Cordell and White, five times more phosphorus is being mined than is being consumed. Stated another way, 15 million tons of phosphorus is mined yearly to grow food, but 80 percent never reaches the dinner table: It is lost to inefficiency and waste.

Farmers use too much fertilizer and it runs off the land, polluting streams, lakes and oceans. Industrial agriculture does not plow crop residues back into the soil after the harvest. In some countries, consumers throw away a third of their food, even when much of it is still edible.

The article blames the usual culprits, meat-eating and industry, so I can already see the angle that the enviro-Left is going to take with this. If the Right had guts, they would use this as the wedge against our repulsive, quasi-Soviet agricultural subsidy system, which drives our phosphate-heavy agribusiness practices. I'm not holding my breath.

The solution: poop. Lots and lots of poop. The whole system of waste management may indeed be a waste, and the time may come, and soon, for the ultimate in personal recycling.

One Man's Inconvenient Truth...

...is another man's rebellious editorial. Further evidence to my theory that we're all revolutionaries, or think we are, nowadays.

I remember a few years ago, thinking, surely activity on the Sun would make as big an effect on global temperatures as anything we do? Had no science to back it up, though. Not sure if I have it now, either. All I know is I do not trust the people who tell me that there is no debate.

Global Warming is Going to Make Us Freeze!

Or, Britain Freeze, or something along those lines. You see, the Gulf Stream is weakening, and that means less warm water and air from the tropics makes it to northern Europe. Consequently, things up there get colder. All of this the Guardian calls "a consequence of global warming."

Please feel free to blither now.

I'm no physicist, but I'm pretty sure that increased temperature means that stuff has more energy, and stuff that has more energy moves around more. So if Global Warming is so runaway and unstoppable, shouldn't the Gulf Stream be strenghtening?

We're rapidly reaching the point where we could have comets hurtling at the earth in synchronized-swimmer formation and people would find a way to link it to "global warming." It's the bogeyman caused by Society's Evil, a secular Anti-Christ if ever there was one.