Climate change deniers feign outrage. But it’s all about the money.
Any politician can tell you, facts rarely get in the way of well funded fiction. Consider the case of the House Natural Resources Committee of the Utah legislature. They just approved a resolution declaring that “climate alarmists” are pursuing some sort of population control conspiracy. Huh? The push was urged on by the Utah Farm Bureau, a deceptively folksy sounding organization that includes massively subsidized, polluting factory farms in its membership.

Similar nonsense is happening in Texas. Remember, they threatened to secede from the U.S. over new EPA rules that might force them to clean up their belching oil refineries? 

In fairness, we should all pay for the conversion to cleaner energy. We all use the oil and gas from the region. But the point is that their reason for “outrage” isn’t because the science of global warming is bad. It’s because the wealthy elites who own the oil industry like the fistfuls of money they make from dirty industries—without having to pay for the collateral damage. In fact, a new study suggests that if oil industries actually had to pay the environmental costs for the damage they do, they’d be operating at a loss.

The fact that mankind is changing earth’s climate is no longer up for debate. To say otherwise is equivalent to arguing that there’s “not enough evidence” to connect cigarette smoking to cancer. Flash to picture of blackened lungs.

Part of the confusion stems from the corporate media’s simplistic concepts of “objectivity.” Put 1,001 climate scientists in a room. It’s likely that a thousand of them concur that climate change is a huge and growing crisis. One clown at the punch bowl says the whole theory is bunk. Reporters swarm around him. The CNN headline reads “Debate over Climate Change Still Open.”

You can see the absurdity. Another new study just released today shows that all the hoopla over what the flat-earthers call “a giant conspiracy” is ill placed. If anything, the real numbers are actually more dramatic—and global warming is happening faster than expected.

Let’s assume we take the low road for a minute. Let’s chant what big oil wants us to chant: Climate change is some kind of conspiracy…Climate Change is a leftist hoax…

What have we accomplished? Instead of reinvigorating the U.S. economy with innovation and a new kind of purpose, we’ve helped people in a few dirty industries keep their jobs. We’ve killed the potential for creating new green jobs. We’ve crippled any hopes for putting America back to work as a net producer of innovative technologies and goods. And we’ve screwed our kids.

Once we've blown it--the way Obama has blown any chance of real reform in health care, military policy, or the rule of law, we might well join the conspiracy nuts and "frightened dullards," as Hunter S. Thompson called the unimaginative American public. If we all become teabaggers, wave the flag, pray more, and ask Sarah Palin to save us, we'll be playing exactly the tune that Wall Street has taught us to hum.

Interesting article from Treehugger this morning. As acceptance that oil supplies are finite begins to sink in, the debate could soon become HOW to use the remaining reserves of relatively affordable fossil fuels.--M. Power

Oil Is Too Important To Burn In Cars

by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 01.22.10 (from Treehugger.com)

If there is one lesson to be learned from the designers, thinkers and curators presenting at Conversations in Design: A World Without Oil, it is the fact that we need the stuff for a lot of uses far more important than pushing boxes of steel around on roads.

When one realizes that we are using a cubic mile of the stuff every year (that is the Eiffel Tower on the right for scale), it becomes pretty obvious that this isn't going to continue forever, and we have to begin to think about what we are going to use it for.

The amount of oil consumed each year is shown in the center. There's only so much to go around. Should we be using it to move individuals around in cars made with thousands of pounds of materials?

When you realize what we would have to build to replace the energy from all that oil, like building four dams the size of the Three Gorges Dam, 52 nuclear power plants or 104 coal fired power plants every year it becomes obvious that switching to Tesla Roadsters and plug-in hybrids is not going to make very much of a difference.

READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE

Why is everyone so excited a Spanish company building a billion dollar solar plant in New Mexico?
Go ahead, call me an isolationist. But when I read the headline this morning about a Spanish company building an enormous PV factory in New Mexico, I choked on my (Columbian) coffee. I immediately recalled some of the more backward ideas in Barack Obama's State of the Union address--his assertion that we need nuclear power and clean coal to solve our energy woes.

Apparently, Spain doesn't agree. So what's going on? Why New Mexico? Why now?

I did some sleuthing around. Apparently, the New Mexico utilities company, PNM, is building five solar power plants. And they're going to need lots and lots and lots of solar panels.

So where do they turn? To a mature company with the wherewithal (and financial backing) to create the factory infrastructure they need. You see Europe is decades ahead of us in the manufacture of clean energy such as PV. Like the Bush-Cheney oil men who preceded him, Obama apparently doesn't put much stock in the promise of renewables. But then, his bets so far haven't paid off too well.

The Spanish probably like the fact that Obama isn't paying much attention to their area of expertise. They won't have to compete with any big federal subsidies for manufacture of renewable energy the way they might in Europe, but at the same time they can take advantage of New Mexico's state subsidies, and get treated with red carpet perks.

The company, it should be noted, will create about 300 jobs. Maybe New Mexico's democratic governor, Bill Richardson, is just doing the smart thing. Instead of waiting around for our federal government to stop chasing its own energy tail and pissing away our taxes on dead end wars in the Middle East, he's cutting deals with whoever can help his state achieve energy independence. Maybe New Mexico's success will embarass the White House into doing the right thing. We all have the audacity to hope, right?


 

In cities that were once belching hubs of industry, such as detroit, an amazing transformation is taking place. Urban streets and empty lots are being reclaimed by nature. With no auto industry, will urban farming become the economic drivers of these strange new worlds?


This morning a friend sent me this fascinating story about what's happening to abandoned city blocks in Detroit. Just the aerial view of the city is enough to make you think you're watching a science fiction movie. But this is not a dystopian future, according to many futurists. It's an opportunity. We welcome your thoughts.

Article on turning Detroit into an agricultural hub HERE.

FULL STORY HERE

"Consumers spent over five and a half hours on social networks in December, up 82% from the same time last year. A year ago, most users were spending a little over three hours a day on social sites, a group that includes networks like Facebook, blogs, and the Twitter micro-blog service. Social media is now the most popular activity online. Gaming and instant messaging are the next most popular categories." I'm a recovering social media user. I tried Facebook for about a year, collected 150 "friends," tried all the features and then DELETED my listing. What's my gripe with 24-hour instant access to gossip? Where do I begin? At a time when most of us spend way too much time in front of television and computer screens, handing us an addictive device that creates the illusion of connectivity is a brilliant way to bring the focus back around to our selves--to our most petty and shallow personas.

By personas, I'm referring to the person you represent on a social media site. That person is not YOU. It's a constructed avatar of yourself--you as you wish to be seen. But you soon learn that this too is an illusion.Once you're part of the social media matrix, your personal life is everybody's business. Before long you find that someone has posted a picture of you from a party five years ago, when you were half in the bag and leering like an idiot. An old friend from college finds you and begins sending you minute-by-minute updates of her cat's surgery. Another friend you haven't seen in years signs on and you see he's having an art opening that you SHOULD attend, but you don't want to. Let the guilt begin. Guilt for not being a better friend. Guilt for not attending someone's anniversary party. Guilt for not responding to an email for weeks.

It doesn't take long for people find out you're an editor, or a builder, or an insurance agent, and begin asking your advice (AKA unpaid consulting). You feel like instead of talking to you, you're at a perpetual trade show, where second and third tier friends (people you barely know) are walking up to you and reading your name tag, not looking into your eyes.

And all this time, as the creeping malaise of social media works its way into your day, life is ticking away. At a time when we should be reconnecting with our natural environment, instead we're sucked into a world of faux relationships, faux conversations and pseudo reality. That's a hard thing to explain to my teenager. But I'm hoping that even if social media is here to stay, it will eventually peak and then begin to diminish in importance--as people discover the true alienating properties of sharing life with carefully constructed ones and zeros.

PS: I just read a great little essay titled Twittering Fools by Edward Docx. It's even harder on the social media idiocy than I was. Check it out.