'Environmentalism' has become an enemy of the environment because it is not about the environment any more, if it ever even was. It's about money and power over other people's lives, just as we have come to expect from the... forceful left.
I submit that I and most conservatives I know love the environment more than any hundred phony radical knee jerk enviros. We are conservationists after all.
And I've also planted around half a million trees with my own hands which took 5 long seasons of such hard work that only about 1 in 50 who tried it could last more than 2 weeks.
Can even one of these self righteous zealots tell us where human inputs rate relative to the other barely known inputs like volcanism, plant degradation, insect life, animal life, solar cycles, cosmic rays and ocean dynamics? Not one? Imagine that. So where does that leave them? Hysterical.
Let us welcome and even encourage more practical and elegant technologies by which we can eventually move beyond the oil age. The biosphere must not be seen as absolutely incorruptible.
But let us not bow down to the hysterical left and their 'forceful' inclinations.
Especially when any cursory investigation reveals just to what degree they tend to twist and pervert and ruin whatever they touch. It's only the nature of the beast after all.
...And a few numbers (unconfirmed) from another's comments:
Location: TX
Reply # 29
Date: May 31, 2008 - 8:20 AM EST
Humans currently release 5.5 gigatons (GT) of C02 into the atmosphere
annually from energy consumption.
That compares with:
750 GT that are already there,
1000 GT in the surface ocean,
2200 GT in the biosphere, and
38,000 GT in the deep ocean.
Transport between these various reservoirs ranges from 50 to 100 GT per year.
The size of these reservoirs and transports, and the uncertainty in their
measurements are such that it's not possible to determine where the recent
increase in CO2 comes from, nor is it reasonably possible to do anything
about it.
And this:
Reply # 41
Date: May 31, 2008 - 8:53 AM EST
If rabid environmentalists didn't want to be called communists, they should not have celebrated the first Earth Day on Vladimir Lenin's 100th birthday. look it up...
Of course I want clean air, water, and land. However - the labelling of CO2 as a pollutant (rather than a natural byproduct of life, as lanczos pointed out in #29) forces us backward. Burning coal releases many pollutants, but the global-warming-alarmists would have us burn 30% more coal to deliver the same amount of electricity, and use the excess to sequester CO2. This releases MORE NOx, mercury, selenium, etc that has to be dealt with.
I like the way Krauthammer refers to the environmental alarmists as a church. They display the same tendancies as the worst of tyrants masquerading as holy men:
- flawed doctrine
- forced obedience to their rules
- punishment of heritics & critics
- Indulgences (carbon offsets)
Time to start another reformation...