All the News That's Fit to be Tied

I have an axe to grind, but unlike the New York Times, I freely admit it.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Going Green with Groucho

I've been pretty hard on the election for the past two months, but as the primary season slows and the Democratic race gets a little muddier, I will going green for a while unless McCain's medical records give us pause, Hilary drops out, or Obama puts his other size 12 shoe in his mouth. Some of the recent reporting about Global Warming has taken on a new tone. Having failed to convince the vast portion of the population to sell theirs souls to the global warming devils, they are now using the expression Climate Change to describe the possible changes in the climate in the future. Hello-climate change takes place every day. From daily changes in weather, seasonal changes in hot and cold periods, hundred-year phenomena, and long-term climate changes such as recent ice ages or the extinction of the dinosaur. Revelations about the use of out-of-context images and the use of computer-generated images in the film, An Inconvenient Truth, and other reports such as those refuting various aspects of the global catastrophe theory, have forced many scientists and other experts to dismiss many of the dire predictions put forward by the climate change set. While many of the predictions are possible that presumes that no weather-related variable will change, which is highly unlikely. Trained meteorologists and climate scientists cannot predict, in anything but a general way, what next weeks’ weather will be. So how could anyone take seriously the prediction of the weather, or climate, if you prefer, a century of more into the future. Even the founder and former president of the Weather Channel provides very sound reasoning for dismissing the predictions as ridiculous and absurd. As you might expect I have had to defend myself quite often against from serious believers of climate change. They are as convinced that it is real as I am that it is not. However, this does not mean that I am not interested in helping to conserve energy as a means of driving down the cost of fuel. I drive a sedan, which gets better mileage than my critics who drive jeeps, SUV’s and trucks. In the short-term I am for nuclear power, clean coal and natural gas. I am not for ethanol for two reasons. First it requires more energy to create than it produces, therefore it is inefficient. Second it is made from edible food. Food that could feed millions and keep the price of milk, meat, rice, wheat, corn, barely and soy beans down if we didn’t use it to create poor quality fuel for cars. I try to conserve in other ways as well that are too boring to discuss. However, Climate Change is not fuel conservation or development strategy. It is a political and financial strategy. With the right number of lawyers, government officials and special interest groups, the climate change crowd will bring the nation to its knees by destroying our economy with stifling regulations. They will loot the taxpayers with the Cap and Trade Program and The New Kyoto Protocol. They will rip us off and tell us it is for our own good. They’ll convince many that their own destruction is in their best interest. So far my favorite example is the Al Gore light bulb. These corkscrew-shaped bulbs provide poor and hideous fluorescent light and cost six times as much as a regular bulb with half the light. It was recently learned that they contain mercury. That’s the same mercury that contaminates fish, and that some people say may cause childhood maladies like Autism. And yes, we are putting it in millions of light bulbs that the U.S. Congress will require all of us to use by law. Light bulbs that will be invariably be dumped into landfills unless the Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency pass laws and regulations requiring us to store our mercury containing light bulbs until we have enough to drive to a special toxic materials site for recovery and storage for which we must pay a fee. The other night I was in a hotel in Florida and I heard a customer ask the waiter for a glass of ice water. The waiter turned to him and said “This is Florida. No ice, no snow. Peel an onion, that’ll make your eyes water.” Groucho Marx said that.