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That's not pollution, it's STEAM

By Skeptic’s Corner

Plant Food and Dirty Harry

Here is a story from Reuters that combines the worst of both worlds, media biased portrayal with political black mail. Let’s start with the media part. There is a two photo slide show with the story, here is the first photo (left);

Now I don’t know how many people know that those towers at power plants are cooling towers and coming out of the top is nothing more than steam. In England a survey showed that two thirds of people thought what was coming out was pollution. I would guess it is the same everywhere. This is done to protect the environment so as not to discharge hot water back into lakes etc.

The fact that the media uses these pictures constantly as an iconic representation of global warming is both misleading and ironic. The irony being that water vapor is in fact the number one greenhouse gas, though man’s contribution is minuscule. Besides that is not what our purveyors of truth in the media are trying to portray anyway. When you see pictures like the above it is meant to represent pollution. The fact that it is not is obviously unimportant to them. Of course they are just following the lead of the most famous of such misdirection.

How do I know that Reuters was trying to convince us that those power plants represent pollution? Simple, the very next picture in the little slide show.

Heliogenic Climate Change where I first saw this story linked to the Planet Ark Site where they only used the second photo (of course) but gave a caption to it.

Century City and downtown Los Angeles are seen through the smog December 31, 2007.
Photo: Lucy Nicholson

So in one fell swoop without a word being written we are left with the impression that steam from power plants is the same as the smog in Los Angeles and this all has to do with Carbon Dioxide which is a harmless odorless natural element necessary for life on earth, plant food. Wow ain’t journalism special.

Now to the story.

Risk of EPA move smoothes way for U.S carbon law: Rep

CAMBRIDGE – The threat of tougher regulation from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency should ease industrial opposition to a cap-and trade market on greenhouse gases, a U.S. lawmaker said on Monday.

U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, co-sponsor of a bill that would cut the nation’s emissions of greenhouse gases associated with global climate change, said the EPA’s authority to act should convince industrial lobbyists that it is in their best interest towork with Congress on the issue.

“Now you have a choice … Do you want the EPA to make the decision or would you like your congressman or senator to be in the room and drafting legislation? So we think this is a very helpful development that focuses the mind,” Markey said at a meeting on clean energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, just outside Boston…

“If Congress doesn’t act, then clearly there is a residual authority now granted by the Supreme Court of the United States to the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases,” Markey said. “The only way to avoid that is to have Congress act.”

That should encourage business not to fight the proposed legislation, which Markey plans to begin committee hearings on next week.

“It becomes a real factor,” Markey said. “Industries across the country will just have to gauge for themselves how lucky they feel if they kill legislation in terms of how the EPA process will include them.”

Ah yes just what we wanted from our elected officials, Playing Dirty Harry with our industrial sector, ain’t Democracy great.

Al Gore Really is Stupid

By Richard Baehr, American Thinker

Yesterday I attended the Cubs home opener, as I do most seasons. At scheduled game time of 1: 20, the temperature was in the mid 30s, windy, with a steady rain. The game start was delayed an hour, and the rain lasted through the first 3 or 4 innings. All in all, a perfect day for baseball in Chicago (the Cubs won 4-0, on a combined one hitter by starter Ted Lilly and three relievers). This late home opener — April 13th, and the late start to the season on Sunday, April 5th, was a result of the World Baseball Classic, which pushed back the start of the Major League baseball season by a week. If you were cold at Wrigley Field yesterday (so far the new owners have not renamed the park Ameritrade Stadium), there are warmer days ahead. Al Gore, speaking to a near empty theatre in Chicago a few weeks back, on a bitterly cold day of course (he seems to bring this weather with him everywhere he speaks) assured the few true believers willing to pony up to hear him that by mid century, as a result of global warming, the Cubs could be playing baseball in February. Really? There are many people who have overrated Al Gore, but this level of stupidity needs to be examined. The February average temperature in Chicago is 33 high, 17 low. Even Al Gore’s most hysterical model for temperature change by the year 2100, is for a 6 degrees centigrade shift, or 10 degrees Fahreneheit. So by mid century, take half of that increase, or 5 degrees fahrenheit. Would baseball be routinely played in an environment where the average high temperature was 38,and the average low was 22? These average temperatures, of course require swallowing Gore’s whopper of a 6 degree centigrade increase in global temperatures by 2100. In the last 150 years, all that global warming we have been hearing about, has raised world temperatures by 0.44 degrees centigrade. Al Gore grew up in Tennessee and Washington DC. His northern exposure was due to his “child of a famous person affirmative action” admission to Harvard (Gore’s father was a US Senator). I doubt that Al Gore ever sat through an opening day at Wrigley Field or Fenway Park, when the weather was as it was in Chicago yesterday. And I will wager that neither his heirs nor anybody else will get to sit through baseball in Chicago in February 2050.

Confirmed Data: Sea Levels Have Not Risen Over Recent Past

By An Honest Climate Debate via ICECAP

SPPI’s authoritative Monthly CO2 Report shows that in recent years global mean sea level, as measured by the JASON satellite, has not risen for three years, probably in response to ocean cooling. Main points The University of Colorado, at SPPI’s request, has updated the sea-level data from the JASON satellite to the end of 2008. Though James Hansen of NASA says sea level will rise 246 feet, sea level has not risen since the beginning of 2006. Sea level rose just 8 inches in the 20th century and has been rising at just 1 ft/century since 1993. Since Al Gore’s climate movie An Inconvenient Truth was launched in January 2005, global cooling has occurred at the equivalent of 10F (5.5C) per century. If this rapid cooling were to continue, the Earth would be in an Ice Age by 2100. The UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, had projected temperature increases at 4.5 to 9.5F (2.4 to 5.3C) per century, with a central estimate of 7F (3.9C) per century. None of the IPCC’s computer models had predicted a prolonged cooling. The IPCC’s estimates of growth in atmospheric CO2 concentration are excessive. They assume CO2 concentration will rise exponentially from today’s 385 parts per million to reach 730 to 1020 ppm, central estimate 836 ppm, by 2100. However, for seven years, CO2 concentration has been rising in a straight line towards just 575 ppmv by 2100. This alone halves the IPCC’s temperature projections. Sea ice extent in the Arctic recovered to the 30-year average during the early winter of 2008. In the Antarctic, sea ice extent reached a record high late in 2007, and has remained plentiful since. Global sea ice extent shows no trend for 30 years. The Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index is a 24-month running sum of monthly energy levels in all hurricanes, typhoons and tropical cyclones. The Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index hit a 30-year low in October 2008. Read the full SPPI Monthly CO2 Report including a debunking of railroad engineer IPCC chief Pachauri claims here.

President Obama’s red sea

By Paul Driessen

America is diving into a Marianas Trench of red ink. There is barely a digit of black anywhere on the balance sheet, and spendthrift lawmakers are closing off numerous sources of positive revenue. On the spending side of the ledger, the White House and Congress enacted a $700-billion financial bailout, followed by an earmark-laden $787-billion “stimulus” law and plans to ladle out $1.6 billion in federal government bonuses in 2009. Then came a $3.5 trillion “red sea” FY 2010 budget, and the prospect of $9.3 trillion in total indebtedness over the coming decade. A March 31 Bloomberg study found that the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, FDIC and HUD have thus far obligated generations of Americans to $12.8 TRILLION in debt. That’s 90% of our nation’s entire 2008 Gross Domestic Product, notes columnist Deroy Murdock! It’s more accrued debt than 43 previous administrations combined, and it doesn’t include the cost of servicing this debt – or the US share of the $1.1 trillion “global stimulus” devised by the Group of 20, to be administered by professional spenders at the International Monetary Fund. Taxes will soar, to pay off these debts – and cover new levies on everything we do. As 2,600 delegates flew greenhouse-gas-spewing jetliners to Bonn for another five-star-hotel UN climate change confab, envoy Todd Stern announced that the White House is “seized with the urgency” of tackling runaway global warming. Looming on the horizon is a hulking 648-page House climate change bill. Equally monstrous Senate and EPA versions wait in the wings. President Obama wants energy prices to “skyrocket,” to coerce Americans to slash carbon dioxide emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 – to levels last seen in 1905! He says cap-and-trade will “raise” $656 billion between 2012 and 2019, to fund green energy, green job and other government programs. The National Economic Council and other analysts put the tax bite at $1.3 to $3.0 trillion. This is not monetary manna. It is a massive wealth transfer – extracted from every hydrocarbon-using business, motorist and family, and doled out by Congress and bureaucrats to politically favored constituencies. These all-intrusive energy taxes will hit poorest households hardest. Cap-and-tax will also clobber manufacturing and heavy-industry jobs. Twenty states get 60-98% of their electricity from coal. They form our manufacturing heartland, and every increase in electricity prices will result in more businesses laying off workers or closing their doors, more jobs sent overseas, more homes forced into foreclosure, more families into welfare, and more school districts, hospitals and churches into whirlpools of red ink. Soaring gasoline and natural gas prices will do likewise. And for what? Hundreds of climate scientists say CO2 plays little or no substantive role in climate change. They point out that even total elimination of US carbon dioxide emissions would quickly be offset by emissions from China, India and other rapidly developing nations. Thankfully, sensible Republicans and Democrats are raising red flags about these economy-killing proposals. But a White House/EPA rulemaking would require no congressional vote – and they’re reportedly going to drop that bombshell this month. On the revenue side, the situation is equally irresponsible. Lock up the best and tax the rest, is the motto. Whether it’s oil and natural gas (onshore or off), coal or coal-to-gas, shale oil or uranium, Congress and the White House are making America’s best prospects off limits. They are imposing punitive taxes and regulations on prospects that aren’t in no-access categories, to curtail development. That means rejecting trillions in potential bonus, rent, royalty and tax revenues that could help pay for this spending binge. Developing just our off-limits oil and gas resources in the ANWR, OCS and Rockies could generate over $1.7 trillion in government revenue and create 114,000 new jobs, a recent ICF International study concluded. The petroleum would eliminate one-fifth of the nation’s $350-700 billion annual oil imports bill. Developing all US oil and natural gas resources on federal lands could generate $4 trillion. The American Energy Alliance and other experts say the benefits would be even greater. And this is just conventional oil and gas revenue. It does not include trillions more in revenues from oil shale, tar sands, methane hydrates, coal, uranium and other deposits that Congress, bureaucrats, judges and green activists have conspired to put off limits to the American taxpayers and consumers who own them. It does not consider the regulatory stranglehold on coal and nuclear power plant construction – and thus on jobs and revenues that those projects and their energy would provide. This is Real Energy, Real Revenue, Real Employment. Hydrocarbons and nuclear generate 93% of all the energy that safeguards our jobs, health, living standards and national security. With 90% reliability, they keep the lights on and make America work and prosper. But they are being closed down – to be “replaced” by pixie dust energy from wind turbines and solar panels that now meet barely 1% of our total energy requirements. Wind turbines actually generate electricity only 2-6 hours a day, on average. They are built and operated only because of billions in taxpayer subsidies. And they require large swaths of land and prodigious amounts of concrete, steel, copper and fiberglass: 700 tons for each 1.5 MW turbine – plus enormous additional quantities for natural-gas-fired electrical generators that kick in every time the wind dies down. Solar doesn’t even make a perceptible contribution to our energy needs. Two-thirds of Americans want our petroleum and nuclear energy developed. They want jobs, security, economic recovery, power that works 24/7. They don’t want to see America file for bankruptcy. But their rights are being trampled on, by partisan totalitarians whose decrees violate America’s sacred traditions of open, robust debate, sound science and economics, accountability, and majority opinion on critical issues. Whatever happened to the bipartisanship and responsible government that voters thought they were electing last fall? It’s time to say, enough!

Letter: Stop global warming scam

Cyril Cernohous, town of Troy, River Falls Journal

I want to commend Beata Kalies from the State Electric Coop Association for her stand on global warming now being called “climate change.”Whatever you call it, it is a money-making scam started by Al Gore with the intention to make millions of dollars with carbon credits.Several years ago America was scammed by a claim that R12 Freon was causing depletion in the ozone layer so the company making R34 could sell their product.I don’t know who the “mainstream climate scientists” referred to are; they are probably being compensated by the likes of Al Gore. But I do know that I have heard a news broadcast that stated there were over 600 scientists in Europe who have come forward and denounced the fact that CO2 emissions could cause global climate change.There is a lengthy article on global warming that explains the history of the climate changes and the insignificant effects of CO2 at http://geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice-ages.html.In this article there is a statement from Al Gore emphasizing the need to exaggerate the facts to establish a problem (global warming) so the audience will listen.If we are in a global warming crisis today, even the most aggressive and costly proposals for limiting industrial CO2 emissions would have a negligible effect on global climate change.What we as Americans need to do is use whatever clout and influence we can muster up to put a stop to this nonsense or it will be shoved down our throats just like the R12 Freon scam was. This is not a political issue. It is a downright scam! Gore and Obama are trying to sell this scam in Europe, too, with some opposition, so it is going to be an uphill battle to get this scam stopped.

Newspaper readers come to the defense of CO2 and yours truly

By Justin C, ILCD

Yesterday I posted an article about the BC NDP’s proposal to eliminate the ridiculous carbon tax now being enforced by the Lieberals in this province, and I linked to a similar story which appeared in The Province. I also left a comment on that Province article, and at last check it sure seems that a whole lot of fellow concerned BC’ers aren’t falling for the CO2 hoax either and want this tax SCRAPPED.

See all the comments here: NDP’s best bet: Tapping carbon-tax ire

When the Inmates are in Charge

By Alan Caruba, Warning Signs

If you ever wondered what it would be like if seriously deranged people were close to the seat of power in America, you can stop wondering.

In January, the Competitive Enterprise Institute issued a three-page memorandum. William Yeatman, the author of the memorandum, had serious concerns about the nomination of Dr. John P. Holdren to be the White House Science Adviser.

This position heads the Office of Science and Technology Policy which, in official lingo, “serves as a source of scientific and technological analysis and judgment for the President with respect to major policies, plans and programs of the Federal Government.”

“John Holdren’s 40-year record of outlandish scientific assertions, consistently wrong predictions, and dangerous public policy choices make him unfit to serve as White House Science Adviser,” warned Yeatman.

Just how crazy is Holdren? On April 8, according to the Associated Press, Holdren said that “global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air.” Holdren suggested that one option includes “shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays.”

The last time anything of this nature was discussed, it was called “a nuclear winter” in which the debris from a nuclear war would fill the atmosphere and keep the Sun’s warming and nourishing rays from getting through.

According to Holdren, “It’s got to be looked at. We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.” Holdren believes that the Earth is in the grip of global warming, but the difference between belief and science is that the latter demands proof. Take, for example, the data our weather satellites have been sending back since 1998 all of which points to a cooling Earth.

Twice during the interview, Holdren compared global warming to being “in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in a fog.” The truth, however, is that Holdren is a genuine cuckoo who probably checks under the bed every night to make sure the bogyman isn’t there.

Yeatman described him more charitably as a “chronic alarmist”, citing just a few of his paranoid fantasies. In 1971, Holdren predicted that “some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the century.” We are now safely into a new century and the only catastrophe is the Obama administration.

The really neat thing about making catastrophic predictions is that they always take place way into a future. In 1986, Holdren was predicting that global warming would cause the deaths of one billion people by 2020. This is eight years beyond 2012 when devotees of the ancient Mayan calendar predict the end of the world will occur. Neither are likely to occur.

In 1998 Holdren warned that we just can’t go on using energy fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal that represent nearly one hundred percent of everything we and everyone else uses now and will into the future. These days we hear President Obama blathering away about “clean energy”, but there is reality and there is the increasingly weird world of the White House.

In a recent article, Robert Bryce, one of the nation’s leading authorities on energy, pointed out that “Oil now provides nearly 40 percent of America’s total primary energy use. It also provides nearly all of the energy needed for the transportation sector. Coal and natural gas together provide about 50 percent of America’s primary needs.”

That leaves “clean energy”, solar and wind power, “but together,” Bryce notes, “these sources currently provide about 0.16 percent of Americans total needs.” It should also be pointed out that solar, wind, and ethanol production would not exist were it not for huge government subsidies and mandates for their use.

Both President Obama and Holdren think “clean energy” should receive billions of dollars while the White House does everything in its power to destroy the nation’s oil and coal industries.

The Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, recently said that windmills off the East Coast “could generate one million megawatts of power, roughly the equivalent of 3,000 medium coal-fired power plants, or nearly five times the number of coal plants now in the United States.”

The reality, however, is that there aren’t 3,000 coal fired plants operating. There isn’t even half that number. The Institute for Energy Research estimates that, to achieve Salazar’s insane goal, there would have to be 309,587 giant 3.15 megawatt wind turbines spread over 1,800 miles of coastline or about 172 turbines per mile of coastline. And, of course, the wind would have to blow 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Are these people crazy? You bet! Are the inmates in charge of the asylum? Yes, indeed.

They aren’t the only ones. The American Meteorological Society and several other otherwise respected science groups have completely lost their wits. The AMS wants to explore “geoengineering’s potential to understand its limits and to avoid rash deployment.”

Geoengineering? Remember that Star Trek movie that featured the “Genesis” machine that could convert a dead planet into one with grass and trees, rivers and oceans? When the AMS starts talking about geoengineering, it is strictly into cloud cuckoo land.

Absolutely nothing humans can or should do to mess with the unimaginably huge forces that determine the Earth’s atmosphere should even be contemplated. It is insane! It’s beyond science fiction. It is global genocide. Holdren has been urging “population control measures” since the 1960s.

In 1969, Holdren wrote that it was necessary “to convince society and its leaders that there is no alternative but the cessation of our irresponsible, all-demanding, and all-consuming population growth.” This is another way of saying that there are too many people sharing the planet with Holdren and he has been thinking about that “problem” for a very long time.

So have others in the Obama White House and, in terms of energy use, their “solution” is to make energy so expensive that people will stop driving, starting using mass transit, or just telecommute without going anywhere ever again. Forget about air conditioning and other aspects of modern life.

They intend to achieve this by scaring everyone with global warming talk and by claiming carbon dioxide is a “pollutant”. Then they intend to have the Environmental Protection Agency regulate it. Then they will tax it in the form of cap-and-trade “carbon credits” that must be purchased by all forms of industry and business in America. The costs will be passed along to consumers.

Billions would flow to a government that already is spending trillions in a mad scheme to fix the financial crisis.

What ever happened to just doing nothing? Sometimes when there is no problem, doing nothing is the most brilliant answer. There is no global warming. And, left alone, the financial crisis would correct itself in time. Everything the government is currently doing was tried in the 1930s and it just prolonged the Depression and made it worse!

In the meantime, loonies like Dr. John Holdren will be whispering into Obama’s ear about “shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays.”

Scientist Dissents: Gore’s 'laughable' claims are 'appallingly riddled with mistakes and outlandish exaggerations'

By Marc Morano, Climate Depot
By Brian Pratt, P.Geo., a sedimentologist and palaeontologist at the Department of Geological Sciences, University of Saskatchewan and a member of Northern Light, the Canadian Mars exploration project. Link to Pratt’s full bio: Excerpt of March/April 2009 analysis via www.IceCap.US: When you stop and think about it, the apocalyptic predictions don’t quite make sense scientifically. Alongside the enormity of the sun and what we know of the scale and power of natural processes, to imagine humans being able to make any difference to global climate would seem like the most preposterous conceit. […] Even though I consider myself a dedicated environmentalist I cannot accept the claims of anthropogenic—humancaused—global warming. My research involves deducing climate back in what we call “Deep Time” – geological eras of millions and billions of years ago – so I think I have enough background to understand the evidence. I know that the factors controlling climate work as an extremely complex, integrated system that cannot be resolved by debate and exchange of opinion. Therefore the suspicions of any scientist should be aroused by glib assertions like “the science is settled” or “there is a consensus,” because this is not how scientists and engineers operate. Al Gore’s movie and books are so appallingly riddled with mistakes and outlandish exaggerations that they would be laughable if they weren’t taken so seriously by so many. […] Globally averaged temperature data—imprecise, it must be admitted—show that temperature has not risen in the past 10 years: we are not in the midst of global warming at all. The famous “hockey-stick” graph wielded by Al Gore and the IPCC reports that claimed to show a dramatic rise in global temperature in the latter 20th century turns out to be a methodological and statistical chimera.
Some have even suggested that it was a deliberate fraud. Temperature fluctuations and regional variations in the last few decades do not track rising atmospheric CO2 concentration. So, if anthropogenic CO2 is not driving climate change, why do most Western governments—with the notable exception of Václav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic—continue to fall over themselves in support of the belief of anthropogenic global warming, and try to best each other in promising to cap CO2 production, designing carbon taxes and cap-and-trade legislation, and throwing huge sums of money at alternative energy schemes, CO2 sequestration projects and climatological research? Sure, certain individuals stand to make a lot of money out of these measures, but some of them arguably will amount to economic suicide. Well, what politicians do “passeth all understanding” for most of us in the trenches, but it does illustrate the power of the green lobby and, in my opinion, a dearth of real leadership. […] As James Hutton said in 1795, the Earth has “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end” and this holds true for climate change. Does reducing our dependence on fossil fuels justify promulgating scientific lies? I don’t think so. But it is inescapable that coal, oil and natural gas are finite natural resources and when they are burned up they are gone. Period. Profligacy with these precious commodities is what needs to change. Professor Pratt’s full climate analysis available here

An Inconvenient Film Coming Soon

By Peter Foster, National Post

Al Gore is about to feature in a new movie, but he’s not going to like it very much. Titled Not Evil Just Wrong: The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria, the film presents a devastating account of the shaky foundations and hefty price of Mr. Gore’s brand of self-interested and hypocritical alarmism. Created by the Irish film making duo of Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney — who made another excellent documentary about the “dark side of environmentalism” called Mine Your Own Business — Not Evil provides the perfect rebuttal to Mr. Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Despite being chock-a-block with inaccuracies and misrepresentations, Mr. Gore’s movie has frightened schoolchildren all over the world, driven the public policy debate, and garnered both an Academy Award and a Nobel Peace Prize for its star. Not Evil — which is due to be released later this year — will appear at a crucial time. The world’s crisis-beset nations are due to meet in Copenhagen in November to concoct a new policy straitjacket to succeed the meddlesome but utterly failed Kyoto Accord. If global warming’s U.N.-based ringmasters have their way, this will lead to a slashing of industrial production in developed countries and to a huge extension of boondoggle redistributionist schemes to fund “green” technologies in developing countries. Such policy represents a triple threat: it will destroy economic activity; it will cripple trade; and it will hurt the poorest the most. Nevertheless, President Obama appears to be on-board this ship of fools, having bought into the notion that there are net “green jobs” to be had from a massive increase in taxation and regulation of industrial activity. The impact on Canada could be horrendous, and not merely on the oil sands, which have been targeted by environmental non-governmental organizations. This week, Environment Minister Jim Prentice admitted that Canada could be forced to adopt more draconian regulation if it is not to be hit by threatened U.S. carbon tariffs. The truly astonishing feature of this policy fandango is that it will have little or no effect on the climate, the science of which is still only dimly understood. However, alarmists such as Mr. Gore have successfully sold the notion that the science is “settled.” This is just one of the claims to which Not Evil Just Wrong puts the lie. Alternating credible skeptics with arresting imagery, the film makes clear that the science, far from being settled, has been comprehensively misrepresented by the likes of NASA’s James Hansen, who is to Al Gore and climatology what Trofim Lysenko was to Joseph Stalin and agronomy. There is a wonderful scene of Mr. Hansen becoming almost discombobulated at the very mention of Stephen McIntyre, the maverick Canadian who, with the help of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick, took on the UN climate change establishment over the so-called “hockey stick” temperature graph, and won. Mr. Hansen claims that paying attention to such inconvenient truths amounts to just “clouding the issue.” The film dramatically outlines the dreadful damage already done by environmental hysteria, in particular the millions of unnecessary deaths caused by the campaign against DDT. That campaign started with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which was at the root of the modern environmental movement in every sense. Despite the World Health Organization’s lifting of the DDT ban, Al Gore remains devoted to Ms. Carson’s memory. And methods. As Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace but now a skeptic, points out, radical environmentalists “care more about fish eggs than they do about children.” Meanwhile kids are shown fretting about about imminent global inundation and the deaths of polar bears. Just as Mine Your Own Business showed how opposition to mining in developing countries comes often not from the “grassroots” but from well-funded multinational NGOs with as little concern for local employment as they have for truth, so Not Evil Just Wrong further demonstrates environmentalists’ disregard for humanity, and in particular the poor. Perhaps the most memorable scene in Mine Your Own Business was that of the WWF’s local representative in Madagascar, Mark Fenn, who was leading opposition to a development by Rio Tinto. The appalling Mr. Fenn, who owned a $35,000 catamaran and was building a local luxury home, claimed that poor people were happier, and that if the locals had more money they would “just spend it.” The film makers have come up with similar buffoons for their new movie, including a Bible-thumping environmentalist in Uganda who opposes using DDT and claims that the U.S. never experienced malaria and Hollywood actor Ed Begley, who suggests that Fijians are “happy with nothing.” Not Evil Just Wrong which will be released later this year —is an important film that deserves the widest possible distribution, both in theatres and schools. The only quibble that I have with it is that its title might be too generous to those it exposes. (To find out more about the movie and the fundraising campaign to help its distribution visit its website: noteviljustwrong.com).WATCH THE MOVIE TRAILER:

Please donate what you can today! NotEvilJustWrong.com
Thanks,
Justin, ILCD editor

**UPDATE: April 18, 2009: The Wall Street Journal reports on Not Evil Just Wrong.

Finally Some Sanity? NDP Promises to Scrap BC Carbon Tax

Canadian Press
BURNABY, B.C. — Five days before the May 12 election campaign kicks off, B.C. New Democrats are trying to pin the tax-and-spend label they’ve previously been forced to wear on the two-term incumbent Liberals.The NDP, chased from power in 2001 under accusations of fiscal incompetence, unveiled an election platform Thursday that features tax cuts and modest spending increases, adding up to three years of deficits.NDP leader Carole James painted the Liberals under Premier Gordon Campbell as bad managers, misreading the depth of the recession, accepting a massive cost over-run for the new Vancouver convention centre and tying the province to dubious public-private partnership projects.”This is no time to increase taxes on families and small businesses,” she said.”Gordon Campbell plans to triple the gas tax; I will scrap it. I’ll give business and average families a tax break.”An NDP promise to eliminate the Liberals’ carbon tax on fossil fuel is the biggest single element in the party’s fiscal plan, costing the government around $1.8 billion over three years.The carbon tax, first imposed last July, stands at 2.4 cents a litre but is slated to rise steadily as a way of taxing greenhouse gas emissions.The government calls the measure revenue neutral thanks to personal income tax cuts and rebate checks.But James said the tax has been a failure. It hasn’t reduced fuel consumption and is a hardship on struggling families.Read more here and here in The Province.Watch Climatologist Timothy Ball’s opinion on the BC Carbon Tax scam: