GW Hype and environmentalist costing us $$$$

Deron, you're making wide-ranging accusations that are impossible to discuss. Your phrase "pretty much everything else" is the clue that you're the one far out in left field.

In any case ..

"run up in gasoline prices ..." -- Nope. This is due either a) to China & India going through industrialization and therefore increasing demand, b) the stupid illegal war in Iraq which is raising concerns about oil supply, c) the world oil peak having been reached resulting in the inevitable decline in oil supply ... or d) all of the above

"No nuclear" -- Despite Nuclear power being a horrendously bad idea (extreme bad environmental consequences for tens of thousands of years) nuclear power does not create oil and therefore cannot be used to power the current vehicles we have on the road.

"Cannot drill for oil" -- Can you say more? There are certainly new oil wells being drilled all the time, around the world.

"Ruining the economy" -- You're pretty vague here.. what about all the new companies being built who are providing goods and services related to green technologies. In my view what's ruining the economy is the megatrillion$$$'s being spent on this stupid illegal war in Iraq.

Coleman talks a good argument. I just happen to think he's wrong about some of it. I stopped worrying about global warming when I heard a scientist point out that if we stopped 100% of co2 emissions today it would take 100 years to return to normal. I have no idea if this is true, but it made me think, ok, nothing i can do will affect it for me. And I chose to do my part by NOT reproducing. Which is the real problem in my opinion.
As for the price of oil, don't expect market forces to have the good of the people in mind. Its not a political, or environmental problem as much as too much money is chasing a finite product. As the dollar tanked, and the real estate tanked, this year tons of invested money has been dumped into oil futures. The money made was reinvested, etc etc and now even more money. When the stock market goes wacky, automatic controlls on trading go into effect to prevent another crash of 39. But as far as I know, there is no such thing for oil futures, so overbidding just breeds more everbidding. You want to see this happening, follow an ebay items bids. Its stupid but they keep bidding each other up infinitely. Anyway that's my daily rant, my wife won't have to hear it again today.

Right on Riekiman. I wish we had spent 1/10 of the cost of Iraq on solar and wind power for us. I don't feel safer now, quite the opposite.

The linked article states "Vice President Gore" (third paragraph). Me thinks he just cut and pasted something from 8 odd years ago and forgot to check it properly. Ironic that an anti-environmentalist has such a keen understanding of reycycling :D

He makes some very good arguments (note the sarcasm):

I estimate that this square in front of my face contains 100,000 molecules of atmosphere. Of those 100,000 only 38 are CO2; 38 out of a hundred thousand. That makes it a trace component. Let me ask a key question: how can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? It can’t. That’s all there is to it; it can’t.

I'm glad that issue is settled. :)

It was the environmentalist’s prime force in blocking any drilling for oil in this country and the blocking the building of any new refineries, as well. So now the shortage they created has sent gasoline prices soaring.

Current US Oil reserves = 21 billion barrels. US oil consumption = 21 million/day. That's less than 3 years of supply. It doesn't matter how many wells we drill. And, we can't even draw it out of the ground that fast economically, so we have to buy foreign oil to keep using it at 21 million barrels per day.

The basis for his argument is wrong. The shortage has been created by supplies running out.

And, it has lead to the folly of ethanol,..

I agree, ethanol is a dumb idea, and somewhat of a scam.

So now the global warming myth actually has lead to the chaos we are now enduring with energy and food prices.

We haven't really done anything significant about it. The "chaos" is a supply problem that is not going to get better. It's not politics, but reality that has caught us off guard.

We pay for it every time we fill our gas tanks.

Of course you pay for the gasoline every time you fill your tank :P

I just have to bite my lip when I hear someone blaming "them environmentalists!" What exactly is an environmentalist? If it is someone who has the good sense to understand the most simple law in the universe...that is that everything on this planet is interconnected and when you interfere with that sufficiently you begin to produce real problems and dangers...that could ultimately end the human existence...well then count me in as an environmentalist! You know people seem to think those of us who understand the most basic "laws" of our natural world....are simply "dreamers" with some obscure nature obsession. Sure, we find pleasure as do most "normal" human beings in observing, being in, interacting...with the rest of this "natural" world that we live in on this planet. But it's so much more than that. Like I stated, who doesn't enjoy a sense of "connectedness" that we have with the rest of our natural world? It's also much about our survival...the survival and well being of our children....and on and on.

Deronmoped....it's not about who's right or wrong here. It's about what we do here and the consequences. And there are consequences of what human beings do right here on this earth. I don't know how you are anyone else who has the attitude you expressed about "environmentalists" have lived a day in your life and not understood the most simple laws of nature...and the natural "rules" that exist.

Somebody at sometime decided as us humans are prone to do, i.e. insecurity, etc....to label anyone who understood and acted in regard to what I've described above...as "an environmentalist." Well, guess what...you're an environmentalist as well! You just don't know that...and it's simply because as long as you live on this planet you are not outside of this system looking in. You are a part of it. You are nature as well. And everything you do is related to a multitude of other systems, other natural systems, that exist here. So if the environmentalists are to blame...slap yourself around for awhile cause we are ALL 100% a part of this environment we call "earth" and therefore you are blaming yourself along with the rest of us.

Respectfully...but disappointed in your thinking,

Gushar

... I wish we had spent 1/10 of the cost of Iraq on solar and wind power for us...

Was it right for us to go over there and pick a fight? Perhaps we should have saved %100 of the cost.

Don't even get me started on that! I get so mad I mispell enough just on the global oil market. Suffice to say again, I do not feel safer now.

I was thinking about this thread today while buying groceries. :)

Compared to the rest of the planet, Americans are fat (I thought of myself first), lazy, rich slobs who live in a throw-away society. Raising the prices on gas and forcing the American people to re-think their ways, I think, is a brilliant move.

Excess CO2 is bad, you know this.
Starting wars to control oil is bad, you know this.
Waste is bad, you know this.
Being in dept to other countries (US National Dept: $9,420,672,187,598.64 - that's $30,970.37 for each US citizen) is bad, you know this.

My motto is and always has been, "Do the right thing - win or lose." So you don't think global climate change is an issue? That's fine, but you know breathing CO and CO2 is bad for peoples' health - could you chill out on the exhaust production just a little bit for me? I happen to like clean air, could you be a good neighbor and give me just one day where I can breathe without choking? This would be the right thing to do.

Thanks.

I'm not sure, but I do know of several people in Springfield whom are content with living in their own filth.

.

We needed to kick someone's butt, in do it in a big way.

LOL. When is that going to happen? Or do you mean "in a big way" as in $9-trillion?

The run up in gasoline prices and pretty much everything else can be tracked back to environmentalist. No nuclear, can not drill for oil and now the GW hype are ruining the economy.

There are no power plants in the USA that currently burn oil for power. So oil is not raising electric power prices. Nuclear needs far more development and not be run by teams literally sleeping on the job for them to be truly safe.

New drilling is 100% insane political talk. Any new drilling would not produce oil into the USA consumer pipeline for a few years at best. But it would boost huge tax write-offs for research and development, immediately. No one mentions that, hmmm.

Also the best estimates show that we could not put a dent into our consumption with domestic oil, even if we used all currently "off-limit" resources. We'd still have to import tremendous amounts. So we'd still have high prices yet destroy more of nature in vain. Ooops, too late.

We will never have independent oil. Even if we got down to 50% imported, we'd still be at the mercy of the pricing of speculation.

So the answer is it should be illegal and impossible to profit by speculatation on oil prices as long as it's critical to our national security (which is insane but the current state of affairs). It's almost like allowing speculation on water supplies.

Gas in Mexico is around $2 a gallon.
Whatever they are doing, we should do it.

(what's silly is I don't even own anything that uses gas - I just want people to quit whining about this already - gas is going to be $5 this year, so drive less, stop blowing $50-$100 a month on your phone, stop buying fast food, stop dropping $20 at movie theaters, stop buying insanely expensive and low mpg new cars - stop pointlessly consuming!)

I feel the real reason we went to war for, was 9/11. We needed to kick someone's butt, in do it in a big way. For not to do anything would leave the door wide open to more terrorist attacks.

We went to war essentially so the executive branch could have wartime powers. Really, it's that simple. They could have fought terrorism around the world in various countries in the middle-east, Africa, Europe, etc. but without a specific war against a specific country in place the President cannot summarily award wartime contracts to corporations, revoke citizen rights, ignore privacy laws and create places like Gitmo. If he tried to do that without a physical war in a physical country and just a virtual "war on terror" he would be easily impeached by both sides of the house.

It's the most devious situation.
They may be evil geniuses but they are still geniuses.

What blows my mind is that people are already forgetting all the insane scandals, resignations and loss of freedom. They just got used to it and accept it. It's crazy. PBS is the only news that mentions how many soldiers have been killed each week (4100 total), meanwhile dozens more each week are critically injured and require lifetime care so they don't "count" (31,000 total). Last but not least we have literally decimated the iraqi population, killing over 1.2 million people. Now *that's* insanity.

You are exactly correct needWheels. I'd like anyone to tell me how you win a war against an "action." The phrase "war on terror" is absolutely ludicrous. There's as much substance to that is there is to a "war on ignorance" or a "war on happiness" or a "war on sadness"....or any other human "feeling" or emotion. People in this country who support(ed) the actions in Iraq must at some point realize they were led like a bunch of lemmings...using a brand of semantics that was "sold" to them like a box of laundry detergent. Let's see...since we don't really have any great reason to invade this country what can we call this...hey let's call it a war on "terror." Everybody is against terror right! It's an insult to every person in this country that people were duped in this way...but we have to ask ourselves "why" were people so easily swayed with this fear mongering, classic marketing 101, campaign? That's what makes me so uneasy about the whole thing!

And I can't even discuss the human toll this man made tragedy has cost. It makes me sick to my stomach...

Gushar

I feel the real reason we went to war for, was 9/11. We needed to kick someone's butt, in do it in a big way. For not to do anything would leave the door wide open to more terrorist attacks.

What was the point of going to Afghanistan? If that wasn't enough why did we chose Iraq? What about Syria or a dozen other targets? We went to Iraq because of a personal issue. Saddam tried to assassinate elder bush.

You are exactly correct needWheels. I'd like anyone to tell me how you win a war against an "action." The phrase "war on terror" is absolutely ludicrous.

The phrase was chosen on purpose for that. Just like the war on drugs. It's purposely impossible to define a finish line and easy to get wide ranging freedom-stomping laws and huge expenditures to "fight". I'm telling you, while everyone thinks the main leader is a moron every time he opens his mouth, the people behind the puppet are absolutely freakin geniuses. Karl Rove and Cheney are easy to spot - but these guys are the hidden masterminds too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Addington
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo
There's dozens more. It's going to take decades to find all the damage they've done because they purposely did not use whitehouse email which must be archived and instead used the GOP's email system which was "accidentally" deleted.

I mean people have COMPLETELY forgotten about this:
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/04/30/bush_challenges_hundreds_of_laws/
The wiretapping, etc. etc.
It's insane.

You continue to be exactly right, needwheels. Stop whining about the price of gas and stop using it. I'm trying as hard as I can, on transportation and the house. Oil is an addiction, I haven't givien up my hot air balloon yet, but it has at most one more year in it before it's gone. Giving that up is too much cold turkey for me this year, just the car for now. But I am working toward an Ed Begley lifestyle which is more than a lot are doing. Here in NM they haven't even slowed down yet.

We had to kick somebody's butt after 911, but it's too stupid we just picked the first person who we could kick. It was like in Casablanca where the guy says round up the usual suspects.That war has done ten times the political damage as the Vietnam war to us worldwide. We look like the biggest idiots on earth now. When they say we are committed to the war now, I feel the ghost of LBJ walk up my spine.

[/quote]"is not the "RISK" of a few deaths from a accident worth it to save the Planet from runaway green house effect killing hundreds of millions, meltdown of the polar caps, flooding of all the coastal cities...

what runaway green house effect....what polar ice melting.....what flooding????

I'm pretty sure you started this post off by completely rejecting global warming.

Now you are going to use it to justify nuclear?

There are some things about some environmentalists that annoy me. I don't like the general onerous assumption that any human project, especially large scale project must be destructive. There seems to be a constant focus on the negative side of things. I think that can be really destructive to human endeavor ultimatly to progress as people can get depressed. I'm not opposed to nuclear myself but would prefer a massive industrial renewable energy for example http://www.desertec.org/concept.html shows that we could use solar thermal power from the deserts to comforably provide the whole world with energy.

Things like that tends to get ignored by many of the mainstream environmentalists that I read, I think it because they just can their heads round the idea that humans might do something right for once. There's seem to be this assumption that the only thing we can do is stop being destructive and build small pretty things like a few solar panels on a roof or a painted wind turbine. Nothing wrong with that in itself but its not going to solve the real problems, like replacing fossil fuels or raising living standards in the third world.

As I have read all the comments above, I can't help but observe that OIL is NOT a renewable resource.
When it is gone, there will be no more. We passed PEAK OIL awhile ago so are on the downhill side of
production. Most of the major oil producing countries are down at least a 3rd of peak production.
.
I am also amazed that Americans think we are entitled to cheap gas when the rest of the world is paying
twice as much. Gas in Europe is $8 to $11 per gallon depending on the country. In the news this morning
were pictures from a variety of countries where they are striking and protesting the high price of fuel.
Fishermen in Spain can't take their boats out, etc, etc. Based on my 1st paragraph, it won't get better.
.
We do need Solar Energy. We do need Wind Powered Generators. We do need Wave Powered Generators. We need
every alternative fuel source we can come up with. It won't be long before pedal power, mass transit,
electric vehicles will be the only way we can get around.

Getting people to admit that climate change is real is not difficult.

Getting them to accept responsibility for it is.

Claiming that Global Climate change is Completely Man Made is somewhat overzealous in my opinion. It exposes you to the Ice Age/Interglacial Period argument...i.e. that Global climate change is a natural cycle that has been happening forever and will continue to happen regardless of whether we measly humans are here or not. This rebuttal bears weight, but the indulgent conclusion that our actions have no significance to the larger picture is extremely dangerous, and one that a lazy comfort driven mind can easily jump to.

We need to look at human born carbon emissions as just one piece to the puzzle. In this larger picture the Natural world does have its own cycles. However, we are also a part of them. Continuing our emisison rates unchecked can create a resonance pattern with other atmospheric conditions that destabalize and amplify this natural pattern from a periodic cyclical phenomenon into a larger cataclysmic event.

If you follow the Precautionary Principle you can't loose:

If there is nothing we can do about climate change then let's not waste our time trying.
But if we wait untill it is too late only to discover that there was something we could have done....wouldn't it have been better had we anticipated the worst and acted accordingly?

Isn't that why we went to Iraq in the first place...to prevent a future disaster?

If our security is that important to us, why not invest even a quarter of those $ hundreds of billions $ in renewable energy and stop wasting our time chasing oil pipe dreams?

The War in Iraq is doing what it's supposed to be doing, keeping the United States safe from another 9/11.

They hit the US and we clobbered them back

Sounds like people are confused between Iraq and Afghanistan. There wasn't a single connection between 9/11 and Iraq unless you want to consider religion.

The War in Iraq is doing what it's supposed to be doing, keeping the United States safe from another 9/11.

They hit the US and we clobbered them back

Sounds like people are confused between Iraq and Afghanistan. There wasn't a single connection between 9/11 and Iraq unless you want to consider religion.

This has been a difficult thread to follow but this is one item in the thread which I want to respond to.

There's been a lot of confusion created by the U.S. administration which has misled the people to believe that Iraq's government was involved with terrorism and involved with the Sep 11, 2001 attack. This is completely bogus, there was no connection. Nor were there any "weapons of mass destruction", no nukes, etc.

The war we're fighting in Iraq was sold to us based on lies told by the U.S. administration.

See:

http://www.7gen.com/blog/20080614/24339-iraq

http://www.7gen.com/article-summary/bush-blunders/bush-used-iraq-intel-was-false

Those are a couple articles I researched recently about this question. My 7gen.com has much more of this.

http://www.7gen.com/topics/impeach-bush

...on the other hand they say nuclear is so potentially dangerous it should not be considered to save the planet from sure destruction.

I have to agree with Deron here on the Nuclear issue. Nuclear is the most practical alternative now for electricity generation to meet our needs. Renewable is a feel-good solution for now.

Anyway, the underlying dilemma Deron may be getting at is that it is easy to think very negative when considering our impact on the environment. Unfortunately, we may come off as doom and gloomers, or be portrayed in that way. Just focusing on the negative aspects of any given situation is just as delusional as only seeing the positive aspects.

It is a continual challenge to set aside bias and objectively asses all dimensions to an issue to grasp reality. Is Deron up to the challenge? And, are we "environmentalists?" Are we considering our most reasonable course of action, or just caught up in negative sentiment while blinded by feel-good solutions?