Capitalism vs The Climate

[skookerasbil]

How ironic that a far left environmental nutter write an article about the current state of the climate debate and make my point for me??

The eco-k00ks are raging..........and its because they are realizing they are losing. Accordingly, they are out in masse these days trying deperately to gather some steam behind their movement by indicting the people behind the denier message..........




Capitalism vs. the Climate
Naomi Klein November 9, 2011 | This article appeared in the November 28, 2011 edition of The Nation.

There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.
 
He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”

Here at the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren’t going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is.

Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who specializes in harassing climate scientists with nuisance lawsuits and Freedom of Information fishing expeditions, angles the table mic over to his mouth. “You can believe this is about the climate,” he says darkly, “and many people do, but it’s not a reasonable belief.” Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him look like a right-wing Anderson Cooper, likes to invoke Saul Alinsky: “The issue isn’t the issue.” The issue, apparently, is that “no free society would do to itself what this agenda requires…. The first step to that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way.”

Claiming that climate change is a plot to steal American freedom is rather tame by Heartland standards. Over the course of this two-day conference, I will learn that Obama’s campaign promise to support locally owned biofuels refineries was really about “green communitarianism,” akin to the “Maoist” scheme to put “a pig iron furnace in everybody’s backyard” (the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels). That climate change is “a stalking horse for National Socialism” (former Republican senator and retired astronaut Harrison Schmitt). And that environmentalists are like Aztec priests, sacrificing countless people to appease the gods and change the weather (Marc Morano, editor of the denialists’ go-to website, ClimateDepot.com).

Most of all, however, I will hear versions of the opinion expressed by the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism. As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his new book Climate of Corruption, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”

Yes, sure, there is a pretense that the delegates’ rejection of climate science is rooted in serious disagreement about the data. And the organizers go to some lengths to mimic credible scientific conferences, calling the gathering “Restoring the Scientific Method” and even adopting the organizational acronym ICCC, a mere one letter off from the world’s leading authority on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the scientific theories presented here are old and long discredited. And no attempt is made to explain why each speaker seems to contradict the next. (Is there no warming, or is there warming but it’s not a problem? And if there is no warming, then what’s all this talk about sunspots causing temperatures to rise?)

In truth, several members of the mostly elderly audience seem to doze off while the temperature graphs are projected. They come to life only when the rock stars of the movement take the stage—not the C-team scientists but the A-team ideological warriors like Morano and Horner. This is the true purpose of the gathering: providing a forum for die-hard denialists to collect the rhetorical baseball bats with which they will club environmentalists and climate scientists in the weeks and months to come. The talking points first tested here will jam the comment sections beneath every article and YouTube video that contains the phrase “climate change” or “global warming.” They will also exit the mouths of hundreds of right-wing commentators and politicians—from Republican presidential candidates like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann all the way down to county commissioners like Richard Rothschild. In an interview outside the sessions, Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, proudly takes credit for “thousands of articles and op-eds and speeches…that were informed by or motivated by somebody attending one of these conferences.”

The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank devoted to “promoting free-market solutions,” has been holding these confabs since 2008, sometimes twice a year. And the strategy appears to be working. At the end of day one, Morano—whose claim to fame is having broken the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth story that sank John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign—leads the gathering through a series of victory laps. Cap and trade: dead! Obama at the Copenhagen summit: failure! The climate movement: suicidal! He even projects a couple of quotes from climate activists beating up on themselves (as progressives do so well) and exhorts the audience to “celebrate!”

There were no balloons or confetti descending from the rafters, but there may as well have been.

* * *

Capitalism vs. the Climate | The Nation





Im reading this article and laughing my ass off so hard I can hardly cantain myself.......because one realizes that this woman writer is beyond miserable and moreover ( as with most far lefties and writers from The Nation) doesnt at all acknowledge the economic costs......as if it is some kind of irrelevant afterthought.

Again.......this article is a perfect illustration of the fcukedupedness of liberal thought. Cant answer the two pivitol questions:

1) At what cost?

2) As compared to what?

No matter..........the meathead woman is right about one thing...........that the "consensus" doesnt matter and also..............

 

[gslack]

Whenever I see the name Rothschild, I hide my wallet...

 

[Old Rocks]

As compared to what?

[ARCHIVED CONTENT] Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change - HM Treasury

At what cost?

Don't know yet the full cost of climate change. But we are going to find out. Then we will find out the full cost of belated and ineffectual measure to ameliorate the genie that is already out of the bottle. We are past prevention, what we will be dealing with are consequences.

Unpredictable weather and expanding markets promise to keep food prices high | CAIVN

Prolonged summer heat has devastated the summer crop of Runner peanuts, the staple variety used for most peanut butter production. Close to 90% of U.S. households consume peanut butter on a regular basis and an estimated 1.5 million pounds of peanut products are purchased annually. In 2010, raw peanuts fetched about $450 a ton. Now, a ton of peanuts costs $1,150 wholesale, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture figures.

The Ag Dept just lowered the estimated corn production in the US at the same time as we have inked contracts for massive shipments of corn to China. Double whammey on the price of corn products.

 

[skookerasbil]

As compared to what?

[ARCHIVED CONTENT] Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change - HM Treasury

At what cost?

Don't know yet the full cost of climate change. But we are going to find out. Then we will find out the full cost of belated and ineffectual measure to ameliorate the genie that is already out of the bottle. We are past prevention, what we will be dealing with are consequences.

Unpredictable weather and expanding markets promise to keep food prices high | CAIVN

Prolonged summer heat has devastated the summer crop of Runner peanuts, the staple variety used for most peanut butter production. Close to 90% of U.S. households consume peanut butter on a regular basis and an estimated 1.5 million pounds of peanut products are purchased annually. In 2010, raw peanuts fetched about $450 a ton. Now, a ton of peanuts costs $1,150 wholesale, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture figures.

The Ag Dept just lowered the estimated corn production in the US at the same time as we have inked contracts for massive shipments of corn to China. Double whammey on the price of corn products.

Yeah Ray....but you cant blow up and economy based upon a hunch. Thats just the reality of it.
If I took $2,000 and rode out to Atlantic City tonight to hit the tables, there is some possibility I come home with lots of dough, but the risk/reward is absurd, thus the inevitable question, "At what cost?".

The people are just never going to buy the tradeoff of sitting at home by candlelight with no cable TV and eating white rice every night in exchange for hoping we can cool the planet.

 

[skookerasbil]

Threads like this are far too real for the nutters, which is why these type of threads dont get traction.

All the temperature debate BS keeps it very hobbyesque.

 

[bripat9643]

As compared to what?

[ARCHIVED CONTENT] Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change - HM Treasury

At what cost?

Don't know yet the full cost of climate change. But we are going to find out. Then we will find out the full cost of belated and ineffectual measure to ameliorate the genie that is already out of the bottle. We are past prevention, what we will be dealing with are consequences.

Unpredictable weather and expanding markets promise to keep food prices high | CAIVN

Unpredictable weather? That's a result of climate change? When has weather ever been predictable? One of the main reason's AGW is so lacking in credibility is precisely because all the predictions of the wizards who endorse have turned out to be dead wrong.

Prolonged summer heat has devastated the summer crop of Runner peanuts, the staple variety used for most peanut butter production. Close to 90% of U.S. households consume peanut butter on a regular basis and an estimated 1.5 million pounds of peanut products are purchased annually. In 2010, raw peanuts fetched about $450 a ton. Now, a ton of peanuts costs $1,150 wholesale, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture figures.

Oh yeah, we haven't ever had droughts before?

Oh no!

The Ag Dept just lowered the estimated corn production in the US at the same time as we have inked contracts for massive shipments of corn to China. Double whammey on the price of corn products.

When did the predictions of government bureaucrats become facts?

 

[skookerasbil]

Thats the sheer brilliance of this whole scam..............

Make people THINK that weather was predictable at one time and then paint it as becomming unpredictable.

There are always plenty of those out there that will buy the bag of dog doo for $1,000 a pop iif it is packaged just right...........amd the scammers know it.........just like the entrapeneurs who sell shit on cable TV in the middle of the might to the depressed.


Dollar to a thousand stale donuts meatheads like Chris, Rolling Thunder and RDean have a closet full of shit like this................

Disinfecting UV Scanner
Price: $24.95
TV Guys Price: $16.95
You Save: $8.00 (32 %)

 

[skookerasbil]

Fake TV Burglar Deterrent

Price: $39.95
TV Guys Price: $34.95
You Save: $5.00 (13 %)

You go through the house of many of these environmental hyper-k00ks, this is the kind of shit you find...........

 

[waltky]

Overfishing decimating world fish stocks...

Can the Oceans Continue to Feed Us?
Thursday 10 November 2011 - Washington - Far out on the Pacific Ocean, the world's industrial fishing fleets pursue one of the last huge wild hunts — for the tuna eaten by millions of people around the world.

Yet tuna still aren't fished sustainably, something that conservationists and big U.S. tuna companies are trying to fix. This illustrates one part of the pressure on the world's oceans to feed a growing global population, now 7 billion. It also underscores the difficulties people have in balancing what they take against what must be left in order to have enough supplies of healthy wild fish. "It's serious. On a global basis, we've pretty much found all the fish we're going to find," said Mike Hirshfield, chief scientist at the advocacy group Oceana. "There's not a lot of hidden fish out there. And we're still heading in the wrong direction, taken as a whole." Some 32 percent of the world's fish are overfished, up from 10 percent in the 1970s and 25 percent in the early 1990s, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

In the U.S., restrictions on fishing have allowed some fish populations to rebound. In international waters, however, covering more than half of the oceans, no single country oversees ocean conservation. Instead, regional multinational organizations make the decisions. The first began after World War II, when their job was seen as dividing up what was then thought to be the unlimited wealth of the seas, said Amanda Nickson, who oversees Pacific tuna conservation efforts at the Pew Environment Group. Today, Nickson said, these management groups aren't doing a very good job of restoring tuna populations and making sure they can be fished sustainability.

One of them is the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, which oversees more than 60 percent of the world's tuna catch. Its members include Pacific island nations and the homes of the world's large industrial fishing fleets — the U.S., Europe, Japan, China and Taiwan. Nickson said it's a David vs. Goliath matchup of island nations pushing for sustainable management vs. the large fishing nations, which block the restrictions needed to achieve it. The group's next meeting is in December in the island nation of Palau. The Pew Environment Group is pressing it to set limits on the amount of fish caught for each species; to take action to protect sharks, which are unintentionally caught along with tuna; and to reduce the catch of juvenile bigeye tuna, an overfished species, by ships fishing for skipjack tuna.

Skipjack, the most common tropical tuna, is very heavily fished in some places, but isn't yet overfished, said William Fox, a biologist and the World Wildlife Fund's U.S. vice president for fisheries. Skipjack is the only tuna species that hasn't been fished to its maximum limit or overfished, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. "We're in a race with time, because we're trying to get the regional fisheries management organizations to improve performance so that doesn't happen," Fox said. He's also vice chairman of the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation, a group started by the WWF with major U.S. tuna companies to try to make tuna fishing sustainable. For U.S. fishing fleets, President George W. Bush signed a law in 2007 that required annual catch limits based on science in order to end overfishing by 2011. The limits were in place by the end of last year.

More Can the Oceans Continue to Feed Us? | Truthout