The New Clarion

Critics of environmentalism like Objectivists and many private scientists (private means not bought and paid for with government money ) have long contended that the green movement is against all forms of energy production. Ample evidence of this lies in the fact that whenever any kind of power plant is proposed, green groups immediately file law suits to stop it. (more…)

Tomorrow, April 22nd is Exploit the Earth Day. This year I plan to celebrate it, weather permitting, by burning some scrap wood in my burner. This will of course release valuable carbon dioxide into the atmosphere thus warming our planet. You see warming the Earth will make growing seasons longer and this will benefit almost all living organisms including us humans. (more…)

Joe Romm may think this is the worst Super Bowl commercial {via} ever, but I have to disagree:

I believe that Audi intended it as a caricature: the only difference is that there is not yet an actual police force dedicated to environmental law enforcement at such a visible level. The absurd, petty laws from the commercial actually exist and the intrusiveness of the movement is incredible. (Looks like I’m not the only one that’s noticed the parallels.)

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Here’s a lighter take on Climategate:

The release of previously-sequestered emails, documents, and program code offered confirmation of what many anthropogenic global warming (AGW) skeptics always suspected: the politicization of climate science had utterly corrupted the findings. Those findings, viz. that global warming was taking place and that man’s actions had brought it about, formed the basis for broad international agreements like the Kyoto Protocol and the Bali Accord. The upcoming Copenhagen conference was intended to be the venue where the “alarms” were finally answered and the developed world was going to commence the sacrifices necessary to atone for their development.

But the emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England have cast unavoidable doubts as to the legitimacy of the long-heralded consensus that had found the science to be “settled.” World leaders, when they weren’t feigning ignorance of the controversy, began to backpedal from commitments due to the groundswell of grassroots outrage.
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Here are two new scares the environmentalists are throwing at the wall to see if they stick: Water footprints and oxygen depletion.

That’s right, producing consumer goods uses too much water. If that’s not bad enough, man is depleting the oxygen in our atmosphere. If we don’t assign some noble bureaucrats to regulate these horrors caused by capitalist greed, then we will all end up dehydrated and suffocating.

UPDATE: (HT: William Teach)

ARCTV has a 2min. video by Yaron Brook on the subject of sacrifice vs trade. While this subject needs a lot more coverage in today’s culture, Mr. Brook as usual, nails the essentials.
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I know this is a few days old but I think it’s noteworthy anyway. The newest burden you will be asked to carry is provided by the Sec. of Commerce Gary Locke who says that Americans must be made to pay for some of the carbon emissions of–the Chinese! Read the WSJ blog article here. You see, the Chinese factories are making lots of inexpensive products that make our lives better, so we are the cause of their CO2 emissions.
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An alert relative sent to me a link to this story. Evidently, Nashville Tenn. is experiencing new record lows for July. They didn’t mention his name but Al Gore lives in the Nashville area. Love it.

A senior EPA scientist was rebuffed after trying to distribute a report expressing doubts about a pending global warming policy. He was told that it would not be released since it might jeopardize the policy, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has discovered. The author took the EPA to task for relying on outdated research and for relying on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was a last-minute attempt to inject some caution into the incautious process by which the EPA was going to officially declare carbon dioxide a pollutant. After an online blizzard of indignation curiously absent from the media, he was relieved of all climate-related duties and advised to get an attorney.

A polar bear expert was told that he wasn’t welcome at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group because he has argued repeatedly that polar bear populations are actually increasing. The chairman of the group explicitly stated that his views “counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful.” He had obtained funds to travel to the meeting but the members of the group voted down his attendance in spite of his unassailable expertise.

These two recent episodes are but the latest in a long series of denying dissent by the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Spend any time online researching global warming and you’ll quickly discover countless more examples of earnest dissenters citing a laundry list of reasons to doubt only to be derided as “deniers” and shouted down until they leave. The pattern plays out time and again. What the EPA scientist, the polar bear researcher, and these online denizens fail to realize is that the truth is utterly irrelevant to AGW advocates.

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A few weeks ago, conservative John Derbyshire posted a revealing item over at National Review Online.  It is revealing, in that it exposes one of the fundamental commonalities between conservatism and the Left, that sets them in opposition to Americanism: the idea that there are different (and contradictory) “kinds” of freedom.

Notice that Derbyshire characterizes these four “notions of liberty” originally described by David Hackett Fischer, as being “subtly different”.  Let us examine these differences, to see how “subtle” these differences are.

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I have posted here before about how environmentalists are anti-human life. Another example of same is found in the May edition of Ward’s AutoWorld in an editorial by editor Drew Winter titled “Criticism of Tata Nano Wrong Headed.”

For the uninformed (like me) Mr. Winter writes:

“The Tata Nano, a tiny car with average fuel economy of 55 mpg (4.3 L/100 km).
Priced at $2,500, it is the world’s cheapest car and designed specifically to give South Asia’s low-income families a safer, all-weather alternative to a motorcycle or scooter, currently the only “family car” millions can afford.”

Evidently, most Indians ride motorcycles or scooters which results in over 100,000 deaths and 2 million injuries per year. This car might alleviate that. But who is attacking the development of this car? Some fringe eco-activists? Nope. One of the enviro leaders at the UN.

“And yet, many environmentalists who profess to be on a mission to save mankind are condemning this new device as an “environmental disaster” they would like to wish out of existence. Chief U.N. climate scientist Rajendra Pachauri has said “I am having nightmares” about it. Many other green groups also lament its debut.”

Mr. Pachauri is also the lead scientist at the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) which has been, since 1990, selling the notion that global warming will lead to disaster for life on Earth and is all man’s fault which my own two US Senators Debbi Stabenow and Carl Levin bought.

Mr. Winter reports that demand for the Nano is expected to exceed supply and this means:

“It is exactly this popularity that critics from green groups — 100% of whom we can assume do not have to drive their children to school on a scooter — fear. They are afraid the Nano will become so popular it will spark an industrial revolution, such as Henry Ford’s Model T did in the U.S.
In other words, demand for the Nano will soar; leading to more factories being built, creating more jobs, which in turn will create more demand for cars, accelerating India’s production of greenhouse gases. The Nano will create progress. And gosh, that will be terrible.”

He properly condemns this enviro attitude:

“Unfortunately, this contemptible viewpoint, spewed from comfortable middle-class lodgings in the U.S. and Western Europe, has not received the heaping dose of ridicule it deserves. In the worst kind of cultural elitism imaginable, environmentalists argue that in their noble war on global warming, tens of thousands of traffic deaths annually in the developing world are acceptable casualties.

This is an utterly unacceptable position to take, no matter what. The birth of the Nano is an historic event that needs to be celebrated, and environmentalists need to reevaluate their rhetoric and game plan.”

There is of course, no chance they will reevaluate their game plan. Although I won’t be buying a Nano in the forseable future (I prefer something of substance between me and whatever is going to run into me), I’m happy to see such an objective, rational argument in a trade journal.

Evidently, some eco nuts ran into reality. Billy Beck at Two-Four reports that:

“An expedition team which set sail from Plymouth on a 5,000-mile carbon emission-free trip to Greenland have been rescued by an oil tanker.”

They just don’t get it.

Update; corrected typo

This being the week of Earth Day, itself a product of junk science, I thought two more examples of same would be in order.

Junkfood Science has a remarkable post by the name ‘Rejection of science squared’. What’s amazing is that any paper or journal would be willing to publish such a speculative, assumptive, wishful thinking article. Or that somebody was willing to finance a study like this. I don’t think palm readers and clairvoyants use that many weasel words.
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Watts Up With That? (WUWT) has a guest post by Steven Goddard on the contradictory reports of the climate change alarmists which says in part:

Last weeks’ top Antarctic AGW story was :

Antarctic ice melting faster than expected

due to CO2, of course.

This week the #1 story is :

Antarctic ice spreading

but the increase in size is due to “stratospheric ozone depletion” which is of course also caused by man-made gases.

Except that’s not quite true as Mr. Goddard explains.

“Oh, and one minor problem with the ozone hole theory ”The ozone hole occurs during the Antarctic spring, from September to early December” – but the positive ice anomaly occurred during the autumn and winter (March through July) as represented by the red line below.”

The enviros will always find some reason to blame man for every problem real and imagined. How can it be otherwise since man is so evil and depraved by nature? Sigh. It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that Earth Day is also the birthday of communist leader Vladimir Lenin. In fact, the first earth Day was picked to be on his 100th birthday. Not much love for mankind there.

Environmentalism today is more about misanthropy and human sacrifice than it is about saving nature. Saving nature is only the rationalization behind a more insideous motive, hatred for man’s mind. Here are some quotes from the horses’ mouths.

At the website Environmentalism.com are these three quotes, (with a link to even more):

Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.

—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.

—Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!

I know scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line … we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth…. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along. (source: “Mother Nature as a hothouse flower,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 22, 1989, p. 10.)

—David Graber, biologist, National Park Service

The above quotes show that the leaders of environmentalism place little or no value on human life and do not regard man as part of nature. But this is not just a small insignificant sample. There are many more at for example the conservative site Free Republic. Such as this quote which reveals the real inner motive of those who hate man:

“We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion — guilt-free at last! — Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue”

Such is the power of guilt. It turns men against their own species, against themselves.

And how do you get men to accept an unearned guilt? By referring to nature not as nature but as ‘the environment.’ Get them to think they are responsible not only for their own environment but for everyone else’s as well. Don’t talk about the fact that environments are regional and local. Get them to accept the idea that their environment is global and therefore a man in Michigan is responsible for environmental damage in Peru. Make him feel guilty for that damage and he will not resist your demand that he atone for his guilt by handing over his money and freedom, or to support government policies that accomplish the same thing.

I think one of the best concretizations of the true nature of environmentalism that I’ve found is this Wondermark comic:

Earth Day (and the movement that goes with it) isn’t so much about bringing humanity up to the level of the Jetsons or Star Trek as it is of reducing our presence back to the Flintstones.

Earth Day is hear once again and so are the calls for human sacrifices. Humans, we are told, must give up their technological way of life for a more austere one in order to save the planet. But saving the planet is not the real goal of the environmentalists. Human sacrifice is the real political and moral goal. Not sacrifice to achieve any desired end, but sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice, sacrifice as a way of life. The thing to be sacrificed is man’s mind.

Notice how any suggestion that modern technology be used to save nature is met with indignant hostility. Observe that the peasants of Africa are not required to make sacrifices. They are already right where the enviros want them, close to nature–starving–and are already sacrificing the only thing they have to sacrifice, their future.

Environmentalists hold that all living organisms have an absolute, unconditional right to exist, except one–man. It is only man that must sacrifice his nature, his way of life, his happiness, his survival to all the plants, bugs and creatures of the planet. Man has no right to survive according to his own unique nature–which is by means of his reasoning mind. Make no mistake about it, the assault on man is an assault on reason. The protection of nature is only the excuse, the rationalization they use to attack man’s mind.

Earth Day should be renamed ‘Man Day’ to celebrate man’s mastery and therefore control over his environment. If the enviros really were concerned about nature they would champion laissez-faire capitalism, the only system that can provide for the survival of both man and nature.

Congress and the media’s continual criticism of the domestic auto industry is that they lost out because they weren’t being enough like Toyota. (No, I don’t mean using non-union labor. Of course they didn’t mean that.) The repeated cry is that Detroit failed because they were “living in the past” by building large and powerful vehicles rather than making smaller, “more-efficient” cars and – especially – hybrids.

But was Toyota’s success because they produced small cars and hybrids like the Prius, or was it in spite of that fact?

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Environmentalists must really be feeling their oats, these days.  The boldest among them are no longer even bothering to conceal or deny their real goal — the elimination of the plague, man, from the face of the earth.  Their initial trial balloon, launched in Great Britain, calls for cutting that nation’s population in half.  It used to be only the Earth Firsters who would say this stuff openly.  Now, British politicians feel safe enough to get away with it.

JONATHON PORRITT, one of Gordon Brown’s leading green advisers, is to warn that Britain must drastically reduce its population if it is to build a sustainable society.

Porritt’s call will come at this week’s annual conference of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), of which he is patron.

The trust will release research suggesting UK population must be cut to 30m if the country wants to feed itself sustainably.

Porritt said: “Population growth, plus economic growth, is putting the world under terrible pressure.

They do continue to use the tired old lie that they are doing this “for man.”  Orwellian double-speak has never been done better.  In order to make the world a better place for mankind, we must eliminate half of mankind.  And the sooner, the better.

On Saturday, March 28, from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m., in contrast to the dubious “Earth Hour,” there are a couple of new movements celebrating the achievements of Thomas Edison and those men and women who—as Ayn Rand eloquently phrased—”took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.” 

In honor of Edison Hour, which was coincidentally established by the University of Michigan Students of Objectivism and myself, and also in tribute to Human Achievement Hour, households and businesses across the nation will be keeping their lights and other electrical devices on, and refusing to concede the unearned guilt that environmentalists want to establish in our culture.

We live in the most innovative, life-sustaining and “money-making” country in mankind’s history, and we should never apologize for human happiness and success. So please remember to keep your lights on this coming Saturday. You may want to spend the hour by sitting down by the bright light of your lamp reading Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal or revisiting her uplifting novella, Anthem, from which I’ve selected a quote from its main character who rediscovered electricity and the light bulb:

I have learned that my power of the sky was known to men long ago; they called it Electricity. It was the power that moved their greatest inventions. It lit this house with light which came from those globes of glass on the walls.

Let’s make sure that the precious inventions that freed the world from darkness are never taken for granted, and especially not destroyed by the anti-man philosophy of environmentalism and “Earth Hour.” Let’s change the tide of the culture by celebrating human achievement and literally fending off the darkness.

One of the reasons that government seems to be on a fast track to total power over all of us via the politicization of science is that John Q Public has little knowledge of basic science. By way of Junkscience.com of March 16th is a post which links to Softpedia and an article on the sad state of public knowledge. The site’s science editor Tudor Vieru writes:

“According to a series of recent surveys among the general population, most US citizens seem to be unable to pass even the most basic science literacy test, a trend that has got experts very concerned. Because individuals lack this ability, they may find it very difficult to interpret scientific articles, and some may even misconstrue presented pieces of evidence and turn them into something they are not, like in the case of global warming. As people miss even the most basic background in science, they cannot actually emit an informed opinion, and the trend is growing with each passing year, experts note.”

I would blame a lot of this on the anti-conceptual philosophy of education that has gripped American schools for about 50 years I would estimate.Some of these earlier students are now in the media which aids and abets the general ignorance.

A case in point is two articles that appeared in the Detroit News on Mar 13th 09. One was titled “Pollution not only fouls air, it dims skies.” There should have been some mention that the pollution of the 1950s has been reduced by about 90% today. In a 2000 edition of Reason Magazine editor Ronald Bailey writes

“In the U.S., air quality has been improving rapidly since before the first Earth Day–and before the federal Clean Air Act of 1970. In fact, ambient levels of particulates and sulfur dioxide have been declining ever since accurate records have been kept. Between 1960 and 1970, for instance, particulates declined by 25 percent; sulfur dioxide decreased by 35 percent between 1962 and 1970. More concretely, it takes 20 new cars to produce the same emissions that one car produced in the 1960s.”

According to this our skies should be getting brighter not dimmer. The threat of dimming of course is just another attempt at scarring people into sacrificing more of their money and freedom to those who are collecting such sacrifices–politicians and enviros.

The second article is a new report from WAPO “Trace carcinogen amounts found in baby care products.” It states that:

“More than half of the baby shampoo, lotions and other infant care products analyzed by a health advocacy group were found to contain trace amounts of two chemicals that are believed to cause cancer, the organization said Thursday.

Some of the biggest names on the market, including Johnson & Johnson Baby Shampoo and Baby Magic baby lotion, tested positive for 1,4-dioxane, or formaldehyde, or both, the nonprofit Campaign for Safe Cosmetics reported.”

The report did carry contrary statements by Johnson and Johnson to the effect that the EPA has found these products to be safe. But considering today’s anti-business climate, many readers will just dismiss the statements as routine business denials. Over at the website STATS, a division of George Mason University, Trevor Butterworth reveals that:

“First, the CSC is driven by a group of environmental activist groups with a long history of hyperbole. The study was self-published, it wasn’t peer- reviewed; in fact, it wasn’t even scientific – if one takes science to be formulating a hypothesis and testing it against the full range of data.”

He goes on to discuss both formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane, said to be found in the health products and concludes:

“But here we come to the fundamental methodological flaw in report – one that underscores the need for real, peer-reviewed scientific analysis of chemical exposures and health and not activist reports designed to maximize media attention through sensationalism:

The Campaign measured how much formaldehyde was in the product, but not how much a child would actually be exposed to or absorb in the course of using that product.”

On 1,4-dioxane Mr. Butterworth writes:

“The other confounding problem with 1,4-dioxane is that we are exposed to it routinely in tap water, either by drinking or when we shower (as a volatilized compound), and in seafood, cooked meat, fried chicken, deep fry oil, ripe tomatoes, tomato paste, peppers, coffee, herbs and spices (within the range of 2-15ppm). In fact, given that 1,4-dioxane is more easily absorbed by ingestion and inhalation rather than absorption (due to its propensity to evaporate), the route of exposure is much more likely from the water we wash and shower in than through skin absorption from a cosmetic lotion.”

What makes the CSC report dishonest is the fact that it presents out of context assertions. It claims that all amounts of a carcinogen are dangerous and government force should be employed to ban them. The context being ignored by such activist groups is the toxicology principle that ‘the poison is in the dose.’ The human body has been evolving on this planet for thousands of years and has developed methods for dealing with trace amounts of toxic elements. Most people today have trace amounts of lead, mercury, dioxin, arsnic, asbestos, 1,4-dioxane and probably many others. Why aren’t we all dead? “The poison is in the dose” is why.

Activist groups like the CSC deliberately use out of context assertions knowing that many people, out of fear, will jump to the wrong conclusions. This fear is how they get donations which they use to lobby for governmental control over you and I.

Thirty years ago Petr Beckmann, a professor of electrical engineering, published a pamphlet titled The Non-Problem of Nuclear Wastes.  In it he showed that while no source of energy is entirely free of waste storage dangers, nuclear waste was less of a problem than any other viable energy source, especially coal.  Among the many problems of coal waste disposal is its sheer mass, which dwarfs nuclear waste; coal itself is radioactive (but no one suggests a “nuclear priesthood” needs to watch over it for a thousand years); it emits particulates into the air which get into people’s lungs, causing fatalities; and coal waste contains other toxins, some of which remain toxic forever (such as arsenic), unlike radioactivity, which eventually decays to below the level of radioactivity of the ore that it originally came from.

He showed how bad coal is in comparison to nuclear, not because he was against coal, but simply to show that nuclear is a better, cleaner, and safer source of energy.   Also, he bases his arguments on the sensible idea that American nuclear plants would reprocess spent fuel, which would reduce the amount of nuclear waste – something which is not being done, again, for political reasons.

At any rate, I bring this issue up because President Obama has apparently decided that nuclear waste could never be safe in Yucca Mountain, and he won’t allow it to be stored there.   This simply isn’t a rational conclusion, as Beckmann demonstrates in his pamphlet.  I advise anyone with an interest in the so-called problem of nuclear waste disposal to read Beckmann’s pamphlet. 

On a related note, a promising new nuclear energy technology is written up in Technology Review, something called a Traveling-Wave Reactor.  It would reduce the already minute amount of waste produced by the nuclear industry.