"We Have to Have Our Abilities to Consume Reined In..."

In relation to my previous post, there's a companion YouTube podcast of Michael Moore, Jeff Gibbs - the director of the film - and Ozzie Zehner who wrote the book The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism that inspired it. They discuss the reaction the film has been drawing. At the time I write this, there were eight comments, most of which were people OUTRAGED that they didn't know this information.

I left this comment. I'm curious as to how long it will last before being deleted.

People like myself - I'm an electrical engineer - have been trying to point out that wind and solar are not viable alternatives to fossil fuels for literally decades, and the only reason they are implemented is the massive subsidies of taxpayer dollars. That electric cars are not "pollution-free" but instead move the pollution from the tailpipe to the smokestack of the power plant (not mentioning the pollution associated with battery manufacturing and disposal), which is usually located somewhere far away from the people who can afford electric vehicles. What have we received in return? Vitriol and hatred and accusations of being on the payroll of "Big Oil." Well, as Mr. Gibbs discovered, we were right, and all that money WAS wasted. Now you want us to "rein in our ability to consume," and control our population. Well, if you haven't noticed, Europe isn't reproducing at replacement rate. The only reason the US population is rising is immigration. But you're telling the people living in the Third World, "We've got ours, you can't have any. It's for the Planet." Who are you going to trust with the POWER to "rein in our ability to consume"? The same people you relied on in the Green movement?

"Less Must Be the New More."

I strongly advise you to watch this film.  It is a brutal indictment of the environmental movement as organizations run by cynics taking advantage of useful idiots and financed by corporate billions.  It illustrates, with painstaking accuracy, the false promise of "green energy," - wind, solar, biomass.

It is also an advertisement for the Voluntary Human Extinction movement.  Quotes from speakers starting at about 46 minutes in:

There are too many human beings using too much, too fast.
--
As a global community we really have got to start dealing with the issue of population.
--
Population growth continues to be, not the elephant, but the herd of elephants in the room.  We have to have our abilities to consume reined in, because we're not good at reigning them in if there are seemingly unrestrained resources.

Just who is going to do the reining in?  And how?

The filmmaker has a valid point - there are real problems that need to be addressed, and the environmental movement is just a "feel-good" effort that is in fact counterproductive.  There is little to no incentive to actually address the problems, because no one wants to live like the Amish except the Amish, and I'm not certain about them.

But I did notice that the only comment made about nuclear energy was an aside jab at General Electric, which he notes makes both nuclear power plants and wind turbines.

Seriously, watch it.  It's worth your time.  Meanwhile, I have to see my psychologist about my endorsement of a Michael Moore-backed documentary.


UPDATE: 5/26/20 - "Planet of the Humans" has been yanked. One of the short sequences in the film was used without the permission of the creator of it, and he filed a Copyright takedown claim. Michael Moore is getting hammered by the Left for being RIGHT WING.

The Sky is ALWAYS Falling

Fifty years of Failed Eco-Pocalyptic Predictions

What do they all have in common? 

• Actual proof isn't necessary because by the time we have it it will be too late to fix
• The only solution is central planning by a world government run by our intellectual superiors
• People who oppose this are "deniers" who should be shut up at any cost
• There are too many people anyway, and a mass die-off would be good for the planet.

 In other news, the glaciers in Glacier National Park that were supposed to be gone this year are still running strong, and Michael Mann lost his defamation lawsuit because he still wouldn't release the raw data he used to produce his infamous "hockey stick" global temperature graph.

Intellectual Phase-Locking

What they Promise vs. What they Deliver

This recently popped up over at Facebook:

I was going to respond to it, but didn't feel like dissing the poster at that time.  Today I saw someone else had the proper response:

Yeah, that's what I wanted to ask.

There are No "Solutions" - Only "Trade-offs"

Today's Electric Car Batteries Will Be Tomorrow's E-Waste Crisis, Scientists Warn

Wind turbines kill endangered bird species, electric cars require toxic batteries and run off of coal-fired power plants, The infrastructure necessary to provide charging stations for plug-in EV’s will cost billions and require even more power generation, but no one wants a nuclear power plant in their back yard.

Engineering isn’t about “solutions,” it’s about picking the best options and minimizing the costs of the trade-offs.

Politics is only about getting elected and re-elected. Politicians can promise the moon without any concern about the costs - monetary, environmental, social. And they depend on a public ignorant to the realities. Shouts of “Consensus!” are used to ensure that no one opposed gets listened to.

That’s not how science - or engineering - work. Reality is what remains even if you don’t believe in it.

What Do You Mean "AS THOUGH"?!?

Democrat Sen. Mazie Hirono: 'Believe in Climate Change as Though It's a Religion'

Maybe this wouldn't be such a divided country if skeptics weren't treated like heretics. Maybe these times would be more normal if Democrats thought before they spoke. Of course, they thrive on division. They can't exist without it. Their modus operandi is to set people against each other and then profit from the conflict. And of course, the whole time they have to blame their opponents. That's how they've always done it, and they'll keep doing so as long as it keeps working.

Word.

Meanwhile in Climate News...

National Parks Quietly Toss Signs Saying Glaciers ‘Will Be Gone’ By 2020:

The National Park Service has quietly removed all the signs put up by the Obama administration that told visitors that the glaciers would “all be gone” by the year 2020 due to global warming… because… it’s 2019, and the glaciers are all still there and have been growing.

Glacier National Park quietly removed a sign at its visitor center saying the glaciers will disappear by 2020 which were originally placed because former President Obama believed the predictions pushed by the left’s climate change hypothesis.

According to federal officials, several years in a row of high snowfall and cold temperatures totally obliterated a computer model that authorities relied on to claim that the glaciers would all be melted by 2020, Daily Caller reported.

Homeward Bound

I left the Konkolville Hotel at 5:50 this morning, drove into Orofino, checked the tire pressure (*wink*), and then headed South.

Just South of Twin Falls, what did I run into?  This:

I drove through this crap for 100 miles, then finally it switched back to rain.

Until I got near Ely, NV. It's doing this:

When I checked in at the hotel, I asked what the weather forecast was. It's supposed to snow until 11PM. The temperature currently is 34ºF and it's going to get colder. Who was it that thought going home through Ely was a good idea? And what the hell happened to Global Warming?

UPDATE: 8:30PM and it's not snowing. And warmer. Whew!

More Global Climate Change

I'm in Burlington, Vermont this week.  This is the view out my window at just after 6PM local time today:


Yes, it's April 8^th.

Flying in to Burlington on Monday, we passed over Lake Champlain where I noticed that it seemed at least 90% covered in ice.  From the Burlington Free Press, February 17:

For the second year in a row, the lake appears to be frozen from one side to the other. National Weather Service high resolution satellite images show ice pretty much everywhere on the lake.

That's enough for meteorologists to declare the lake as "closed" or frozen over, said Peter Banacos, a meteorologist at the NWS office in South Burlington.

Burlington has had below freezing temperatures throughout February, he said. This weekend Vermonters experienced wind chills as low as minus 40, which likely consummated the freeze-over.

The lake froze completely in 2014, but this is the first time in a decade that the lake has closed two years a row. Vermonters last saw the lake completely freeze consecutively in 2004 and 2005.

The instructor of the class I'm taking here went down to the lake last night. He reported the ice is still "about a foot thick."

Atmospheric CO₂ is now at 401PPM.

Current sunspot activity is low and declining.

I know where my money is riding on this question.

Non Sequitur of the Day

Non sequitur - (Latin) a conclusion or statement that does not logically follow from the previous argument or statement.

See if you can spot it in the following excerpt from this Modern Farmer article, Salad, Inc.:

After an earthquake and tsunami decimated northeast Japan in 2011 — an unexpected weather incident that scientists are still struggling to understand — the Japanese government built Sanriku Fukko National Park.

Kabuki Theater

According to Wikipedia:

Kabuki is a classical Japanese dance-drama. Kabuki theatre is known for the stylization of its drama and for the elaborate make-up worn by some of its performers.
The individual kanji, from left to right, mean sing, dance, and skill. Kabuki is therefore sometimes translated as "the art of singing and dancing". These are, however, ateji characters which do not reflect actual etymology. The kanji of 'skill' generally refers to a performer in kabuki theatre. Since the word kabuki is believed to derive from the verb kabuku, meaning "to lean" or "to be out of the ordinary", kabuki can be interpreted as "avant-garde" or "bizarre" theatre.

Apparently, it can also mean "Senate Democrats Trying Desperately to Change the Subject."

In the summer of 2010, it was Harry Reid, the Senate’s Democratic leader, who squelched his party’s efforts to pass a climate change bill, declaring it could never attract enough votes to pass. In the years since, he has rarely spoken publicly about the issue.
But on Monday night, an impassioned Mr. Reid took to the Senate floor to kick off a nearly 15-hour climate-change talkathon by about 30 Senate Democrats, part of a campaign by a new Senate "climate caucus" to make it a politically urgent issue.

Yeah, it's "politically urgent," all right. Getting Obamacare off the front page is their FIRST priority.


Edited to add:

I stumbled across something that fits this post perfectly. From James Lileks a while back:

If everyone in America had been tied to a chair and forced to watch the debate Clockwork-Orange style, we'd all realize that the Senate is just a holding tank for people whose self-regard and cretinous reasoning is matched only by their demonstrable contempt for the idiots they think will lap this crap up.

Holy Crap!

Reader Phil B., expatriate Brit now living in New Zedland, sent me a link to a Salon.com op-ed with the note:

This is why trying to reason with left wing, right on, politically correct groupthinkers is a bit like trying to wallpaper fog.  And, incidentally, why I firmly believe we are deep within an era of anti-Renaissance where such idiocy is published and taken seriously.

Billy Beck calls it "The Endarkenment."  And I am fully in agreement with Phil on his "wallpapering fog" assessment.

This thing is so full of WTF? that I can't even fisk it.  My brain boggles.

If you've got a few brain cells you're not too happy with and are willing, nay eager to sacrifice, go read Why the Right Hates Detroit, written by the biggest case of white-guilt I think I've ever seen.

I'm amazed this man hasn't offed himself due to his own self-loathing.  I guess he's found a way to project it onto anyone to the political right of Mao.

At least the commenters appear sane, though I didn't read many of those.  I  have to wonder about Salon's editors.

Michael Ramirez on the Promise of "Green Jobs"

Repeat after me:

Amonix ($5.9M)
Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3M)
Nordic Windpower ($16M)
Konarka Technologies Inc. ($20M)
Evergreen Solar ($25M)
Raser Technologies ($33m)
Beacon Power ($43M)
Range Fuels ($80M)
Ener1 ($118.5M)
A123 Systems ($279M)
Abound Solar ($400M)

Not to mention the $535 million lost with Solyndra's bankruptcy.  And, as I said before, "This list is not complete."

Quote of the Day - Coal Edition

Given yesterday's announcement that the Obama administration needs to engage in a "War on Coal," I was amused by an Instapundit reader's comment:

Given the success of the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs, if I’m Big Coal, I’m praying for a War on Coal.

This goes well with yesterday's QotD, which concluded:

...in government, failure is an exciting excuse to ask for more funding or more power.

Can I get an "AMEN!"?

SNOWPOCALYPSE!

Yeah, we had a little bit of winter here in the Old Pueblo yesterday.

Nothing Additional Required

Quote of the Day - Fracking Edition

From Dale at Mostly Cajun:

I worked for a company refurbishing a SONATRACH liquifaction plant that took that gas and liquified it and sold it to, among other places, the US, shipping it to the facility that sits behind my office, where we turn the liquid back into gas and pump it into the pipelines that spread that energy all over the country. When we were buying gas from overseas, it was thirteen bucks for a thousand cubic feet. Now it’s a bit over three. The reason for the difference is one word, ‘FRACKING’. Yeah, the same word that’s joining global warming as the word of the week for the envirowhacko movement. And make no bones about it, under the present regime, envirowhackos are at the highest levels of the government.

So let’s see if we can put a couple of things on the table: Our own government wants to shut down OUR gas production. No sweat, huh? We can still buy gas from overseas, right? AT five times the cost of what we can suck it out of the ground here. Since gas is the energy for electricity, heating, and a million other uses in modern life, prices across the board will go up. Oh, wait! That overseas gas? Under control of all manner of people that the obama regime seems to empower. OPEC? They’re one of the more stable and benign. And how’s OPEC gonna fare as one ‘stable’ government after another falls to the obama-endorsed ‘Arab Spring’?

FrackNation

I watched the documentary FrackNation that I helped fund last night when it aired on AXS.  It is a takedown of the previous crockumentary Gasland, and the opposition to fracking both here and around the world using, you know, facts.

The central focus of the film is the town of Dimock, PA and the people there who have been fighting against the anti-fracking forces, and one thing that struck me in particular was a montage of residents decrying the incredibly slanted media coverage of the topic without, as one person put it, any attempt at balance at all.

I was reminded of The Narrative - an excerpt from a Stephen Hunter novel I posted here a while back:

You do not fight the narrative. The narrative will destroy you. The narrative is all-powerful. The narrative rules. It rules us, it rules Washington, it rules everything.
--
The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It's so powerful because it's unconscious. It's not like they get together every morning and decide "These are the lies we will tell today." No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it's a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they've never really experienced that's arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they've chosen to live their lives. It's a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They know, for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama is a saint. They know communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They know that Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was fucked up.... Cheney's a devil. Biden's a genius. Soft power good, hard power bad. Forgiveness excellent, punishment counterproductive, capital punishment a sin.
--
And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don't even know they're true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything. But they will absolutely de-frackin'-stroy anybody who makes them question that....

And the media knows that fracking is a horrible thing that destroys ground water and air quality and must be stopped at all costs because it will contribute to Global Warming.

What? Their Heads Don't Explode?

Yes, let's politicize children again.  (And they keep telling me that kids aren't being propagandized these days.)

Here's a little video that on the YouTube page says:

Re-electing President Obama is a momentous decision that will require every single voter.

What would the children of the future say if we let them down this November?

At the time of this writing the video has 135 'likes' and 1425 'dislikes'.  Here it is:


UPDATE: Oops! Looks like it was SO unpopular, they made it "private," but I saved a copy. Here you go:


And here are the lyrics:

Imagine an America
Where strip mines are fun and free
Where gays can be fixed
And sick people just die
And oil fills the sea

We don't have to pay for freeways!
Our schools are good enough
Give us endless wars
On foreign shores
And lots of Chinese stuff

We're the children of the future
American through and through
But something happened to our country
And we're kinda blaming you

We haven't killed all the polar bears
But it's not for lack of trying
Big Bird is sacked
The Earth is cracked
And the atmosphere is frying

Congress went home early
They did their best we know
You can't cut spending
With elections pending
Unless it's welfare dough

We're the children of the future
American through and through
But something happened to our country
And we're kinda blaming you

Find a park that is still open
And take a breath of poison air
They foreclosed your place
To build a weapon in space
But you can write off your au pair

It's a little awkward to tell you
But you left us holding the bag
When we look around
The place is all dumbed down
And the long term's kind of a drag

We're the children of the future
American through and through
But something happened to our country
And yeah, we're blaming you

You did your best
You failed the test

Mom and Dad
We're blaming you!

I'm still reminded of this video, though. 


UPDATE - 10/29/12: What the upper video represents is a chorus of kids like this, from 2007:


Except he doesn't think that adults "did (our) best."

UPDATE:  11/4/12 - a comment left in the AR15.com thread on this topic wins One Internet:

We are the children of the future.
You are the hippies of the past.
You voted for Obama.
And he fucked us up the a**.