Umm…They Do Grow Back, You Know…
Jim Cameron, call your office:
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that these same people are big on “renewable resources”.
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News and Commentary on Space
Posts tagged environmentalism
Global Warming Insurance: Annotated
Some of my co-conspirators at People’s Press Collective have been having a little fun with the “global warming insurance” video…
“It’s not like you’re gonna give up your whole paycheck, it’s just a few bucks a month [that you're gonna give up]“.
Dude…it’s not your money to take.
[hat tip: WhoSaidYouSaid]
Al Gore Celebrates ‘Earth Hour’…With Floodlights
As most of you know, just over two years ago, my organization, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, found that the knuckleheaded leader of the global warming alarmism movement, Al Gore, consumes 20 times more electricity in his home than the average American household.
Since Earth Hour was recognized today, Saturday, March 28 from 8:30-9:30pm, I thought I’d see how the hypocritical, fear-mongering former Veep was celebrating at his home.
I pulled up to Al’s house, located in the posh Belle Meade section of Nashville, at 8:48pm – right in the middle of Earth Hour. I found that the main spotlights that usually illuminate his 9,000 square foot mansion were dark, but several of the lights inside the house were on.
In fact, most of the windows were lit by the familiar blue-ish hue indicating that floor lamps and ceiling fixtures were off, but TV screens and computer monitors were hard at work. (In other words, his house looked the way most houses look about 1:45am when their inhabitants are distractedly watching “Cheaters” or “Chelsea Lately” reruns.)
The kicker, though, were the dozen or so floodlights grandly highlighting several trees and illuminating the driveway entrance of Gore’s mansion.
I shit you not, my friends, the savior of the environment couldn’t be bothered to turn off the gaudy lights that show off his goofy trees…
If you’re unfamiliar, Earth Hour is where socialists and patchouli-dabbing tree-hugging hippies unite to dismiss electricity, fossil fuels and the modern conveniences that allow for historically unrivaled prosperity, longevity, health and quality of life throughout the world.
I guess I’d almost maybe be sort of a little surprised by this, if Drew Johnson hadn’t already revealed how Gore’s mansion consumes twenty times as much energy as the average american home...and even more than that after renovations aimed at improving its energy efficiency paradoxically increased energy usage by more than 10%.
Personally, I think Al Gore is perfectly within his rights to use as much electricity as he likes, so long as he is paying the bills himself…even during “Earth Hour”. I find this amusing because it illustrates the hypocrisy of the environmentalist elitists like St. Al. I do not know whether or not Gore was personally pushing “Earth Hour”, and it doesn’t really matter – Johnson merely used the occasion to check up on the latest electrical goings-on at the Gore mansion and discovered that, “Earth Hour” or no, Gore’s lights were on, but no one was home.
A Letter From the Power Company
Along with this month’s power bill came an interesting letter from the utility…interesting in how politically incorrect it is:
How long we will be able to freeze our rate depends upon federal and state energy policies. Many in Congress see a CO2 cap and trade scheme or carbon tax as a lucrative source of potential government revenues, payable by electricity consumers. Special interests at the state and federal level are pushing to require subsidization of uneconomical and inefficient power sources.
During the first quarter of 2008, we conducted a survey seeking our members’ views on subsidies proposed by lawmakers. A carbon tax – which would increase energy costs across the board – was opposed by 84% of the questionnaire respondents. 77% opposed a tax to fund energy conservation, and 65% of our members opposed paying for solar subsidies. They agreed with the Board of Directors that consumers benefitting from lower electric bills after installing a solar array should pay for the system themselves rather than requiring their neighbors – many of whom are already having difficulty paying their bills – to pay for it.
This year, new legislation is being proposed that would promote tiered rate structures. Such rates would cause the per kWh cost to increase as you use more energy… The purpose of the tiered rates is to impose energy conservation. However, the effect is to reduce the revenues needed to run the business [ie: the utility company] with the end result being rate increases for everyone.
Our members’ comments clearly indicate they can’t afford higher taxes and they want IREA to keep rates low; also that “rebates” (in fact, subsidies) disproportionally affect the poor and those on fixed incomes. Since these new proposals – cap and trade, tiered rates, or a carbon tax – would result in trillions of dollars of additional power costs nationwide, devastating our economy and quality of life whil yielding little or no practical benefits, we plan to actively oppose such proposals.
The letter goes on to rally members to help the co-op fight such measures.
Nice to see a company whose business is targeted by environmentalist do-gooders actually fighting back against the directives and non-value-adding costs said do-gooders are trying to impose on them — and us.
I see nothing wrong with “alternative” energy, but I do think it’s wrong to mandate the adoption of alternative energy when the technology is not yet (and may never be) capable of competing with existing sources through equivalent or better reliability, availability, and affordability. If subsidies are required to make such technology even remotely economical, and if significant, economy-wrecking penalties need to be applied to existing sources of energy to “incentivize” the switch to alternatives, the alternatives are clearly not ready for widespread adoption.
Environmentalists who are sincerely concerned with CO2 emissions and environmental damage from the extraction and use of fossil fuels, and who want to actually make headway against those things, would be taken much more seriously if they endorsed nuclear power – the real alternative energy. It’s a pity that our local co-op is too small to build a nuclear reactor of its own.
Mars Needs Beano
More methane on Mars:
“Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars in 2003 indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas,” said Michael Mumma of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “At northern mid-summer, methane is released at a rate comparable to that of the massive hydrocarbon seep at Coal Oil Point in Santa Barbara, Calif.” Mumma is lead author of a paper describing this research that will appear in Science Express on Thursday.
Methane, four atoms of hydrogen bound to a carbon atom, is the main component of natural gas on Earth. Astrobiologists are interested in these data because organisms release much of Earth’s methane as they digest nutrients. However, other purely geological processes, like oxidation of iron, also release methane.
“Right now, we do not have enough information to tell whether biology or geology — or both — is producing the methane on Mars,” Mumma said. “But it does tell us the planet is still alive, at least in a geologic sense. It is as if Mars is challenging us, saying, ‘hey, find out what this means.’ “
Previous posts on Mars methane here and here.
As I’ve said before, extant life on Mars (or just the possibility of it) is a mixed blessing.
On the positive side, a solid indication of life would focus more scientific attention on Mars, and could provide justification for sending humans to explore the planet in person. The benefits from this would be the development of new space technologies and operations experience, and the possibility that humans could, having finally gotten there, maintain a permanent presence as settlers. (And yes, there are no doubt better means of accomplishing the same goal than another wasteful and politics-conflicted government program – or worse, a program based on international kumbayaaism. Just thinking overly-optimistically here of the potential for such a program to disrupt the chicken-egg problem and provide us with the minimal technology set required to establish a beachhead.) Plus, it would be interesting as a scientific curiosity, regardless of the origin to which the methane is ultimately attributed – though obviously more interesting if it turned out to be biogenic, since that attribution would merely answer one question while opening up thousands more – and for its potential to completely derail antiscientific nonsense like intelligent design and creationism.
On the negative side, a solid indication of life could prompt arguments to prevent further direct exploration of Mars by landers or (especially) humans, and take settlement of the planet completely off the table. Such arguments against direct exploration and settlement would center on the risk of biological cross-contamination - concern over some Martian microbe hitchhiking back to Earth and improbably devastating the “defenseless” life on this planet, or that by taking terrestrial biology with us (via microbes on nearly-but-not-perfectly sterilized landers or quite literally by sending human explorers to the surface) we would destroy any scientific value the discovery of life on an untampered-with Mars might yield.1
Further in this vein, there is the possibility that a Mars inhabited by even primitive life would trigger a trekkish “Prime Directive” response, whereby concerned citizens would seek a prohibition on exploration and settlement of the planet based on the ‘self-determination rights’ of microbes to evolve on their own, without outside interference.
It’s impossible to predict exactly what the response would be, of course, since it will depend on the circumstances and the prevailing attitudes at the time of discovery. One hopes rationality will prevail, but one never knows.
1 For an example of keeping an uninhabited place pristine for scientific purity, examine the case of Surtsey: “The scientists have strict rules against not carrying any seeds to Surtsey – the idea behind no human interference is to witness colonization and secession as naturally as possible.” While the quarantine of Surtsey is a nearly-unique and highly valuable scientific experiment on Earth with negligible effects on anyone else, closing off an entire planet to human activity based on the presence of the most primitive forms of life would be excessive.
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Recent Posts
- The Disappointment of “Star Wars”
- Mitt Romney’s Space Brain Trust
- James P. Hogan
- An Annoying Feature of Non-Fiction Books
- Indian Migrations and Space Settlement