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  #1  
Old 12-05-2003, 09:28 AM
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Kyoto treaty is on it's "last leg", thankfully.

The United Nations’ global warming bureaucracy is meeting (vacationing?) in Milan this week pondering how to revive the beleaguered international global warming treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol. This week’s news that Russia might say “nyet” to the treaty all but seals its doom.

----------------------------------------

“A number of questions have been raised about the link between carbon dioxide and climate change which do not appear convincing and clearly it sets very serious brakes on economic growth which do not look justified,” said an aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The treaty’s scientific and economic shortcomings are both excellent reasons for rejecting it. Another reason not mentioned nearly often enough, however, is exposed in compelling fashion by Paul Driessen in his new book "Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death."

Driessen, a senior fellow at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation (search) and a former member of the Sierra Club (search) and Zero Population Growth (search), reveals how the ideological environmental movement -- essentially comprised of wealthy, left-leaning Americans and Europeans -- wants to impose its views on billions of poor, desperate Africans, Asians and Latin Americans.

Eco-imperialism (search) violates these people’s most basic human rights, maintains Driessen, and denies them economic opportunities, the chance for better lives, and the right to rid their countries of diseases that were vanquished long ago in the U.S. and Europe.

Hollywood actor and eco-imperialist Ed Begley, Jr., for example, preaches that “the two most abundant forms of power on Earth are solar and wind…It’s much cheaper for everybody in Africa to have electricity where they need it, on their huts.”

Drissen points out, however, that while solar panels would be a major improvement over “current” conditions in many areas of the third world, they are but a band-aid approach to the developing world’s critical electrical deficiency.

“They cannot possibly provide sufficient power for anything more than basic necessities, and large-scale photovoltaic electricity is far more expensive than what is produced by coal, natural gas, nuclear or hydroelectric pants. Wind power has the same shortcomings. For impoverished countries where few have access to electricity, these are not idle considerations,” writes Driessen.

The environmental movement “has repeatedly used the alleged threat of global eco-catastrophe -- e.g., global warming -- to override the wishes of people who most desperately need energy and progress,” he adds.

In India’s Gujarat Province (search), a dam project was halted after eco-activists pressured international lending agencies to withdraw financial support. The dam had to be stopped because it would “change the path of the river, kill little creatures along its banks and uproot tribal people in the area,” one eco-activist smugly intoned.

“The local ‘tribal people,’ however, don’t appear to appreciate her intervention,” offers Driessan. “One resident angrily called the activists’ handiwork ‘a crime against humanity,’ because the project would have provided electricity for 5,000 villages; low-cost renewable power for industries and sewage treatment plants; irrigation water for crops; and clean water for 35 million people.”

Driessan’s book isn’t limited to global warming and third world energy problems. The chapter “Sustainable Mosquitoes -- Expendable People” describes the ongoing tragedy of the eco-activist crusade against DDT.

“Our family and community are suffering and dying from [malaria], and too many Europeans and environmentalists only talk about protecting the environment,” says 34-year old Ugandan businesswoman with malaria. “But what about the people? The mosquitoes are everywhere. You think you’re safe, and you’re not. Europeans and Americans can afford to deceive themselves about malaria and pesticides. But we can’t,” she added.

The Ugandan woman is only one of more than 300 million annual victims of malaria in the third world. Between 2-3 million die every year. “Over half the victims are children, who die at a rate of two per minute or 3,000 per day -- the equivalent of 80 fully loaded school buses plunging over a cliff every day of the year,” explains Driessen.

Despite this ongoing public health horror story, the United Nations Environment Programme, World Bank, Greenpeace, Pesticide Action Network, World Wildlife Fund, Physicians for Social Responsibility and other eco-imperialist groups oppose the use of DDT (search) -- the only practical solution to the malaria crisis. The eco-imperialists’ disturbing attitude toward the third world is perhaps most frighteningly described by Robert S. Desowitz in another must-read, "The Malaria Capers," (search) (W.W. Norton, 1991).

Desowitz reports a U.S. Agency for International Development official named Edwin Cohn as saying, “The third world didn’t require a healthy labor force because there was a surplus of workers; better some people should be sick with malaria and spread the job opportunities around.” Even more bluntly, Cohn reportedly said people in the third world were “better [off] dead than alive and riotously reproducing.”

There should be no question, then, about Eco-Imperialism’s subtitle: Green power does indeed mean black death.


-------------Steven Milloy is the publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and the author of Junk Science Judo: Self-defense Against Health Scares and Scams (Cato Institute, 2001).

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  #2  
Old 04-14-2006, 12:19 PM
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Source for model output to enjoy in the privacy of your own home.

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  #3  
Old 04-14-2006, 01:17 PM
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If people in, say, Uganda want to use DDT or build a coal power plant, what's stopping them other than the fact that maybe western governments won't give them money for it?

I'm just trying to understand this because other than these governments not having enough money, I don't know of any reason why they couldn't just say the heck with naysayers and build it anyway. Is there some other reason?
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Old 04-14-2006, 04:41 PM
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Why those Goddamed Commie Bastards. How dare they!! When we didn't sign it there was a huge stink. Russia doesn't and it is so quiet. Relatively speaking. Double standard, anyone?
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  #5  
Old 04-15-2006, 07:58 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by aklim
Double standard, anyone?
Yes.

Didn't you get the memo?...

We're the big, bad, ugly, greedy *********s, and every bad thing in the world is completely our fault, so we should do all the work and pay for everything and never complain about it.


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  #6  
Old 04-15-2006, 10:12 PM
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Edited

Last edited by Hatterasguy; 04-16-2006 at 12:59 PM.
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  #7  
Old 04-15-2006, 11:13 PM
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Originally Posted by kitchenrat
i don't know who said this but it seems to fit, "not all conservatives are stupid, but all stupid people are conservatives".
I don't follow what this has to do with the topic. I think conservatives say the same thing about liberals like yourself so where does that leave us? Besides with the sibbling banter in the backseat, that is.
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  #8  
Old 04-16-2006, 10:13 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by aklim
I don't follow what this has to do with the topic. I think conservatives say the same thing about liberals like yourself so where does that leave us? Besides with the sibbling banter in the backseat, that is.

Uh, yeah. It's always easier to label somebody and insult the label than it is to make a rational argument using facts and reasonable conjecture.

Ad hominem attack, anybody?

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  #9  
Old 04-16-2006, 08:39 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by aklim
Why those Goddamed Commie Bastards. How dare they!! When we didn't sign it there was a huge stink. Russia doesn't and it is so quiet. Relatively speaking. Double standard, anyone?
потому что русские знали что kyoto был тупоумн и He основан на факте.
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Old 04-16-2006, 09:01 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by peragro
потому что русские знали что kyoto был тупоумн и He основан на факте.
What is the english translation of that?
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  #11  
Old 04-16-2006, 10:25 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by aklim
What is the english translation of that?

"because they (the russians) knew kyoto was stupid and not based on fact."



basically, it was fine to play along as long as they'd score international brownie points. Once it starts to cost real money the honeymoon is over. Many russian scientists laugh when kyoto and definitive anthropogenic global warming is the topic.
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Old 04-16-2006, 10:34 PM
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Let Cooler Heads Prevail

By George F. Will
Sunday, April 2, 2006; Page B07

So, "the debate is over." Time magazine says so. Last week's cover story exhorted readers to "Be Worried. Be Very Worried," and ABC News concurred in several stories. So did Montana's governor, speaking on ABC. And there was polling about global warming, gathered by Time and ABC in collaboration.

Eighty-five percent of Americans say warming is probably happening, and 62 percent say it threatens them personally. The National Academy of Sciences says the rise in the Earth's surface temperature has been about one degree Fahrenheit in the past century. Did 85 percent of Americans notice? Of course not. They got their anxiety from journalism calculated to produce it. Never mind that one degree might be the margin of error when measuring the planet's temperature. To take a person's temperature, you put a thermometer in an orifice or under an arm. Taking the temperature of our churning planet, with its tectonic plates sliding around over a molten core, involves limited precision.

Why have Americans been dilatory about becoming as worried -- as very worried -- as Time and ABC think proper? An article on ABC's Web site wonders ominously, "Was Confusion Over Global Warming a Con Job?"

It suggests there has been a misinformation campaign implying that scientists might not be unanimous, a campaign by -- how did you guess? -- big oil. And the coal industry. But speaking of coal . . .

Recently, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer flew with ABC's George Stephanopoulos over Glacier National Park's receding glaciers. But Schweitzer offered hope: Everyone, buy Montana coal. New technologies can, he said, burn it while removing carbon causes of global warming.

Stephanopoulos noted that such technologies are at least four years away and "all the scientists" say something must be done "right now." Schweitzer, quickly recovering from hopefulness and returning to the "be worried, be very worried" message, said "it's even more critical than that" because China and India are going to "put more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with conventional coal-fired generators than all of the rest of the planet has during the last 150 years."

That is one reason why the Clinton administration never submitted the Kyoto accord on global warming for Senate ratification. In 1997 the Senate voted 95 to 0 that the accord would disproportionately burden America while being too permissive toward major polluters that are America's trade competitors.

While worrying about Montana's receding glaciers, Schweitzer, who is 50, should also worry about the fact that when he was 20 he was told to be worried, very worried, about global cooling. Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." Science Digest (February 1973) reported that "the world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age." The Christian Science Monitor ("Warning: Earth's Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect," Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers "have begun to advance," "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter" and "the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool." Newsweek agreed ("The Cooling World," April 28, 1975) that meteorologists "are almost unanimous" that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said "may mark the return to another ice age." The Times (May 21, 1975) also said "a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable" now that it is "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950."

In fact, the Earth is always experiencing either warming or cooling. But suppose the scientists and their journalistic conduits, who today say they were so spectacularly wrong so recently, are now correct. Suppose the Earth is warming and suppose the warming is caused by human activity. Are we sure there will be proportionate benefits from whatever climate change can be purchased at the cost of slowing economic growth and spending trillions? Are we sure the consequences of climate change -- remember, a thick sheet of ice once covered the Midwest -- must be bad? Or has the science-journalism complex decided that debate about these questions, too, is "over"?

About the mystery that vexes ABC -- Why have Americans been slow to get in lock step concerning global warming? -- perhaps the "problem" is not big oil or big coal, both of which have discovered there is big money to be made from tax breaks and other subsidies justified in the name of combating carbon.

Perhaps the problem is big crusading journalism.
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Old 04-16-2006, 11:32 PM
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yep, read that one and posted it over on the "do you believe we went to the moon" thread the other day.

It seems to be really upsetting the dyed in the wool "sky is falling" crowd.
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Old 04-16-2006, 11:35 PM
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Well, I don't know if we are cooling or heating up but either way, it seems like they have reversed themselves. This does make me wonder why and makes me wonder if we should be more skeptical when we get these reports.
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Old 04-16-2006, 11:36 PM
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Originally Posted by aklim
Well, I don't know if we are cooling or heating up but either way, it seems like they have reversed themselves. This does make me wonder why and makes me wonder if we should be more skeptical when we get these reports.
good for you! I wish more folks thought that way.


There's some more articles I posted about this stuff over on the "moon" thread. start at the last page and go backwards.

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