Nota: DDT

This has little to do with current events, but a recent disagreement with a friend leads me to provide this list of sites with information on DDT -- and the fact that it is most certainly not dangerous.

• Steven Milloy:  "DDT:  The Bald Eagle Lie."  Putting some of these Green movement lies to rest.
• RachelWasWrong.com:  "Is DDT Safe?"  Erm...yes.
• RachelWasWrong.com:  "DDT and Wildlife."  Friends forever.
• The Volokh Conspiracy:  "WHO Backs DDT Use."  International consensus, suckers!

(Not a complete list, but I wanted to get some down.  Enjoy.)

Falling Off Of...THE CLIFFS OF INSANITY!

In keeping with DBD's Princess Bride theme for the day.

Chris Arndt's blog, Apologies Demanded, has led me to a fantastical land of global warming craziness exposed for the entertainment of--hopefully--increasingly many. Global Warming Insanity documents the crazy things people do and say about the upcoming secular apocalypse and the Green code of conduct. (Think the Jesus statue from Scrubs, only with global warming instead of abortion. "No candescent lights!" "But what about our freedoms?" "Oh, yeah, I forgot. That's different then." "Really?" "NO CANDESCENT LIGHTS!" And so on.) Anyway, without further ado, the relevant story that I couldn't keep myself away from posting even though I promised to start a series about the Republican Party's future:

On Monday, Dr. Arthur Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine will release the names of 31,000 American scientists who are skeptical about global climate change. There will be a statement attached to their collected signatures, the result of OISM's Petition Project.

Consensus: WHY WON'T YOU DIE!? Anyway, there will be a follow-up post to...follow. Darnit, now I've started on a different movie theme...

global warming is not great

John Hinderaker at PowerLine Blog posts about the inconvenient fact that the Earth has not warmed since 1998.

He also brings up the Argos temperature buoys. You know, the ones that discovered a slight cooling in the Earth's oceans over the last five years, and whose accuracy was therefore questioned because it didn't fit the capital-T Truth.

I graduated from Michigan State University last week. At our convocation, the speaker was Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway; she came into our country, received an honorary degree from one of our universities, and denounced an official of our government (the great Antonin Scalia, to be precise) for being a "denier." Some of my fellow students snorted in disgust as she tickled their stereotypes--that evil genius Antonin Scalia! Of course he wouldn't listen to a sainted former head of state of the enlightened nation of Norway!--but I refused to clap. This intellectual thuggery is embarrassing, but not unexpected. If we needed any proof that society needs religion, this is it: what happens when an entire continent embraces atheism? They find some other faith to grab onto and bash people over the head with.

CSW Dinner For Bloggers

So, now that I have some time...

Last night I attended a dinner at La Senorita restaurant in Lansing to hear Paul Chesser, the director of Climate Strategies Watch, talk about an organization called the Center for Climate Strategies. Basically, what this group does is go to state governors--they've gotten to about half of them already--and offer to put together an action plan for climate change. They can do this at almost no cost to the state, because they're funded by left-wing foundations like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. CCS tells the governor to declare climate change a crisis and use an executive order to form a panel dominated by global warming alarmists that is structured to put together a platform that is nearly the same for every state: costly new regulations that hurt the state's economy. All the policies advocated for are considered to be endorsed at the outset; in other words, you have to actively disagree with the platform items. Mr. Chesser notes some of the interesting procedural rules for the panel: "participants will not debate the science of climate change," "participants are expected to support the process and its concept fully"... This is a back door attempt to force costly legislation on a state already reeling economically based on inadequate scientific data with no hint of cost-benefit analysis.

Let your state representative and state senator know!

As for the rest of the dinner, it was fantastic. I met some very nice folks who are also passionate about freedom, including Jason Gillman, Sr., the author of Michigan Taxes Too Much (soon to be included on the sidebar), as well as his son, Jason Gillman, Jr., whose blog is entitled Random Rants From An Airline Employee (also soon to be included). My buddy Chris Arndt of Apologies Demanded was there (already on sidebar!), as well as my friend Karen Post--soon to join the blogging community, and updates on that will be forthcoming. Rose Bogaert of the Michigan Taxpayers Alliance attended; she is the one responsible for the appearance of the Boss Hogg video on my website. (Which: Watch!) Lastly, Representative Jack Hoogendyk, the impressive candidate against U.S. Senator Carl Levin this fall and writer of Core Principles Blog, attended as well. The event was held by the indispensable Mackinac Center for Public Policy, whose director of communications, Michael Jahr, helped host the event.

More later about the CSC; also more about the Center-Right Coalition meeting I attended this morning, though since it's off the record, strictly opinion from TW2!

Yes, But WHY Are Food Prices So High?

The Detroit Free Press reports today that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has declared the rising price of food to be a global crisis:

A sharp rise in food prices has developed into a global crisis, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today.

Ban said the United Nations and all members of the international community are very concerned, and immediate action is needed.

Action! Yes! Wait...how did we get here in the first place? The Freep is not kind enough to let us in on the secret, but Captain Ed Morrissey confirms what everyone already knew--at least, those who are paying attention to the current global climate hysterics:

In a way, the entire concept of biofuels as currently applied makes no sense at all. Instead of using food to actually feed people or even animals, we use it to feed our cars. Ethanol has suddenly lost its luster as an alternative energy source as food prices have skyrocketed, including in global-warming-sympathizing Europe

Who could possibly have predicted that these sorts of policies would be bad for poor countries? Hmmm. Captain Ed talks about the ethical issue of "feeding cars, not people," but the fact is that the real issue here is the power of the free market. Using corn-based ethanol to power cars is so ludicrous a way to help the environment that even college students don't support it. (Of course, considering the power of the agricultural lobby, led by Archer Daniels Midland, it was inevitable that increased government power to interfere on behalf of the environment would lead to absurd new agricultural policies.) Nothing enhances efficiency like the free market, which has already been bringing automobiles to higher and higher standards of fuel efficiency. If there is an economically viable alternative, let it flourish on its own. As it is, if people thought land use issues were important now, just wait until millions of new acres are used exclusively for corn now that prices are skyrocketing.

But instead, the government will simply wash its hands of this experiment in economic management and move onto the next failure. Wait and see.

The Green Religion

Karl Marx called religion "the opiate of the masses," suggesting that rulers used religion to keep the lower classes from realizing they were being exploited. Well, his successors--or usurpers, if you choose to look at it that way--found out that it's a pretty powerful drug, as Pope John Paul was one of the trio of world leaders (the others being Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) who brought down the Soviet sphere. His outspokenness, his survival of their assassination attempt, and the courageous, historic mass he gave in Soviet-dominated Poland inspired millions who longed for the freedom to practice their religion.

So the Marxists realized they needed to use religion rather than scorn it, and the results have been stunning. But at least some whose minds are truly trained for skepticism--sadly, I'm not now talking about many scientists--are sounding alarms after initial enthusiasm. Here is an excerpt from Simon Jenkins writing in The Guardian:

Farewell the age of reason, welcome the idiocracy. Only George Orwell could have invented - and named - the government's Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) that came into operation yesterday. It is the latest in a long line of measures intended to ease the conscience of the rich while keeping the poor miserable, in this case spectacularly so.

The consequences of the RTFO have been much trumpeted on these pages. It says enough that one car tank of bio petrol needs as much grain as it takes to feed an African for a year, or that a reported one-third of American grain production is now subsidised for conversion into biofuel. Jeremy Paxman pleaded the cause of this latest green wheeze on Monday's Newsnight, while the United Nations food expert, Jean Ziegler, screamed for it to stop: "Children are dying ... It is a crime."...

If all these fancy subsidies and market manipulations were withdrawn tomorrow and government action confined to energy-saving regulation, I am convinced the world would be a cheaper and a safer place, and the poor would not be threatened with starvation.

Just now, for reasons not all of which are "green", commodity prices are soaring. Leave them. Send food parcels to the starving, but let demand evoke supply and stop curbing trade. The marketplace is never perfect, but in this matter it could not be worse than government action. Playing these games has so far made a few people very rich at the cost of the taxpayer. Now the cost is in famine and starvation. This is no longer a game.

Read the whole fantastic column.

Conservatives have known for years what this man is only discovering: almost no matter what the issue is, the government is worse at solving problems than free associations of people. Michael Crichton points out in his well-researched novel State of Fear that human efforts have failed nowhere more spectacularly than in trying to control environments. Moreover, the green movement is creating a massive new opportunity for lobbying that is currently being used by Toyota to destroy American manufacturers and by the agribusiness lobby to raise corn prices and profits to the detriment of American consumers. Americans are wealthy and will muddle through, but the true crime is the grinding poverty Africa is being kept in because of enviro-fads. But it's all wrapped in a cloak of secular piety. Disgusting.

Global Warming, A Friendly Riposte

My good friend, Mr. 42, left a comment on my last post that I think raises an interesting and a key point, to which I would like to reply. Here is the comment, in full:

First off, let me say that I completely agree with you that the science of global warming is at best debatable, and that we really don't know exactly what is going on. However, I feel we must be prepared for all circumstances.

I think the point you are missing is that in this case, the freedom exerted by these businesses could possibly be infringing on the lives and well-beings of countless other people. People, especially businesses, need to be responsible in controlling how much they contribute to the environment. Will it completely stop global warming? I don't know. Do we, as consumers, also need to be less wasteful? Probably.

If these businesses cannot see that the improvements can not only help them, maybe the government should be involved. The government's primary job is to protect it's citizens. If that means that they have to place laws to protect the environment, then it should.

I think 42's concern is one that is widely shared; it is a legitimate one that cannot be dismissed out of hand. The problem comes at several points, which I would like to outline.

The argument can be sketched out in this way: 1. There is a possibility that businesses' practices are contributing to the incidence of global temperature increase in such a way that other people may be hurt. 2. The government's primary job is to protect its citizens. 3. Therefore, government may have to step in to limit businesses' range of activity.

I realize that my argument will make a departure from current mainstream thought (though not from the classical liberal tradition on which our Constitution was based). However, the problems are with the second premise and with an unstated assumption built into the argument.

The premise that "the government's primary job is to protect its citizens is false. The government's primary job is actually to protect its citizens' freedoms. The point in my bringing up the statement "Give me liberty or give me death" is to say that freedom is more important than life, and that that is a defining and founding creed of our republic. The truth is that the Constitution does not authorize the government to take any action regarding environmental concerns--not even the actions the government has already undertaken. The reason is that the Founders were more concerned with liberty than with life; that's why so many of them risked so much to gain their freedom. In fact, I believe that morality requires us to choose freedom over life, if such a choice becomes necessary.

The unstated assumption is that government action could potentially protect citizens in this area. Increasingly, real world experience tells us that the answer is an emphatic "no." I'll link to a column from Britain's Guardian paper today that will elaborate, but the fact is that government action has contributed to economic stagnation and even deaths throughout Africa, and that government action has done little more than create an enormous new lobbying arena that inevitably leads to inefficient and outright destructive actions, such as ethanol subsidies, restrictions on oil drilling and refining, and promotion of wind power over nuclear.

Bush Prepares To Pass Around Global Warming Kool-Aid

Michelle Malkin directs readers to this post by Iain Murray on The Corner on National Review:

We're hearing some very bad things about the President's likely unconditional surrender on global warming today. One senior source suggested that the last line of sound defense had been breached and that "It will be very bad." I'd imagine he will request, against all evidence from Europe that this does anything but make consumers poorer and utilities richer, a cap and trade regime for energy utilities.

This is the last straw regarding President Bush's conservatism. No one can rightly be called a conservative who supports government intervention for global warming. Heck, even if the science is solid--a dubious assertion--and the anti-warming measures will actually curb warming--significantly more dubious--what ever happened to freedom? What does "Give me liberty or give me death" mean, anyway? USA, you've come a long way.

Christian morality has played a significant part in presidential politics of the past, but it will have been nothing compared to the coming Green morality.

McCain has bought in too, and you can bet that both Democrats are in. So we likely have another eight years of this madness to deal with. This only underscores the extreme importance of electing Republicans to Congress who can stop this religious movement from destroying our economy and more importantly, our freedoms.

A Comment, And A Reply, On The Auto Industry

I thought this was interesting, so I'm going to turn this into its own post. Tell me what you think about this debate!

Thomas Kazmierczak
"Honestly, I don't think Detroit's (or Michigan's) auto industry can be saved. In the past, Michigan was able to stay dominant due to its pool of highly skilled auto workers. Unfortunately, with newer and more advanced automation processes, auto workers don't need to be skilled anymore. Thus, auto companies will shift their production centers to places with large supplies of cheap, unskilled labor, which Michigan does not have. IMO Michigan needs to transition as quickly as possible from jobs that do not require skilled labor (such as manufacturing) to jobs that do (biotech, geospatial tech, etc.) it will not be an easy one, but it is a necessary one.

Additionally, with regard to your "excessive" environmental policies, we have an example of what happens when modern industry is allowe to run unchecked. It's called China. Massive economic growth at the expense of ruining the soils, rivers, and lakes you depend on? I'll err on the side of protection, thanks."

The Wandering Wolverine
"I agree with you that Detroit's auto industry probably cannot be saved, at least in the sense that GMC and Ford are beyond repair. I disagree that the introduction of more advanced machinery would lead companies to seek out less-skilled workers; the current situation is that, perversely, American automakers are opening plants in cheap labor areas like Mexico, whereas Japanese and other foreign automakers are opening plants in Ohio, Alabama, et al. In other words, foreign automakers are seeking more skilled labor and domestic automakers are seeking cheaper labor.

This is an indication of the real situation, which is not that there are simply job losses being suffered in areas with highly skilled workers. It is that some auto companies are thriving and expanding production, whereas others are struggling, find themselves without the ability to cut losses (fired union workers get put in lucrative job banks funded by the companies, plus there are exorbitant pension funds to deal with), and have to risk expansion through cheap labor alternatives in a desperate bid to stave off bankruptcy. Union control and the excessively lucrative contracts guaranteed to auto workers are now taking an inexorable toll. That must be stopped.

Finally, the demise of the American car manufacturers will be significantly hastened by proposed controls on CO2, something that does not create smog or health problems, but is in fact plant food. These controls on CO2 will hardly make a dent in atmospheric CO2 levels, even according to global warming die-hards' models, but it's more a religious issue now than anything else. Since the Detroit manufacturers have found their niche in the market for low fuel efficiency, high safety and stability SUVs, this is a de facto subsidy to Toyota and Honda (and actually a real subsidy, since the Prius only exists because of special tax incentives) and a knife in the back to American industries.

As far as China is concerned, instead of being an example of lack of government control leading to excessive pollution, their situation is in fact illustrative of the normal story of industrialization. At the beginning, pollution is awful as factories and plants are inefficient and technologically primitive. As efficiency is increased, pollution is cut down (since pollution represents output loss from waste); so we saw in America, as smog levels began to clear up significantly after 1900, long before any environmental controls. Pollutant levels in the air and water also began to decrease somewhat before the beginning of environmental legislation--that's not to say that pollution controls did not encourage the process, but it is to say that free markets take care of pollution on their own quite nicely. In fact, the United States is currently cutting down their rates of increase of CO2 production far faster than more government controlled systems like those in Europe."

Temperature Monitors Show Ocean (1) ****ing. Quiz.

This National Journal article tells the story. The Argo temperature monitors that report on ocean temperatures show a (2) ****ing trend; some scientists are thus considering them to be (3) vital/faulty tools in establishing global trends, since they do not support a theory of global (4) ****ing. This leads at least one blogger to think that certain scientists quoted in the story are full of (5) bull****. Answers below.










1. Cool
2. cool
3. faulty
4. warm
5. crap. Gotcha!

When Government Picks The Winners, They Never Pick People

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey points out the hilarious and predictable news that maybe, MAYBE government deciding to force people to buy compact fluorescent bulbs and quit with the incandescent bulbs might not have been the best idea.

Government's track record on picking which industries and products to invest in: poor. Support for more government involvement in picking industries and products: high.

Huh?

Anyway, this ought to clear one thing up: global warming is being used as a pretense for getting government more involved in your life.

What World Temperature?

(Interesting tidbits from the excellent presentation of Christopher Horner, Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and best-selling author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming. (Buy at Amazon.com.) (Yes, I am trying to make up for the fact that I posted virtually nothing new over the weekend.)

Does it make sense to think about a global temperature? Does NASA just stick a giant thermometer into the Earth's rectum (located in Columbus, Ohio) and get a read on what the temperature of the Earth is?

It turns out there are over 2,000 temperature stations in the United States, where the best temperature records are kept. (By the way, the Siberian stations were largely shut down after the collapse of the USSR in the 1990s. What effect do you think THAT had on global averages?) Want to look at a few of them? Try www.surfacestations.org.

Here are some samples:







Hmmm. No problems there. Increased temperatures ARE due to man's interference!

Unfortunately, of course, it seems to be a different sort of interference than greenhouse warming. Take a look at the map on the website's main page. The surface stations are, for the most part, in urban areas that have been seriously built up in the last hundred years. Ever heard of a micro-clime? We have one in Michigan; it's called Detroit. There's a reason it isn't in my hometown of Newaygo.