Environmental protesters leave catastrophe in their wake

Wait, what?

A total of two dogs and six puppies were found abandoned at the site and rescued by local nonprofit Furry Friends Rockin’ Rescue, local news reported on Saturday.

The two dogs the group rescued reportedly show signs of exposure to the brutal North Dakotan cold, with frost-bitten ears and mangy fur.

But, but they CARE so much!

The reports of the cast-aside canines follow news of the grave environmental threat to the Missouri River posed by the almost unfathomable amount of waste left at the site by protesters, a threat so grave it compelled North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum to sign an emergency evacuation order.


Authorities estimated that protesters left enough garbage and human waste to fill 2,500 pickup trucks.

It sure "feels" good to make a difference, right?

Between these sorts of protesters and the Obama Admin EPA polluting that river with toxic waste, I don't know how much more help mother Earth can stand!

Hyperloop, hyper hype...

The current news is all abuzz about the [limited] demonstration of the new hyperloop project. On paper this sounds pretty interesting and as it is being done by (mostly?) private companies with their private money, more power to them.

I am sad to say that I don't think it will ever be deployed commercially. My reasons for my pessimism are:

• NIMBY - This technology is basically a rail system, updated. It takes land to lay out the tube that this runs in. Think laying down a new freeway stretch. I see endless battles for easements and right of ways. Others will fight the addition of this "eye sore" that will spoil the value of their McManions and "blight" the area.

• Environmentalists - I see endless court battles with the greenies over things like the habitat of the orange eyed, three toed, purple tree frog. Greenies do what greenies do. They oppose anything technology unless it is the "right" technology even if their "right" tech does more harm than good, cause it "feels good" to be on the side of Gaia!

• Regulations - What started out as a "great idea" will get crushed under an endless stream of safety tests and local, state, and federal regulations involving everything from what plastic is used to support the seat frame to what is used to insulate the "pods" from temperature/noise.

• Unions - Union contracts and union work rules will add additional large sums to the project costs. Combined with the NIMBY and environmental court costs, will dramatically increase the costs per foot of the project.

• Occupancy - In order to make a "transportation" company successful you need to 1) get people from point a to point b, 2) more conveniently than if they were to drive themselves, and 3) cheap enough to make the "hassle" of not driving themselves worth it. That means that this "Hyperloop" must move enough people from where ever they are to where ever they want to go quickly enough and cheaply enough to out weigh the value of driving themselves from point a to point b. Any two of these are easy but all three is difficult to do for enough people to allow the business to make money. Think Amtrak.

Add all of these up and I just don't see "Hyperloop" making it. For that matter, I don't see any new, disruptive mass transportation system making it either unless it removes the requirement of a long distance physical infrastructure to enable it (i.e. train tracks or tubes).

Think I am making too much out of the impediments? When was the last time a large international airport was constructed? All of my above reasons for the failure of "Hyperloop" are the cause of the failure of all other "really large" projects. Even when you have the power of the Government behind you these big projects take a long time. Look at how long any large government projects take (i.e. Chicago's Big Dig, etc.) with their corresponding cost over-runs.

It is for reasons like those listed above that we "can't have nice things".

Google, whatever happened to "Don't be evil"?

Today Google chooses to honor the marine biologist and “Silent Spring” author Rachel Carson. What happened to Google's motto of "don't be evil"? Because of Rachel Carson's radical environmentalism, millions of children have died from malaria and other mosquito born illnesses.

Her book was based on shoddy science and was more a story than documentation but as a story, it succeeded. It helped end the availability of the best weapon against the mosquito, DDT. There was and is scant real evidence that DDT was the cause of any of the issues described in her book. Its banning was an over-reaction to faulty science and and an interesting story that resulted in millions of people paying for her prose with their lives.

While critics of Silent Spring have tended to focus on the one-sidedness of Rachel Carson’s case or on those of her claims that have not held up over time, the fraudulence of Silent Spring goes beyond mere cherry-picking or discredited data: Carson abused, twisted, and distorted many of the studies that she cited, in a brazen act of scientific dishonesty. So the real tragic irony of the millions of deaths to malaria in the past several decades is that the three central anti-DDT claims made by Carson and other activists are all false.

For Google to honer her in this way is a travesty.

French say world to end in 500 days!

In two languages, French Foreign Minister Lauren Fabius started the countdown Tuesday to climate change disaster, speaking in Washington before a meeting with American counterpart Secretary of State John Kerry.

“We have 500 days to avoid the climate chaos,” Fabius said in French.

 “And we have – as I said, we have 500 days to avoid climate chaos, and I know that President Obama and John Kerry himself are committed on this subject and I’m sure that with them, with a lot of other friends, we shall be able to reach success on this very important matter.”

OK, he didn't actually say the world will end in 500 days but he did pin an actual, near-term number on the count down to a "climate change disaster". So there will be calamity in 16 months.

So, build your ark and/or finish your prep cause according to the the French, the end is now...

You Can't Tell the Players without a Score Card

Why would the Washington Post embarrass itself by republishing a thoroughly discredited attempt to link the Koch brothers to the Keystone Pipeline? Because that is a Democratic Party talking point, and the Post is a Democratic Party newspaper. But the truth is a little worse than that. 

Who is Post reporter Juliet Eilperin? Among other things, she is married to Andrew Light, who writes on climate policy for the Center for American Progress. The Center for American Progress is an Obama administration front group headed by John Podesta, who is a “special advisor” to the Obama administration. CAP’s web site, Think Progress, has carried out a years-long vendetta against the Koch brothers that has focused largely on the environment. Ms. Eilperin’s conflict in writing about environmental issues has already been a subject of controversy at the Post. The paper’s ombudsman should examine this latest example of Ms. Eilperin throwing facts to the winds in her eagerness to promote her (and her husband’s) far-left agenda.

And there it is...

#greenfail

Report: DC’s green-approved buildings using more energy

But, but, but WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING! ANYTHING! The world is DYING and you JUST DON'T CARE!

Who cares if it is the wrong thing, or the inefficient thing, or the too costly thing. It is all about a) being able to SAY you did SOMETHING and b) if you can stick it to those evil corporations in the process, you get bonus points.

The only reason the world can support a bunch of whinny, b*tchy, environmentally conscientious, (and let us not forget) power hungry, busybody nut jobs is because of the society that is made possible by capitalism and Democracy.

These busybodies "feel" that everyone should be working to save the planet, that everyone should be earning a "living wage" (whatever the hell that is), that everyone should have "affordable housing" or "affordable healthcare" and all sorts of other things that are described in these vague, malleable terms that give them the maneuvering room to never have to call their crusade "done".

In this case/example it is a bunch of green building initiatives that are directed at saving energy and reducing our "carbon footprint". Of course it increases the costs of construction and there are the extra permits and fees and assessments and evaluations and all sorts of other things that are not free. What does it matter that the results of all of this "effort" is a more expensive and less efficient building? At lest we care! We did SOMETHING! Our conscience is clear and we can sleep at night. What does it matter that the result is worst that if we had done nothing at all and everyone had continued with the status quo?

If the world could be powered by smug, there would be no energy worries.

Do you think there is much concern for the environment when you are worried about keeping your family from starving? Do you think there is much concern for what is dumped into the rivers when you don't even have electricity? If you have to spend all of your time and energy staying alive, you have no time for feel good, "do something, do anything" activities. These things are only possible because a certain critical mass of the population does not have to be involved in a daily life or death struggle. That this situation is the case is a good thing. that this situation is used by those that think they know better than everyone else and "believe" that they should be telling everyone else what to do is the shame of it all.

They are no more than flees on society's back and could they but be shaken off, we would all be the better for it.

The truth about Ethanol

Ethanol as a fuel source is a bad answer. It takes food out of consumption and turns it into bad fuel. By bad fuel, I mean it takes more energy to produce ethanol from corn than you get from the resulting ethanol. Most recent information on the process states that it takes 1.5 gallons of fuel energy to produce one gallon of ethanol fuel energy.

So, producing ethanol results in:

- higher food prices due to the loss of food corn

- higher energy prices due to the process loss from producing ethanol

- higher vehicle maintenance costs due to the corrosive affects of ethanol on nonmetallic engine parts

All so the ethanol lobby can make lots of money for a product that makes no economic sense and so "greens" can feel better about "doing something" for the planet that actually makes things worse for the planet.

Things will only be getting worse as the ethanol additive rates are set to increase from up to 10% ethanol to the newer up to 15% ethanol standard.

Enviro-hypocrisy at the highest levels

Did you really expect something else?

As usual, it is quite fashionable for those in power to preach the need for sacrifice to the masses but just as with communist countries, all of the preaching and posturing is meant to guide our lives, not theirs.

More global warming hypocrisy

So, there will be so many private/charter jets planning to be at the Bali U.N. Conference on Climate Change that there is not enough room at the airport to park them all and some will need to be flown to other airports in the area for storage. I wonder what the carbon footprint of that will be but it is for a good cause and it is not like they could fly commercial or use, I don't know, teleconferencing (WebEx, NetMeeting) or something.

Peace Prize part II

"We're brainwashing our children," said Dr Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. "They're going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It's ridiculous."

"It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong," he said. "But they also know that they'd never get any grants if they spoke out. I don't care about grants."

Actions verses words

From the September 5 OpinionJournal comes the following story and comments (link above is to original story):

Brendan O'Neill of the online magazine Spiked calls our attention to an astonishing report that appeared last week in London's Times. You thought this "carbon offset" business was a scam? It turns out it's even worse, as O'Neill explains:

In [the Times article] it was revealed that the leader of the UK Conservative Party, David Cameron, offsets his carbon emissions by effectively keeping brown people in a state of bondage. Whenever he takes a flight to some foreign destination, Cameron donates to a carbon-offsetting company that encourages people in the developing world to ditch modern methods of farming in favour of using their more eco-friendly manpower to plough the land. So Cameron can fly around the world with a guilt-free conscience on the basis that, thousands of miles away, Indian villagers, bent over double, are working by hand rather than using machines that emit carbon.

Welcome to the era of eco-enslavement.

The details of this carbon-offsetting scheme are disturbing. Cameron offsets his flights by donating to Climate Care. The latest wheeze of this carbon-offsetting company is to provide "treadle pumps" to poor rural families in India so that they can get water on to their land without having to use polluting diesel power. Made from bamboo, plastic and steel, the treadle pumps work like "step machines in a gym," according to some reports, where poor family members step on the pedals for hours in order to draw up groundwater which is used to irrigate farmland. These pumps were abolished in British prisons a century ago. It seems that what was considered an unacceptable form of punishment for British criminals in the past is looked upon as a positive eco-alternative to machinery for Indian peasants today.

What might once have been referred to as "back-breaking labour" is now spun as "human energy."

What's more, this is all done so that Cameron can avoid making changes in his own lifestyle, which we are supposed to believe is destroying the planet. Global-warmism is not just some harmless enthusiasm; it can be despicable and inhuman.

This is the sort of hypocritical behavior of the high-profile, media darling tree-huggers that keeps me and others unconvinced about "man made" global warming and about how much the "true believers" really do believe. When all of these media darling global warming alarmists like Al Gore, Barbara Streisand, John Edwards and David Cameron care enough about this cause to actually change their life styles in support of it, I might start taking it more seriously. When they all start flying commercial instead of in private jets, sell their SUVs and drive nothing but hybrid or electric cars and move out of their mansions and into environmentally neutral dwellings, I promise that I will start to care. These folks have the money and influence to make a real difference with this cause, if they really believe in it. Their actions say no. You don’t make a difference by buying carbon off-sets. You make a difference by using your money to build a 100% environmentally neutral house and driving electric cars. They can certainly afford it, if they really wanted to and their actions say they don’t.

Sauce For the Gander

Makes a lot of sense to me too.

Would not hurt for all "celebrity greens" to follow this too. If it is good enough for the masses, it should be good enough for them (how about it Al?).

Read it, see it, tell a friend...

Watch the trailer.

This sort of thing goes on a lot more than you think and it is good to see it get some attention.