{"id":1601,"date":"2012-10-28T05:23:47","date_gmt":"2012-10-28T12:23:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/?p=1601"},"modified":"2012-11-04T18:27:06","modified_gmt":"2012-11-05T01:27:06","slug":"another-excuse-for-statism-bites-the-dust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/?p=1601","title":{"rendered":"Another excuse for statism bites the dust"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I was leaving for work one morning last week the recycling truck came hurtling down the street. Only one family in our immediate neighborhood, so far as I can tell, dutifully sorts their glass, plastic, and other stuff into the red, white and blue bins. The trashmen throw the contents of all three into the single gaping maw at the back of their truck.<\/p>\n

At least they don\u2019t lie about it: Right on the side of this big red-orange behemoth, in highly visible white letters, the truck describes itself as a \u201cCommingling Recycling Vehicle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of that stuff will end up in the landfill, which is fine. Under current health codes, bottlers have decided it almost always costs more to sterilize and re-use a glass beverage container than trash it; most other recycling schemes either have to be subsidized to create the appearance of cost-effectiveness, or have been banned by competing interests. (I wrote not too long ago about the guy who was shut down by California regulators after he tried to set up in business, buying and recycling used french-fry oil as a motor fuel.)<\/p>\n

It got me wondering in how many other ways the \u201cgreen\u201d movement encourages people to do or fund things designed to make them \u201cfeel good\u201d about how they\u2019re \u201chelping the environment,\u201d but which turn out to be an almost complete waste of time.<\/p>\n

Jane Orient\u2019s \u201cDoctors for Disaster Preparedness\u201d are usually pretty good on this topic. At www.ddponline.org<\/a> we find their September \u201cReality Check\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u2018WIND HAS NO ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFIT\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Green religion constantly issues apocalyptic prophecies and proclaims dogma. Ice will melt, seas will rise, green is clean, and their policies will lead to health, prosperity, and the salvation of the Planet as well as humanity. But without a Memory Hole, these false prophets cannot prevail. …<\/p>\n

\u201cGreens are turning against Green energy — even before it becomes economically viable,\u201d Dr. Orient\u2019s organization points out. The Western Lands Project, Basin and Range Watch, and Solar Done Right \u201chave filed a complaint with the Bureau of Land Management, stating that the agency \u2018failed to analyze numerous impacts of solar energy plant development within several Solar Energy Zones.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The Greens are worried that the projects might disturb caliche deposits, which might release CO2 to the air, and threaten the habitat of the endangered desert tortoise, Mojave fringe-toed lizard, golden eagle, and desert bighorn, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sept. 4.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf one is worried about trace concentrations of greenhouse gases, the solar energy industry has become one of the leading emitters of hexafluorethane (C2F6), nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), which have, respectively, a greenhouse potency 12,000, 17,000, and 23,000 that of CO2,\u201d DDP points out.<\/p>\n

\u201cWind has no environmental benefit,\u201d physicist and environmental activist John Droz told Doctors for Disaster Preparedness at their annual meeting this year. To build one megawatt of generating capacity requires 2,000 pounds of rare earths, Mr. Droz reported. \u2018\u2018A 350-megawatt project generates 350,000 pounds of radioactive waste plus a huge amount of toxic air pollution. Offshore wind installations disrupt marine habitats. While the harm to birds, particularly migratory birds, has been diminished, there is no known way to mitigate bat takings. The loss of bats would have a profound effect on agriculture, as a bat eats about 1 million insects. …\u201d<\/p>\n

While the Brookings Institution claims there are more jobs in the \u201cClean Economy\u201d than in fossil fuels — 2.7 million and 2.4 million, respectively — \u201cThere are only about 24,000 jobs in each of wind power and photovoltaic solar power. The big \u2018green\u2019 categories are waste management, public mass transit, and organic food and farming,\u201d according to the Aug. 18 edition of the Science & Environmental Policy Project\u2019s TV show, \u201cThe Week That Was.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNatural gas, once portrayed by the Sierra Club as the \u2018good fossil fuel,\u2019 is now \u2018dirty, dangerous, and running amok,\u2019\u201d DDP has discovered. \u201cThe Beyond Coal campaign is killing the coal industry; Beyond Natural Gas wants to prevent new natural gas plants from being built whenever possible (Wall Street Journal 5\/30\/12, http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/8ldsjxc<\/a>). …
\n\u201cSeemingly forgotten is that there are no wind plants without a gas backup — if \u2018backup\u2019 is the proper term for something that has to be working two-thirds of the time. …<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reality is that apocalyptic Green predictions are regularly shown to be wrong,\u201d conclude the folks at Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. \u201cThis doesn\u2019t matter because the real agenda is not to protect human health or to promote clean, economical energy, but to reduce human population and jettison free enterprise and individual rights in favor of a state-managed economic system.\u201d<\/p>\n

DISCREDITED MYTHS, NO REBUTTALS<\/p>\n

Meantime, after PBS\u2019s \u201cFrontline\u201d broadcast its program \u201cClimate of Doubt\u201d on Oct. 23, promising to go \u201cinside the organizations\u201d that helped turn the tide of public opinion, and then of elected officials, away from excessive concern over the possible threat of man-made global warming, Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, commented \u201cWe welcomed \u2018Frontline\u2019 producer Catherine Upin and her crew to our Seventh International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago in May,\u201d hoping despite previous experience that the producers would be even-handed.<\/p>\n

In the end, the Frontline effort \u201cwasn\u2019t as bad as we had feared,\u201d Mr. Bast reports, but \u201cThe quality of the program starts to deteriorate at about the 20-minute mark,\u201d when \u201cnotorious global warming alarmists Gavin Schmidt, Katherine Hayhoe, Andrew Dessler, and Ralph Cicerone are presented as representative of the mainstream scientific community, which they are not.<\/p>\n

\u201cRather than use the program to put an end to the myth of scientific consensus on this complex issue, (host John) Hockenberry repeatedly invokes the discredited myth of a 97 percent consensus,\u201d Bast continues. \u201cEvidence in support of that claim is farcical. The issue of what role, if any, consensus should play in science is not addressed at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe second half of the program also speculates on the role that corporate and philanthropic funding plays in the debate … but it only addresses the funding of skeptics, not of alarmists. … Why didn\u2019t Hockenberry end the myth, started by Ross Gelbspan but never documented, that global warming skeptics were or are currently being funded by oil companies to \u2018sow doubt\u2019? The Heartland Institute certainly was never part of such a plan, nor were any of the scientists we work with. Yet this libelous smear is repeated without rebuttal by Hockenberry and by the alarmists he interviews. …<\/p>\n

\u201cNo scientist interviewed for the program offered proof that any of the climatic events shown at the end of the program were caused by human activity, nor could they. …\u201d<\/p>\n

GLOBAL WARMING IS OVER<\/p>\n

The Heartland folks also provided a few helpful \u201cfacts to keep in mind\u201d when watching such programs, including: \u201cThe best scientific data show there has been no warming for 16 years, something none of the computer models that predict an eco-catastrophe predicted or can explain. Data show no connection between man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and extreme weather events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, or floods. … Global warming, simply put, is not a crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n

No wonder John Coleman, a senior meteorologist at KUSI in San Diego who co-founded the Weather Channel, noted last week: \u201cThere was no mention of \u2018global warming\u2019 in any of the three presidential debates this year. This is the first time since 1984 that the topic has not been brought up by one of the moderators or one of the candidates. This is not good news to Al Gore or the thousands of scientists who depend on the global warming scare to trigger the federal research grants that keep them richly employed while so many Americans can\u2019t find a job of any kind. The reality that there is no significant man-made global warming seems to be more and more accepted by voters and politicians.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I was leaving for work one morning last week the recycling truck came hurtling down the street. Only one family in our immediate neighborhood, so far as I can tell, dutifully sorts their glass, plastic, and other stuff into the red, white and blue bins. The trashmen throw the contents of all three into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[35,18,24,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-earth-stewardship","category-economics","category-energy","category-extreme-green"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-pP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1601"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1602,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601\/revisions\/1602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}