Disobedience Will Not Be Allowed

No Plastic Straws at Marquette: More Dumb Virtue Signalling

A really terse announcement by Marquette: “Marquette Dining Services retail locations (e.g., Marquette Place, Brew cafes) are phasing out plastic straws and transitioning to eco-friendly paper straws.”

The announcement seems to say nothing about the three traditional dorm dining halls on campus.

This, of course, is yet another example of virtue signalling that just inconveniences people and does nothing significant for the environment.

What is, supposedly, the environmental problem with plastic straws? NBC is typical when it explains that:

Activists are pressuring businesses to ditch plastic straws because they can end up in the ocean and hurt marine life.

And just how will plastic straws at Marquette end up in the ocean and hurt marine life?

Do Marquette students, when their finish their soda, run down to Lake Michigan and throw the straw in? Really?

Straws go in the trash, and then go into landfills. Yes, environmentalists hate landfills, but they are in fact pretty benign, and certainly no threat to marine life.

Then what is the basis of the “marine life” claim? Christian Britschgi of Reason explains:

Pictures of turtles with straws up their noses are certainly jarring. However most plastic, whatever form it enters the ocean as, will eventually be broken up into much smaller pieces known as micro-plastics. It is these micro-plastics that form those giant ocean garbage patches, pile up on the ocean floor, and leech into the stomachs and flesh of sea creatures.

Reducing the amount of micro-plastics in the ocean thus requires cutting down on the aggregate weight of plastics entering the ocean each year. It cannot be stressed enough that straws, by weight, are a tiny portion of this plastic.

At most, straws account for about 2,000 tons of the 9 million tons of plastic that are estimated to enter the ocean each year . . . —.02 percent of all plastic waste.

This figure is derived from data here:

. . . a ban may be a bit of a straw man in the discussions about plastics pollution. Straws make up about 4 percent of the plastic trash by piece, but far less by weight.

Straws on average weigh so little—about one sixty-seventh of an ounce or .42 grams—that all those billions of straws add up to only about 2,000 tons of the nearly 9 million tons of plastic waste that yearly hits the waters.

Back to Britschgi:

The pollution problem posed by straws looks even smaller when considering that the United States is responsible for about one percent of plastic waste entering the oceans, with straws being a smaller percentage still.

As countless experts have stressed, truly addressing the problem of marine plastic pollution will require going after the source of this pollution, namely all the uncollected litter from poorer coastal countries that lack developed waste management systems.

A scholarly treatment in the journal Science lists the twenty countries that put the most waste plastic in the oceans. The United States barely makes the list, putting an estimated 0.04–0.11 million metric tons of plastic per year. This is all plastics, not just straws. As we have seen, straws are a tiny proportion.  And this compares to 1.32–3.53 million metric tons from China.

The U.S. only makes the list by being large and rich, with a lot of people consuming all sorts of things. All the other countries on the list are poorer countries, with a much higher level of mismanaged waste.

Which raises the question: what happens when a Marquette student puts a plastic straw in the trash? Does the firm that handles Marquette’s solid waste take it and dump it into Lake Michigan? Or perhaps into the Wisconsin River? If they do, that’s a vastly bigger problem than plastic straws. If they don’t, the ban on plastic straws will have zero effect on plastic in the oceans.

Britschgi concludes:

Straw banners have proven stubbornly resistant to this logic. Instead, they have chosen to rely on either debunked statistics (such as the claim that Americans use 500 million straws a day, which was the product of a 9-year-old’s research) or totally unproven notions (like the theory that straws are a “gateway plastic”) in order to justify petty prohibitions on innocuous straws. And they have been helped along by an uncritical media.

The simple fact about environmentalists is that they are busy-bodies, wanting to control people’s behavior. They are also adverse to any sort of sophisticated analysis, latching onto simple-minded crusades (anti-fracking, anti-nuclear, anti-Keystone pipeline).

A university ought not pander to such people, but rather insist that environmental issues be discussed and analyzed. But such is anathema to social justice warriors, who might find that some of their crusades are a bad idea, or that improving the environment might require them to make sacrifices they don’t want to make.

In a university intent on pandering to every fad of the social justice warriors, they will never be challenged. Which means they will never be educated.

[Update 7/25/2018]

The dining manager at Cobeen Hall informs us that the dining hall there has never had straws, so far as he can remember. He is fairly certain that other dorm dining halls have not had straws either.

Effluent

David Suzuki: Environmentalist, Hypocrite, Crackpot

Ignoring the Evidence on Fracking

From the Associated Press:

PITTSBURGH (AP) — In the debate over natural gas drilling, the companies are often the ones accused of twisting the facts. But scientists say opponents sometimes mislead the public, too.

Critics of fracking often raise alarms about groundwater pollution, air pollution, and cancer risks, and there are still many uncertainties. But some of the claims have little — or nothing— to back them.

For example, reports that breast cancer rates rose in a region with heavy gas drilling are false, researchers told The Associated Press.

Fears that natural radioactivity in drilling waste could contaminate drinking water aren’t being confirmed by monitoring, either.

And concerns about air pollution from the industry often don’t acknowledge that natural gas is a far cleaner burning fuel than coal.

“The debate is becoming very emotional. And basically not using science” on either side, said Avner Vengosh, a Duke University professor studying groundwater contamination who has been praised and criticized by both sides.

Shale gas drilling has attracted national attention because advances in technology have unlocked billions of dollars of gas reserves, leading to a boom in production, jobs, and profits, as well as concerns about pollution and public health. Shale is a gas-rich rock formation thousands of feet underground, and the gas is freed through a process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in which large volumes of water, plus sand and chemicals, are injected to break the rock apart.

The Marcellus Shale covers large parts of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and West Virginia, while the Barnett Shale is in north Texas. Many other shale deposits have been discovered.

One of the clearest examples of a misleading claim comes from north Texas, where gas drilling began in the Barnett Shale about 10 years ago.

Opponents of fracking say breast cancer rates have spiked exactly where intensive drilling is taking place — and nowhere else in the state. The claim is used in a letter that was sent to New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo by environmental groups and by Josh Fox, the Oscar-nominated director of “Gasland,” a film that criticizes the industry. Fox, who lives in Brooklyn, has a new short film called “The Sky is Pink.”

But researchers haven’t seen a spike in breast cancer rates in the area, said Simon Craddock Lee, a professor of medical anthropology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

David Risser, an epidemiologist with the Texas Cancer Registry, said in an email that researchers checked state health data and found no evidence of an increase in the counties where the spike supposedly occurred.

And Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a major cancer advocacy group based in Dallas, said it sees no evidence of a spike, either.

“We don’t,” said Chandini Portteus, Komen’s vice president of research, adding that they sympathize with people’s fears and concerns, but “what we do know is a little bit, and what we don’t know is a lot” about breast cancer and the environment.

Yet Fox tells viewers in an ominous voice that “In Texas, as throughout the United States, cancer rates fell — except in one place— in the Barnett Shale.”

Lee called the claims of an increase “a classic case of the ecological fallacy” because they falsely suggest that breast cancer is linked to just one factor. In fact, diet, lifestyle and access to health care also play key roles.

Fox responded to questions by citing a press release from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that doesn’t support his claim, and a newspaper story that Risser said is “not based on a careful statistical analysis of the data.”

When Fox was told that Texas cancer researchers said rates didn’t increase, he replied in an email that the claim of unusually high breast cancer rates was “widely reported” and said there is “more than enough evidence to warrant much deeper study.”

Another instance where fears haven’t been confirmed by science is the concern that radioactivity in drilling fluids could threaten drinking water supplies.

Critics of fracking note the deep underground water that comes up along with gas has high levels of natural radioactivity. Since much of that water, called flowback, was once being discharged into municipal sewage treatment plants and then rivers in Pennsylvania, there was concern about public water supplies.

But in western Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority did extensive tests and didn’t find a problem in area rivers. State environmental officials said monitoring at public water supply intakes across the state showed non-detectable levels of radiation, and the two cases that showed anything were at background levels.

Concerns about the potential problem also led to regulatory changes. An analysis by The Associated Press of data from Pennsylvania found that of the 10.1 million barrels of shale wastewater generated in the last half of 2011, about 97 percent was either recycled, sent to deep-injection wells, or sent to a treatment plant that doesn’t discharge into waterways.

Critics of fracking also repeat claims of extreme air pollution threats, even as evidence mounts that the natural gas boom is in some ways contributing to cleaner air.

Marcellus air pollution “will cause a massive public health crisis,” claims a section of the Marcellus Shale Protest website.

Yet data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration show that the shale gas boom is helping to turn many large power plants away from coal, which emits far more pollution. And the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency passed new rules to force drillers to limit releases of methane from wells and pumping stations.

Some environmental groups now say that natural gas is having a positive effect on air quality.

Earlier this year, the group PennFuture said gas is a much cleaner burning fuel, and it called gas-fired power plants “orders of magnitude cleaner” than coal plants.

Marcellus Shale Protest said in response to a question about its claims that “any possible benefit in electric generation must be weighed against the direct harm from the industrial processes of gas extraction.”

One expert said there’s an actual psychological process at work that sometimes blinds people to science, on the fracking debate and many others.

“You can literally put facts in front of people, and they will just ignore them,” said Mark Lubell, the director of the Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior at the University of California, Davis.

Lubell said the situation, which happens on both sides of a debate, is called “motivated reasoning.” Rational people insist on believing things that aren’t true, in part because of feedback from other people who share their views, he said.

Vengosh noted the problem of spinning science isn’t new, or limited to one side in the gas drilling controversy. For example, industry supporters have claimed that drilling never pollutes water wells, when state regulators have confirmed cases where it has. He says the key point is that science is slow, and research into gas drilling’s many possible effects are in the early stages, and much more work remains to be done.

“Everyone takes what they want to see,” Vengosh said, adding that he hopes that the fracking debate will become more civilized as scientists obtain more hard data.

Liberals, of course, love to claim that conservatives are “anti-science” when they find conservatives wanting to teach intelligent design in schools, or being skeptical of anthropogenic global warming.

But liberals will quickly throw science under the bus when it interferes with their political agenda. This is most obvious when economics is concerned, but on a lot of other issues too.

Remembering an Environmental Hoax

If anybody was the mother of the modern environmental movement, it was Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring was largely responsible for getting DDT banned. But in reality, her writing was sloppy, and indeed downright dishonest.

This is something to remember when hearing current environmentalists fuss and fume about the latest environmental threat.

The details are here:

In 1962, when Rachel Carson published her book Silent Spring, I was delighted. I belonged to several environmental-type organizations, had no feelings of respect for industry or big business, had one of my own books published by the Sierra Club, and I had written articles for The Indiana Waltonian, Audubon Magazine, and other environmental magazines.

At the time, I had been engaged in field work at the University of Wyoming research station in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for three summers and I worked as biological coordinator for the National Park Service in Glacier National Park. I eagerly read the condensed version of Silent Spring in the New Yorker magazine and bought a copy of the book as soon as I could find it in the stores. As I read the first several chapters I noticed many statements that I realized were false; however, one can overlook such things when they are produced by one’s cohorts, and I did just that.

As I neared the middle of the book, the feeling grew in my mind that Rachel Carson was really playing loose with the facts and was also deliberately wording many sentences in such a way as to make them imply certain things without actually saying them. She was carefully omitting everything that failed to support her thesis that pesticides were bad, that industry was bad, and that any scientists who did not support her views were bad.

Dedication: A Lie

Birds Vs. Human Deaths

I then took notice of her bibliography and realized that it was filled with references from very unscientific sources. Also, each reference was cited separately each time it appeared in the book, thus producing an impressive array of “references” even though not many different sources were actually cited. I began to lose confidence in Rachel Carson, even though I thought that as an environmentalist I really should continue to support her.

I next looked up some of the references that Carson cited and quickly found that they did not support her contentions about the harm caused by pesticides. When leading scientists began to publish harsh criticisms of her methods and her allegations, it slowly dawned on me that Rachel Carson was not interested in the truth about those topics, and that I really was being duped, along with millions of other Americans.

As a result, I went back to the beginning of the book and read it all again, but this time my eyes were open and I was not lulled into believing that her motives were noble and that her statements could be supported by logic and by scientific fact. I wrote my comments down in rough draft style, and gathered together the scientific articles that refuted what Carson had reported the articles indicated. It was a most frustrating experience.

Finally, I began to join the detractors of Silent Spring, and when hearings were held to determine the fate of DDT in various states of this nation, I paid my own way to some of them so that I could testify against the efforts to ban that life-saving insecticide. It was gratifying to find that great numbers of scientists and health officials whom I had always held in high esteem were also testifying at those hearings, in defense of DDT and in opposition to the rising tide of antipesticide propaganda in environmental publications and in the media.

In testifying and speaking in public, I frequently exposed the misleading references Rachel Carson had cited in her book, presenting her statements from Silent Spring and then reading the truth from the actual publications she was purporting to characterize. This revealed to the audiences just how untruthful and misleading the allegations of Silent Spring really were.

Now, nearly 30 years later, the controversy is still boiling about how truthful Rachel Carson was. I recently learned that a movie honoring Rachel Carson and Silent Spring is being made for television. Because I believe such a movie would further misinform the public, the media, and our legislators, I decided to type up my original rough notes from 1962-1963 and make them available. Here they are, page by page, starting with her dedication.

Dedication: A Lie

Dedication. In the front of the book, Carson dedicates Silent Spring as follows: “To Albert Schweitzer who said ‘Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the Earth.’”

This appears to indicate that the great man opposed the use of insecticides. However, in his autobiography Schweitzer writes, on page 262: “How much labor and waste of time these wicked insects do cause us ... but a ray of hope, in the use of DDT, is now held out to us.” Upon reading his book, it is clear that Schweitzer was worried about nuclear warfare, not about the hazards from DDT!

Page 16. Carson says that before World War II, while developing agents of chemical warfare, it was found that some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were lethal to insects. “The discovery did not come by chance: insects were widely used to test chemicals as agents of death for man.” Carson thus seeks to tie insecticides to chemical warfare. However, DDT was never tested as an “agent of death for man.” It was always known to be nonhazardous to humans! Her implication is despicable.

Page 16. Carson says the pre-war insecticides were simple inorganic insecticides but her examples include pyrethrum and rotenone, which are complex organic chemicals.

Page 17. Carson says arsenic is a carcinogen (identified from chimney soot) and mentions a great many horrible ways in which it is violently poisonous to vertebrates. She then says (page 18): “Modern insecticides are still more deadly,” and she makes a special mention of DDT as an example.

This implication that DDT is horribly deadly is completely false. Human volunteers have ingested as much as 35 milligrams of it a day for nearly two years and suffered no adverse affects. Millions of people have lived with DDT intimately during the mosquito spray programs and nobody even got sick as a result. The National Academy of Sciences concluded in 1965 that “in a little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million [human] deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable.” The World Health Organization stated that DDT had “killed more insects and saved more people than any other substance.” A leading British scientist pointed out that “If the pressure groups had succeeded, if there had been a world ban on DDT, then Rachel Carson and Silent Spring would now be killing more people in a single year than Hitler killed in his whole holocaust.”

It is a travesty, therefore, if Rachel Carson’s all-out attack on DDT results in any programs lauding her efforts to ban DDT and other life-saving chemicals!

Page 18. Referring to chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides (like DDT) and organophosphates (like malathion), Carson says they are all “built on a basis of carbon atoms, which are also the indispensable building blocks of the living world, and thus classed as ‘organic.’ To understand them we must see how they are made, and how they lend themselves to the modifications which make them agents of death.”

Surely it is unfair of Carson to imply that all insecticides are “agents of death” for animals other than insects.

Page 21. After referring to untruthful allegations that persons ingesting as little as one tenth of a part per million (ppm) of DDT will then store “about 10 to 15 ppm,” Carson states that “such substances are so potent that a minute quantity can bring about vast changes in the body.” (She does not consider the metabolism and breakdown of DDT in humans and other vertebrates, and their excretion in urine, and so on, which prevents the alleged “biological magnification” up food chains from actually occurring.) Carson then states: “In animal experiments, 3 parts per million [of DDT] has been found to inhibit an essential enzyme in heart muscle; only 5 parts per million has brought about necrosis or disintegration of liver cells. ...” This implies that considerable harm to one’s health might result from traces of DDT in the diet, but there has been no medical indication that her statements are true.

On page 22, Carson adds, “... we know that the average person is storing potentially harmful amounts.” This is totally false!

Page 23. Carson says, “the Food and Drug Administration forbids the presence of insecticide residues in milk shipped in interstate commerce.” This is not true, either! The permissible level was 0.5 ppm in milk being shipped interstate.

Page 24. Carson says: “One victim who accidentally spilled a 25 percent industrial solution [of chlordane] on the skin developed symptoms of poisoning within 40 minutes and died before medical help could be obtained. No reliance can be placed on receiving advance warning which might allow treatment to be had in time.”

The actual details regarding this accident were readily available at the time, but Carson evidently chose to distort them. The accident occurred in 1949 in the chemical formulation plant, when a worker spilled a large quantity down the front of her body. The liquid contained 25 pounds of chlordane, 39 pounds of solvent, and 10 pounds of emulsifier (Journal of the American Medical Association, Aug. 13, 1955). Carson’s reference to this as a “25 percent solution” spilled on the skin certainly underplays the severity of that drenching, which was the only account known of such a deadly contamination during the history of chlordane formulation.

The article goes on and on with examples of distortion and sloppy pseudo-science.

But it told the New Moralists in the environmental movement what they wanted to hear, and gave them the first (in the modern era) of many bogey men.

Washington Post: Stop Electric Car Subsidies

The Washington Post has a reputation as a liberal newspaper, and indeed that’s what it is.

But it has shown itself able to take a cold hard look at some of the programs that give liberals the warm fuzzies. One recent example dealt with one of the Obama Administration’s favorite class of subsidies.

THERE MAY NOT have been a party in Times Square to celebrate, but two of the most wasteful subsidies ever to clutter the Internal Revenue Code went out with the old year. Congress declined to renew either the 45-cent-per-gallon tax credit for corn-based ethanol or the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imported ethanol, so both expired Dec. 31.

Taxpayers will no longer have shell out roughly $6 billion per year for a program that badly distorted the global grain market, artificially raised the cost of agricultural land and did almost nothing to curb greenhouse gas emissions. A federal law requiring the use of 36 billion gallons of ethanol for fuel by 2022 still props up the industry, but the tax credit’s expiration is a victory for common sense just the same.

Meanwhile, a lesser-known but equally dubious energy tax break also expired when the year ended Saturday: the credit that gave electric-car owners up to $1,000 to defray the cost of installing a 220-volt charging device in their homes — or up to $30,000 to install one in a commercial location. As a means of reducing carbon emissions, electric cars and plug-in hybrid electrics are no more cost-effective than ethanol. What’s more, only upper-income consumers can afford to buy an electric vehicle (EV); so the charger subsidy is a giveaway to the well-to-do.

The same goes for the $7,500 tax credit that the government offers purchasers of electric vehicles, a subsidy that, alas, did not expire at year’s end. The Obama administration says that the credit helps build a market for EVs, which helps create jobs. Given the price of eligible models, like the $100,000 Fisker Karma, that rationale sounds an awful lot like trickle-down economics.

Backers of the charger tax credit may lobby Congress to renew it when lawmakers tackle the payroll tax extension issue again in the new year. We hope that Congress says no. Not only is it a case study in upward income redistribution, it also would represent a deepening of the taxpayers’ commitment to what looks increasingly like an industry not ready for prime time.

Sales of electric vehicles were disappointing in 2011, with the Volt coming in below the 10,000 units forecast. In addition to its high price, the Volt brand is suffering from news that some of its batteries burst into flames after government road tests. Meanwhile, Fisker, the recipient of more than half a billion dollars in low-interest Energy Department loans, repeatedly delayed the introduction of its ballyhooed Karma — while repeatedly raising the sticker price. And now Fisker has announced a recall of the cars because of a potential defect in its batteries — made by A123 Systems, another large recipient of Energy Department support.

Evidence is mounting that President Obama was overly optimistic to pledge that there would be 1 million EVs on the road by 2015. Electric cars are not likely to form a significant part of the solution to America’s dependence on foreign oil, or to global warming, in the near future. They simply pose too many issues of price and practicality to attract a large segment of the car-buying public. More prosaic fuel-economy innovations such as conventional hybrids, clean-diesel cars and advanced gasoline engines all show much more promise than electrics.

The ethanol credit was on the books for 30 years before it finally died. Let’s hope Congress can start unwinding the federal government’s bad investment in electric vehicles faster than that.

The problem, of course, is that policies like this have nothing to do with a cool-headed policy analysis. Rather they are mostly symbolic. The liberals who favor them want the “committment to green energy” that these programs claim, and aren’t inclined to ask whether they are really “green” and if so whether they are green at any sort of reasonable price.

After all, they are paid for with other people’s money.

California: Home of Locally Grown, Organic Food, Fruits and Nuts

Environmental Hysteria: Top Five Cases

James Cameron: Environmentalist Hypocrite

This is the fellow who told the Los Angeles Times that we “will be a dying world if we don’t make some fundamental changes about how we view ourselves and how we view wealth .... We’re going to have to live with less.”

What he meant, of course, is “you little people will have to live with less.”

Another Piece of Environmental Nastiness

We just blogged about a video produced by a British environmental group that showed people who would not sign on to an environmentalist agenda being blown to smithereens.

This was far from the only nasty, hateful thing produced by the global warming crowd.

Above is a video from Greenpeace from 2007.

These folks, quite simply, are the New Taliban.

This Is Not a Parody of How Environmentalists Think, It’s From an Environmentalist Group

WARNING: GRAPHIC VIOLENCE



They figured out that they had gone too far, and apologized.

One extremely good comment from the page of the environmentalist group:

It isn’t that you “missed the mark” or that it wasn’t a funny idea. The video was actually perfect, because it reveals exactly how you people think about the world and how to solve it’s problems. If people don’t believe you, or like what you have to say, or are just plain thick, then obviously someone needs to step up and beat some sense into them with a big enough stick that it will deter other people. Just like you are doing with subsidization of “ecological” foods, wind mills, electric cars, and what not, and penalty taxes for carbon, gasoline and other “dirty” and sinful products. If people don’t follow you, force them, and don’t forget to smile while you hold a gun to their head. It’s hilarious how you eco-leftists, who think so highly of your own enlightened, humanist, scientific ideals, are actually just the 21st century version of the extreme pietists who not too long ago struggled to stamp out sin by banning tobacco, alcohol and other drugs (compare: carbon, gasoline, etc), preaching that you mustn’t enjoy life (compare: stopping “consumerism”), especially not on Sundays (compare: buy nothing day), otherwise the second coming of Jesus will not arrive (compare: polar bears dying, nature wrecking havoc, taking revenge). And just as pietism is essentially an anti-life ideology, so is yours.

We Have Been Over and Seen the Future -- Via Google Maps

For a mind-blowing experience, get the Google maps version of the capital of North Korea -- Pyongyang. Click to get the satellite version, if it doesn’t come up automatically.

Now zoom in as far as it will let you -- just one step below the very highest magnification. Google will let you roam around the city, moving the image beneath the visible window.

What is spookily missing? Cars.

Welcome to the future -- as envisioned by Al Gore, the Sierra Club, Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats.

Where Did the Global Warming Go?

From Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe:

Jacoby lays out a fanciful scenario, and asks how it would play out in the media.

SUPPOSE the climate landscape in recent weeks looked something like this:

Half the country was experiencing its mildest winter in years, with no sign of snow in many Northern states. Most of the Great Lakes were entirely ice-free. Last December 25th, not a single Canadian province had woken to a white Christmas. There was a new scientific study discussing a mysterious surge in global temperatures — a warming trend more intense than computer models had predicted. Other scientists were admitting that, because of a bug in satellite sensors, they had been vastly overestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice.

Of course, there would be a huge media hue and cry. There would be flat out hysteria.

But what has really happened?

The United States has shivered through an unusually severe winter, with snow falling in such unlikely destinations as New Orleans, Las Vegas, Alabama, and Georgia. On December 25th, every Canadian province woke up to a white Christmas, something that hadn’t happened in 37 years. Earlier this year, Europe was gripped by such a killing cold wave that trains were shut down in the French Riviera and chimpanzees in the Rome Zoo had to be plied with hot tea to keep them warm. Last week, satellite data showed three of the Great Lakes — Erie, Superior, and Huron — almost completely frozen over. In Washington, DC, what was supposed to be a massive rally against global warming was upstaged by the heaviest snowfall of the season, which all but shut down the capital.

Meanwhile, the National Snow and Ice Data Center has acknowledged that due to a satellite sensor malfunction, it had been underestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice to the tune of 193,000 square miles — an area the size of Spain. In a new study, University of Wisconsin researchers Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis conclude that global warming could be going into a decades-long remission. The current global cooling “is nothing like anything we’ve seen since 1950,” Swanson told Discovery News. Yes, global cooling: 2008 was the coolest year of the past decade — average global temperatures have not exceeded the record high measured in 1998, notwithstanding the carbon-dioxide human beings continue to pump into the atmosphere.

None of this proves conclusively that a period of planetary cooling is irrevocably underway, or that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are not the main driver of global temperatures, or that concerns about a hotter world are overblown. Individual weather episodes, it always bears repeating, are not the same as broad climate trends.

But considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn’t the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn’t it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?

But for many people, the science of climate change is not nearly as compelling as the religion of climate change. When Al Gore insisted yet again at a conference last Thursday that there can be no debate about global warming, he was speaking not with the authority of a man of science, but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot.

Of course, the religious zealotry isn’t merely the result of some arcane theology. It’s the result of the class interests of the New Class — liberals and leftists who can use it to extend their control over the economy.

Thus, in the past generation, we have had the DDT scare, the result of a book called Silent Spring by Rachael Carson (1962). We have had The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich (1968). We have had Club of Rome The Limits to Growth in 1972. We had the “coming ice age” which dominated the media in the middle 70s.

All of these environmental scare eposodes turned out to be wrong, but all had one thing in common. They all justified a massive government intervention in the economy.

And that, of course, has always been the point of the environmental movement.

Wishing That All Humanity Would Disappear

From Jeff Jacoby:

THERE’LL ALWAYS BE an England, but will there be Englishmen to inhabit it? Not many, if Jonathon Porritt gets his way. The chairman of Britain’s Sustainable Development Commission declares that “having more than two children is irresponsible” and that couples who “decide to procreate” should first consider their “total environmental footprint.” According to the Sunday Times, Porritt wants the British government to “improve family planning, even if it means shifting money from curing illness to increasing contraception and abortion.” Ending or preventing human life, in other words, should take precedence over extending or saving it.

Such misanthropy is not unique. Greenpeace co-founder Paul Watson, now president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, wants to “radically” reduce the world’s human beings by five-sixths. Population alarmists Paul and Anne Ehrlich have described “the birth of an average American baby” as a “disaster.” Alan Weisman’s 2007 best-seller The World Without Us celebrates the Eden the world would revert to if only mankind would vanish. There is even a Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which urges “people who care about life on planet Earth” to “refrain from further reproduction.”

Those on the green fringe do indeed care about life on Earth -- every kind of life, it sometimes seem, but one.

Five Self-Righteous Ways of Messing Things Up

From Cracked, a rather profane and irreverant dissection of the behaviors of people want to “save the planet.”

Bottom line: when your behavior is really for the purpose of making you feel very good and moral, you aren’t inclined to ask questions as to whether it actually serves any good social purpose.

Here is just one of the five:

#5.Buying Organically Grown Food

Why People Do It:

Seems like a no-brainer. Organic food eliminates the use of chemical fertilizers, hormones and pesticides. Getting rid of all those nasty chemicals means healthier foods and less contamination to the planet.

And anything that’s organic or natural has to be better for you, right? It’s like you’re eating the opposite of Twinkies here.

Why They Shouldn’t:

So what’s the problem with eating healthier food and saving the Earth? Nothing, except that the food may not be any healthier. And that’s even if you can afford the (much) higher prices. Oh, and the impact on the planet may actually be worse.

The funny thing about those chemical fertilizers and pesticides is that they were invented for a reason, and that’s to increase food production. Turns out organic farming is pretty damn inefficient. Holding hands and thinking peaceful thoughts does dick all against pests that want to eat your crops and weeds that want to choke them out. The current acre of farmland produces 200 percent more wheat than it did 70 years ago. The same goes for meat and poultry. The chemicals did that for us.

Take them away, and suddenly you’re getting less food per acre of land. According to some guy who won a Nobel Prize, we could feed 4 billion people if we went all organic. This sounds great except maybe to the 2.5 billion people who would be left without anything to eat.

A tiny fraction of the people organic food would leave starving.

Despite all the claims that chemicals used in farming are bad for us, it turns out cancer rates have dropped 15 percent since farmers began using chemicals. How is that possible? Well it’s mainly due to people being able to afford more fruits and vegetables, because the chemicals allow more to be grown. That’s one reason the average life expectancy in the US went up by almost 10 years between 1950 and 2000.

As for the environment, it turns out organic farming has its own issues. Because it is much less efficient, there is actually a shortage of organic food available. This leads to people having the food shipped in from much further away. We’re no scientists, but we think that doing things like shipping organic milk 900 miles over the highway in a truck belching diesel fumes is probably canceling out any environmental benefits you might have gained from going organic.

Oh, and did we mention organic farming uses a lot of manure to fertilize crops? This results in a greater risk of contamination. Although organic produce only accounts for one percent of the food supply, it accounts for eight percent of the E. coli cases in the U.S.

Basically, you are at greater risk of eating a s**t sandwich, which is admittedly organic, but still.

Check out the others.

The Joke is Not Funny

Stubborn Mule

Environmental Vandalism in Madison

From Modern Commentaries, how environmentalists in Madison let the air out of people’s tires.

They left a note on windshields saying “Happy Fossil Fool’s Day - Drive Less.”

California: Big Brother Will Control Your Thermostat

Via Dad29, the American Thinker documents another giant step toward 1984.

(And just because it didn’t happen by 1984 doesn’t mean it isn’t going to.)

A new revision to Title 24 is in the works for 2008[2] and it includes a number of improvements and enhancements that are largely good sense items and should be non-controversial. . . .

What should be controversial in the proposed revisions to Title 24 is the requirement for what is called a “programmable communicating thermostat” or PCT. Every new home and every change to existing homes’ central heating and air conditioning systems will required to be fitted with a PCT beginning next year following the issuance of the revision. Each PCT will be fitted with a “non-removable” FM receiver that will allow the power authorities to increase your air conditioning temperature setpoint or decrease your heater temperature setpoint to any value they chose. During “price events” those changes are limited to +/- four degrees F and you would be able to manually override the changes. During “emergency events” the new setpoints can be whatever the power authority desires and you would not be able to alter them.

In other words, the temperature of your home will no longer be yours to control. Your desires and needs can and will be overridden by the state of California through its public and private utility organizations. All this is for the common good, of course.

“But surely,” somebody who likes the nanny state might say, “sometimes there are power emergencies that require people to conserve?”

In the first place, problems with the power supply in California are mostly the result of misguided government regulation, and especially the unwillingness of environmentalists to allow adequate energy supplies.

We all know the acronym NIMBY, meaning “not in my back yard.” If it’s prisons, or landfills or a nuclear plant, everybody wants it put it somewhere else.

We know a fellow who says that in California, the rule is BANANA, meaning “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything.”

So we have the usual downward spiral: government regulates something, and messes up the market. And this becomes an excuse for even more regulation. We see this with things like rent control, which gives landlords an incentive to let their apartments run down. How does government respond? With stricter regulation.

But even given real scarcity, the proper policy is to increase prices, and let people decide whether energy means so much to them that they are willing to pay the higher price. A lot won’t be willing to, and the demand will decrease. And the higher price will encourage more production, making scarcity rare.

Thus increasing prices when energy is in short supply is a good idea, but that can be done without the Big Brother apparatus.

Of course, there are loopholes.

EXCEPTION 1 to Section 112(c): Gravity gas wall heaters, gravity floor heaters, gravity room heaters, non-central electric heaters, fireplaces or decorative gas appliances, wood stoves, room air conditioners, and room air-conditioner heat pumps need not comply with this requirement.

So just as people who want a large vehicle to drive can get around Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards by buying an SUV, people who want to be warmer need only buy a heater.

But the problem is that these ways of evading the energy Nazis tend to be rather expensive. Which is part of the reason we see poor people driving old junker cars, and affluent people driving SUVs.

But the real problem comes when the infrastructure of control is put in place, and public attitudes have come to accept that government can regulate peoples lives in minute detail.

At that point, the Nazis have won.