In this week’s round-up, you will discover the dark secrets behind some of the most influential green groups, why polar bears are shrinking and how the world can be saved with only the judicious use of English actors. Also, this is the first weekly round-up where I use the word skulduggery in a sentence. How about that and a bag of chips too? Become one with your beverage and read on, friend, read on…
Part One: Al Gore & Friends
Al must be back from vacation, or is blogging from the road, because he blessed his acolytes with numerous posts this week. I’m skipping the post about Tipper’s photography, let’s just say that if you want to see old pictures of Bill Clinton from his pants-on days, knock yourself out, otherwise, meh. Back to the Goreacle’s blog, he’s miffed that a group called Energy Citizens has the gall to oppose Al’s personal enrichment plan cap and trade legislation. Al goes on to show his unique understanding of astroturf by encouraging his Gore-bot minions to sign up for what sounds a lot like a spam-marketing voicemail blast to Senators. I encourage US readers to make a call to oppose Waxman-Malarkey, after all it’s Al’s rePower America picking up the tab for your call. He can afford it, knock yourself out. Talking of the repower folks, they have a new ad out, and it features a whiney guy in a green shirt. Really.
is that astroturf or grass, it’s hard to seeThe oddest post from Al is this one about energy-efficiency in a war zone. I’m not making this up. Unfortunately, Al makes reference to the Nellis Air Force Base solar power plant, which has a hidden but very inconvenient truth all it’s own:
… the 72,000 solar panels cost $100 million and saves the Air Force $1.2 million annually. So it’ll pay for itself in about 83 years. What a shame the useful life of a solar panel is only 20 years.
Climate Chains is a new documentary that would like to join Not Evil Just Wrong as the Anti-Inconvenient Truth. Check out the trailer at Tom’s joint. Al Gore won an Oscar, which makes him a natural for pimping his buddies movies. Al threw a party to host a screening of the latest Tarantino splatterfest, Inglourious Basterds. Perhaps Al thought the Nazis in the movie were skeptics? In the wake of some arrests for carbon trading fraud, one blogger wonders if Al’s next.
Suzuki’s office is in a forest, allegedlyDavid Suzuki, Canada’s diminutive but incredibly irritating self-proclaimed eco-conscience wants to undo economics. Yeah, it doesn’t work apparently. All that wealth? Not good for Gaia:
…the economic system we’ve created is fundamentally flawed because it is disconnected from the biosphere in which we live. We cannot afford to ignore these flaws any longer.
Part Two: AGW Scaremongers
Oh noes, alarmists on a boat, in the arctic. Stuck in the ice. Maybe the coastguard needs a Darwinism policy to cut costs? Greenpeace leader Gerd Leipold said that “the lifestyle of the rich in the world is not a sustainable model.“ And by rich, he means you, your family and friends, your neighbor and your neighbor’s neighbors. Everyone in the western world, in fact.Click here to read the rest and check out this weeks Global hottie!
Official government measurements show that the world’s temperature has cooled a bit since reaching its most recent peak in 1998.
That’s given global warming skeptics new ammunition to attack the prevailing theory of climate change. The skeptics argue that the current stretch of slightly cooler temperatures means that costly measures to limit carbon dioxide emissions are ill-founded and unnecessary.
Proposals to combat global warming are “crazy” and will “destroy more than a million good American jobs and increase the average family’s annual energy bill by at least $1,500 a year,” the Heartland Institute, a conservative research organization based in Chicago, declared in full-page newspaper ads earlier this summer. “High levels of carbon dioxide actually benefit wildlife and human health,” the ads asserted.