But then, we knew that, right?

The “carbon footprint” justification is loopy (because it cannot alter global warming, even if there was any), but its righteousness distracts people so they forget about other ways of saving money.

Auckland['s publicly-funded War Memorial Museum] expects to spend 35 per cent less on gas and electricity, saving $340,000.

Auckland Museum is being touted as a green example for other city organisations after it succeeded in slashing its carbon footprint by 30 per cent in just two years.

The reduction – saving the museum around $340,000 this year – has prompted a call by Auckland Mayor Len Brown for others to follow its lead. Read more… »

Abandoned houses (in Detroit). To be useful — even for only a few measly decades — houses need maintenance. That is the principle. Extend the principle, if you have the imagination, to all man-made things: moving (such as engines, pumps and vehicles) and unmoving (such as books, drains and bridges). The larger and more complex the “artificial” thing is (such as a park or an oil tanker), the more frequent maintenance it needs. That principle, which in previous ages was common knowledge, in this disconnected age strikes like a blunderbuss.

We voice some counter-arguments to the mythical and ideological “pristine state” nonsense advanced by extreme environmentalists to prevent exploitation of natural resources. Then we show how much we agree with the environmental Taleban.

Nuts!

They compare every change to imagined past conditions of “perfection” and their policy proposals are aimed at returning to that pristine state.

It’s nuts, really. Just a moment’s reflection shows how idiotic it is, for the welfare of our children, to avoid changing the world, and instead attempt to pass on to them a world unchanged, still pristine — a fragile wilderness in all its untouched splendour. How wonderful. How sentimental. How useless.

For that is precisely what the Inuit, the Bushmen, the Maori and the Korowai, of New Guinea, along with all other primitive peoples, actively practised for thousands of years until more advanced races happened along. Read more… »

Old oak tree.

Open letter to environmentalists from A. Tree

From Forbes, seven months ago, we heard about climate-related changes in the wind for the USA. The measures being proposed at potentially insane costs by the Obama administration include reducing the sulphur content of petrol ($2.4 billion pa), impossible boiler operating standards (reduce GDP by $1.2 billion) and highly restrictive cement production standards (shortfall imported from China, 80,000 out of work, construction costs hiked by up to 36%).

A new report released by the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Minority Committee enumerates a slew of planned EPA regulations that have been delayed or punted on until after the election that will destroy millions of American jobs and cause energy prices to skyrocket even more.

Read more… »

20 July 2012

Archbishop Rowan Williams
Archbishop of Canterbury
Lambeth Palace
Lambeth Palace Road
London SE1 7JU

Dear Archbishop Williams

There was a report this morning on the Today programme, to which I trust you paid due regard. If you didn’t, you should have.

The report, concerning the effect of the current American drought on levels of grain harvests, aired a remarkable and arresting statistic – disturbing too, if you have a conscience. It appears that 40% of the grain production of the Western world’s primary producer has been diverted to the generation of feed stocks for the so-called ‘biofuel’ industry. That this will result in hardship to countless within the developed world can be predicted with a high degree of confidence. That the already dispossessed, impoverished and disenfranchised will be the ones mainly to suffer, even unto starvation and death, is an absolutely foregone conclusion.

And the reason for this? Why, to be sure, to pursue policies common on both sides of the Atlantic aimed at sustaining the greatest scientific swindle in history. Read more… »

This Cambridge farmhouse still stands after 650 years, though built without foundations (incredible!). Planning permission these days would be denied for “unsustainability.” The world is become bland.

They can’t define WHAT?

Sustainable.

Lots of people think “sustainable” is most difficult to define. I disagree: it isn’t hard to define – the word is in the dictionary. I looked it up.

Now I will tell you what it means: “sustainable” means supportable; maintainable.

“Sure, you can quote me – and it was the Shorter Oxford… No, I’m not a hero, just an ordinary bloke, anyone else would have done the same in that situation… I don’t know what the fuss is about… Yes, at the back, do you have a question?”

During the Helengrad era in New Zealand, almost every press release emanating from the Beehive was liberally sprinkled with the word “sustainable”. Meaningless bureaucratese or “apparatchik-speak” such as this usually has a short life, but “sustainable” is clinging on – much used, for example, in Phil O’Reilly’s just-published 2012 report of the Green Growth Advisory Group, which mentions some form of the word “sustainable” 67 times. And we still don’t know what the word means. Read more… »

The Herald published this gem two days ago. Well done, them. For some years our “cultural cringe” on hearing that foreigners might hold opinions of us has been, thankfully, fading as we mature. Unfortunately the new default position for many of us is that we are naturally held in some kind of universal esteem. Barry Brill here looks beyond that, pointing out that we’ve been marketing our country to ourselves, because around the world, still, few have heard of us. He also tells the government to leave marketing to the experts.

One thing is quite clear – “clean green” is not this country’s brand. It isn’t a brand at all, says a Government Advisory Group reporting on “Greening New Zealand’s Growth”.

The national brand “New Zealand” carries a collection of attributes for foreigners. Cleanliness and greenness can be amongst its positive attributes for tourism and food products in certain markets. But we need to understand the perceptions that accompany the words.

This is an adopted article.

The report highlights our ranking as one of “the top three cleanest countries” in terms of official corruption. This cleanliness “has definitely become part of our brand”. Fonterra notes that our brand is preferred because “New Zealand is seen as a natural safe and pure source of secure food nutrition”.

These words are readily associated with clean and unpolluted water, along with high standards of hygiene and quality control. Cleanliness and food safety go hand-in-hand. Read more… »

– by Matt Ridley, British author and journalist. Originally titled “Gas against wind”.

Shale rock where you can see it. Deep under the earth, shale is frequently full of natural gas, which moves only slowly through the rock. Water injected under high pressure cracks the rock and releases the gas. Clean, plentiful natural gas is ideal for producing the huge amounts of electricity we depend on, since the combustion products are merely water and carbon dioxide. Natural gas is left over from the formation of the earth, or it may even be generated naturally deep in the mantle — it does not rely on fossils, for methane is plentiful on other planets.

Shale gas will save us. It has no nasty emissions like coal does, its modest wellheads sit in our landscapes much gentler than great, ugly, noisy wind turbines, it’s more abundant than oil, it’s easy to extract (with a clever new technique), it’s far cheaper than any “renewable” energy, including nuclear, it could last the world for 250 years and it beats wind and solar handsomely when the wind stops and the sun sets. What’s not to like? Here I’ve somewhat shortened Ridley’s superb summary, but his laconic style is available in full at The Rational Optimist. H/T Bob Carter.

Which would you rather have in the view from your house? A thing about the size of a domestic garage, or eight towers twice the height of Nelson’s column with blades noisily thrumming the air. Over ten years, eight wind turbines of 2.5 megawatts (working at roughly 25% capacity) roughly equal the output of an average Pennsylvania shale gas well (converted to electricity at 50% efficiency).

Let’s make the choice easier. The gas well can be hidden behind a hedge. The eight wind turbines must be on hilltops, where the wind blows. New pylons are needed; the gas well is connected by an underground pipe.

This is an adopted article.

Unpersuaded? Wind turbines kill thousands of birds of prey every year. And bats: the pressure wave from the passing blade just implodes the little creatures’ lungs. You and I can go to jail for harming bats or eagles; wind companies are immune.

Still can’t make up your mind? The wind farm requires eight tonnes of an element called neodymium, which is produced only in Inner Mongolia, by boiling ores in acid leaving lakes of radioactive tailings so toxic no creature goes near them. Read more… »

The way some people talk, you’d think the Arctic was burning.

What a joke, doctor

At the Huffington Post, “field biologist” Dr Reese Halter talks of the “unprecedented warming of our globe” and claims that “missing” Arctic sea ice is a “wake-up call.” He says the news of Arctic sea ice reaching its lowest point since the start of satellite observations in 1972 (actually 1979) is “outright heartbreaking.”

The heartbroken biologist meanders through observations on the climate, economics and some waffling, brainlessly misleading arguments against climatic scepticism. Read more… »

Global Warming Hysteria: Gore’s Profound Failure of Leadership

First published in www.firstthings.com
Sunday, June 26, 2011
by Wesley J. Smith

Ouch. A notable political scientist (and believer in global warming, at least in the general sense) has mounted a powerful critique of the disastrous political leadership on the issue by Al Gore. From “The Failure of Gore, Part 1″ by Walter Russell Mead in his blog at The American Interest:

Gore has the Midas touch in reverse; objects of great value (Nobel prizes, Oscars) turn dull and leaden at his touch. Few celebrity cause leaders have had more or better publicity than Gore has had for his climate advocacy. Hailed by the world press, lionized by the entertainment community and the Global Assemblage of the Great and the Good as incarnated in the Nobel Peace Prize committee, he has nevertheless seen the movement he led flounder from one inglorious defeat to the next. The most recent, failed global climate meeting passed almost unnoticed last week in Bonn; the world has turned its eyes away from the expiring anguish of the Copenhagen agenda.

This is an adopted article.

The state of the global green movement is shambolic. Read more… »

Bolivia needs a strong dose of reality juice

Their new president is foisting a native religion on the rest of the world and the UN is supporting him, no doubt because of the leverage it offers in the global warming scam. But he would be well advised to sort out his own country’s growth towards maturity and balance before hastening to educate the rest of us.

Reported by Canada.com yesterday (h/t Marc Morano):

UN document would give ‘Mother Earth’ same rights as humans

Bolivia will this month table a draft United Nations treaty giving “Mother Earth” the same rights as humans — having just passed a domestic law that does the same for bugs, trees and all other natural things in the South American country.

The bid aims to have the UN recognize the Earth as a living entity that humans have sought to “dominate and exploit” — to the point that the “well-being and existence of many beings” is now threatened.

Just imagine the strength such a “treaty” would give to the global warming alarmists and their intention to tax modern industry out of existence. The story continues: Read more… »

Consumer groups want end to EU bulb ban

Compact fluorescent light bulb. Big in the environment for a year or two, but now it appears to be a big mistake in the environment. Mercury vapour, of all things, perhaps the most demonised of environmental hazards; after asbestos. Forcing a dangerous product on consumers before adequate testing – what were you thinking, Greenpeace? You should hang your organisational head in shame.

From Germany comes confirmation of the danger of compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Official tests show the new compact fluorescent lamps to be dangerous if broken.

The energy saving bulbs show mercury levels 20 times higher than regulations allow in the air surrounding them for up to five hours after they are broken, according to tests released on Thursday by the Federal Environment Agency (UBA).

“If the industry can’t manage to offer safe bulbs, then the incandescent bulbs must remain on the market until autumn of 2011,” said Gerd Billen, the leader of the Federation of German Consumer Organisations (VZVB).

His group encouraged the federal government to push for a suspension of the ban in Brussels until there was a safe and practical alternative.

“It can’t be that the state bans a safe product and replaces it with a dangerous one,” Billen said. read more…

They’re expensive, slow to deliver the promised illumination, can make a buzzing noise and frequently fail well before the claimed seven to 20-year lifetime. Which ruins their claims of saving anything.

No effect on climate

Concerns have been expressed before that they’re unsafe, but now we have confirmation from nothing less than a German environmental organisation.

Why were we persuaded to use them? Because they save energy. So what, you ask? Less energy use means less global warming – did you know that?

It will have no effect on the climate, but that really is the only reason to put these expensive, dangerous light bulbs into our homes.

I hope our politicians get some sense into their heads and don’t ban the incandescent versions until we have adequate LED replacements or make the fluorescent ones truly, honestly safe.

Is that too much to ask?

 

pinna: cartilaginous outer ear; also called the auricle.

The Herald last Friday reported a Greenpeace protest in Auckland which barricaded the entrance to a building used by Fonterra. The activists sparked a bomb scare by chaining a package to an elevator car. The package contained a speaker system. The police complain that because they were not advised of its contents they had to treat it as suspicious and staff were kept out of the building for about an hour. Greenpeace claim they did in fact tell the police what was in the package before the protest.

What was the protest about? Palm kernel oil, rain forests, the orangutan and climate change. It was aimed at Fonterra, our best and biggest exporter and a company that feeds more people than you could imagine. Therefore undeniably a company of untrammelled wickedness. Read more… »

Mrs Christina Figueres, appointed as Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC earlier this year to replace Yves de Boer, who resigned after Copenhagen failed to achieve a treaty to replace Kyoto. She sounds just as unscientific as her predecessor in her beliefs about mankind’s influence on the climate and she looks well capable of getting her own way in an international (or any other) forum.

On 17 May, 2010, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced the appointment of Mrs Christina Figueres as the new Executive Secretary of the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat based in Bonn, Germany. The appointment was endorsed by the Bureau of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). She replaced Yvo de Boer, who resigned in February, 2010, declaring himself “appalled” by the failure of the international community to reach agreement at Copenhagen on “fighting climate change”.

Yvo De Boer — “appalled” at failure.

The AP quotes Mrs Figueres as saying today in Beijing, China:

“Countries have felt a renewed urgency to address global warming given this year’s series of frequent and catastrophic disasters, including massive flooding in Pakistan, drought and fires in Russia, and mudslides and floods in China.”

Have they, indeed? First, how does she know this, or is she merely stating what she would like to hear? Read more… »

The Carbon Sense Coalition, highlighting the hypocrisy which surrounds the global warming circus, today called for the “climate conspirators” attending the Copenhagen carnival to walk home.

The Chairman of Carbon Sense, Mr Viv Forbes, added: “Right now, over 15,000 green hypocrites, mostly funded by the world’s suffering taxpayers, have winged their way in comfortable carbon-fuelled air travel to Copenhagen’s best VIP accommodation. There they will be seeking ways to forcibly reduce our carbon footprint while doing nothing about their own.

“Top-rated airlines are booming as prominent people top up their frequent flyer carbon credits. Concierges are smiling as limousines glide in, full of exalted envoys with their entourage of minders and courtiers, all with lights blazing, air conditioners humming, kitchens cooking, champagne bubbling and caviar disappearing.”

Mr Forbes said that the global warming industry would also be there, creating scares, talking about drowning polar bears and melting ice, demanding handouts, seeking exemptions, defending paper credits and pushing for subsidies and special deals.

He said, “There will be battalions of largely gullible and fawning media, many also from government media monoliths touring on the tab of the taxpayer. We are told that Australian taxpayers have sent 114 official delegates there, all concerned to reduce our consumption of carbon fuels.”

“If they are fair dinkum,” he fumed, “they should all lead by example, use “green energy”—and walk home.”

Can’t say we disagree with too much of that, really. Drop a note to your MP and let him/her know what you think of this junket.

The Carbon Sense Coalition opposes waste of resources and pollution and promotes the rational and sustainable use of carbon energy and carbon food.

Steve O’connor is a senior geologist who has studied paleoclimate for 40 years. He lives in the circulation area of the Taranaki Daily News, which today published some astonishing comments from one Trotter. I am, unfortunately, unable yet to confirm the Taranaki Daily News item or give a link to it, but I am re-publishing Steve’s letter anyway, because it is the best summary I have read of the central anxieties arising from the global warming scam.

UPDATE 14 Dec 8:30 am: To give you just an outline of Trotter’s complete abandonment of evidence-based science, his denial of the right to free speech and his denial of evidence-based doubts of man-made global warming, here are the concluding comments from his Dominion article, titled “In the war for nature, the deniers are traitors”:
“There will, of course, be people who whisper that the enemy isn’t really our enemy … In 1940, England was full of such whisperers. The British ruling class, in particular, was riddled with defeatists, Nazi sympathisers and traitors. Back then people called them “Quislings” and “Fifth Columnists”. If, therefore, the battle against climate change has to become the moral equivalent of war, with all the sacrifice that war entails, then climate change denial must become the moral equivalent of treason. Over the top? No. The stakes really are that high.”

It is sobering to reflect that, a mere 65 years after World War II, which killed so many of our finest young men as they defended the freedom we still live in against the oppression from without of the advancing fascist barbarians, we are about to subjugate ourselves from within. For the remaining vestiges of that freedom are about to be crumpled in the unelected fists of the most devoted, socialist, totalitarian, “environmentalist” bureaucrats the world has ever produced, justified solely on the grounds of non-existent evidence of man-made climate control.

A menacing interpretation

When I first encountered, a couple of years ago, this menacing interpretation of the approaching “carbon crisis” I scoffed. It was alarmist nonsense; outlandish that anybody would do such a thing; an imaginary conspiracy from the paranoid—surely the movement is based on the science of the enhanced greenhouse effect? Read more… »

If there was any doubt that extreme environmentalists actually want to rule the world more than heal the environment, it can now be dismissed.

For no less a personage than the “High Priest” of global warming, Al Gore, has just expressed a desire for “world governance” to drive plans to control mankind’s emissions of greenhouse gases. How long will it be before our parliament is rendered obsolete, since the UN makes all our important decisions anyway? For the good of the planet, of course.

Mark Morano, at Climate Depot, reported Gore made the comment on July 7, in Oxford, at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment.

Morano went on that Gore’s call for “global governance” echoes former French President Jacques Chirac’s comments on November 20, 2000, during a speech at The Hague, that the UN’s Kyoto Protocol represented “the first component of an authentic global governance.”

“For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument of global governance,” Chirac explained then. “From the very earliest age, we should make environmental awareness a major theme of education and a major theme of political debate, until respect for the environment comes to be as fundamental as safeguarding our rights and freedoms. By acting together, by building this unprecedented instrument, the first component of an authentic global governance, we are working for dialogue and peace,” Chirac added.

Admirable sentiments. It’s just a pity he added the bit about “global governance”, since that’s the tyranny part; the part we must resist.

This man Gore is not only getting rich from trading carbon credits but he is also becoming dangerous to good order and freedom.

    • by Richard Treadgold – published in Tool Magazine, September 2008.

download pdf (542 KB)…

Once upon a time, street-corner zealots shouting “the end is nigh” and warning us to abandon our sins did it for religious reasons. These days, zealots shout the same message with the same warning about sinning, but they do it for climatic reasons. It’s going on for ever, isn’t it? Scare stories about the planet’s climatic doom proliferate endlessly and there are no signs of it letting up. If there’s light at the end of the tunnel it must be a train coming.

So the government’s decided to change the climate. Probably just to shut everybody up. We’re all sick of hearing about it. The Greens say the ETS bill is too weak for them—although, hectoring us to change our ways, they seem more concerned with our lifestyles than the actual climate.

And that’s the thing, isn’t it? There’s so much guilt around AGW (anthropogenic global warming)—we’re not just burning fossil fuels, we’re greedy and selfish—even criminally negligent!   Read more… »

21 August 2008 – Is this the real motive of environmentalism — shame at our existence? Brendan O’Neill – Spiked, tells us that after the eco-footprint and the carbon footprint, now we have the ‘water footprint’. We’re told to be ‘conscious’ (which is a PC word for feeling guilty) of how much water we splash on our faces or flush down the toilet. If only the matter rested there… more…

A couple of weeks ago, plans for a wonderful new coal-fired power station in Kent were given the green light and I was very pleased. more…

All responsible citizens are ‘environmentalists’, but that is no reason to yield to mass delusion. more…