I say "impending ecological disaster" because in the 60's it was "global cooling" then when it started to get warmer it was "the landfills are filling up and we'll all be living in a sea of garbage" then when warming continued it was "global warming" and then warming tapered off and stabilized and now it is "climate change." Along the way we were told that plastic in the sea would destroy the global food chain, (turns out not so much http://news.discovery.com/earth/ocean-garbage-patch-exaggerated-110112.html) Now I've already heard that Fukushima Daichi will kill us all. When someone goes on about how the future is DOOMED, DOOMED I SAY! unless we give them power over our lives I want to slap them with a farm grown salmon then shoot them in the back of the head and bury them in the mass grave that they intended for me.
At least when McCarthy said there were Reds amongst us he got that right. How cruel is history when McCarthy is the only legitimate example of using scare tactics appropriately in living memory?
The calls for abandoning our modern society (which is a triumph of conservation and preservation of ecological diversity) by idiots like this http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-face-genocidal-eco-fascism or when even educated people like astronauts should know better http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/15/world/europe/wwf-living-planet-report/index.html than to call for massive changes to our society....
Let me fisk some quotes here... (hat tip to Tam)
China isn't on the list? The list is bullshit. Where have these people been? Have you ever considered that Iran burns off enough natural gas every day from its oil fields to meet their domestic energy needs for a year? Puts that "peaceful nuclear program" in a different light now doesn't it? Seriously, Belgium? You can swim in the damn water in Belgium, which is not something that I'd care to try in the Yellow River. You know what all those countries have in common? Tourism, they are so "polluting" that people come from the world over to visit them (and if you don't think that people from all over the Middle East flock to Kuwait City for the best medical care they can buy you are an idiot). Each of the countries on that list is a veritable paradise compared to the "Stans in the Steppes" or most of Africa.
"The report is clear that we're still going downhill, that our ecological footprint, the pressure we put on the earth's resources, continues to rise so we're now using 50% more resources that the earth can replenish and biodiversity continues to decline," said Jim Leape, Director General of WWF International.The report includes a list of the world's top 10 polluting countries topped by Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East. They're followed by Denmark, Belgium and the United States. Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and Ireland make up the remainder.
Last I checked Ireland wasn't exactly at "Communist level Pollution" when it comes to ecology.
Oh wait, I bet their are talking about that odorless, colorless gas that is the very basis for life on this planet, Carbon Dioxide. Useless garbage science. Prehistoric levels of CO2 have fluctuated to levels more than twice our "modern maximum."
Now let us quote our Finnish Fascist (hat tip to Firehand)
Just as only one out of 100,000 has the talent to be an engineer or an acrobat, only a few are those truly capable of managing the matters of a nation or mankind as a whole. In this time and this part of the World we are headlessly hanging on democracy and the parliamentary system, even though these are the most mindless and desperate experiments of mankind. In democratic coutries the destruction of nature and sum of ecological disasters has accumulated most. Our only hope lies in strong central government and uncompromising control of the individual citizen.Ten out of ten murderous dictators agree with you. However, Zero out of Ten dictators gave a rats ass about the environment. People who are willing to seize power to support an ideology are interested only in power, not long term environmental possibilities based on fuzzy logic and soft science. I mean according to this guys logic North Korea, China, and Russia should be environmental utopias....
Now, clearly the more developed a nation the more extra resources it can spare to be good stewards of environmental diversity. I am a strong conservationist and can point to a very valid link between wildlife management and economic success. Any country that adapts its wild life and wild areas for economic purposes (hunting, recreation) creates a self sustaining system where the people who hunt, fish, and hike pay to keep the wild stuff wild. African nations that allow sport hunting have healthier animal populations than those that don't, simply because it makes sense to take care of a renewable resource that brings in hard foreign currency.
The very idea that somehow living in a mud hut and cutting down trees for cooking and heating fuel is "greener" than nuclear or hydropower is ludicrous. But the environmental fascists are not interested in solutions, they are interested in ideology, specifically an ideology that allows them to play out their fantasy of recreating the worst man made die offs of fellow humans in living history. To their point of view, Hitler didn't kill ENOUGH Jews, and Stalin didn't kill ENOUGH Ukrainians, and Mao didn't kill ENOUGH Chinese.
It is like these people don't live on the same planet that I do, or at least they haven't traveled enough of the world to notice that American and European (and our Aussie and Kiwi brethren down under) cities pollute less, recycle more (at a known economic loss due to the cost of recycling) and have better air and water quality than ANYWHERE in the communist or "developing" third world. Even the watermelons acknowledge this:
America and Europe, great land of temperate regions, already bemoaned as the worst polluters outside of the Middle East... The cognitive dissonance here is staggering. If everything is worse in the undeveloped world, how in the world is the solution to be less developed?It shows a near 30% drop in biodiversity since 1970, and an even faster decline in the tropics of 60%. However, the index for temperate regions rose 31%, as some species showed signs of recovery after huge biodiversity losses the previous century."The read down on the temperate zone masks much more precipitous declines in other parts of the world. You see a huge loss of biodiversity across the tropics and in the poorest countries and I think that's the most alarming fact in those indices," Leape said.
The solution to pollution is dilution. Modern societies pollute less because basic needs are met with more efficiency than stripping your local forests for cooking and heating and defecating into a ditch or stream to give your neighbor dysentery.
You want to know what civilization really is? Miners and farmers who put raw material into our economy. It is engineers who design roads, water distribution systems, and electric distribution systems. Do you know who builds civilization? Construction workers, electricians, and plumbers. And do you know who keeps it all running? Sanitation workers. Energy in, energy out, resources in waste out. People say "civilization is a thin veneer" but the people who really make civilization happen aren't the kind to gripe and whine and turn feral at the drop of the first atom bomb.
5 comments:
One problem with wide-based voting is that short-sighted, greedy, stupid people can affect the outcome. But it's still better than a limited class of short-sighted, greedy, stupid people who are convinced they can create a "better" society. I would love to see a rule that anyone who feels (or believes, as they seem to be interchangeable for these people) be shipped off at age 18 to a walled off state where their theories are allowed to be put in practice. And you're not allowed back out for 10 years.
I've noticed the people that spout this genocide masked as green ideology never have the courage of their convictions to do the honorable thing to themselves to "save humanity". Cowards-morally,integrity wise and physically,nothing more
On the list of "extinction events" we've survived I'd add the "population bomb" of the 70s.
"One problem with wide-based voting is that short-sighted, greedy, stupid people can affect the outcome. But it's still better than a limited class of short-sighted, greedy, stupid people who are convinced they can create a "better" society."
You just described why America has been third-world fascist hellhole bound since 1920.
The two most utterly worthless classes in any society are ALWAYS the Old-money filthy-rich and the pretending-to-be-poor; the two wolves of democracy voting against the sheep about what's for dinner.
Egalitarianism is not equality!
We should include Israel in the list of democracies that have improved their ecology, taken a wasteland and turned it into a functioning, productive country with agriculture and greenery blooming where there was nothing but sand and rock before.
And the whole Malthus/Erlich "the world will starve to death by the year 2000" farce has been proven to be erroneous. Where there is still hunger and starvation, it is due to dictators and tyrants who mismanage the resources of their countries (often because they are allowing their fat-assed wives to take vacations in Spain, Hawaii, and Martha's Vineyard).
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