I’ve been trying to understand the Tea Party Movement. Sounds like a lot of angry people who want to get the government out of their lives and cut both taxes and the deficit. Nothing wrong with that — although one does wonder where they were in the Bush years.
They were there all along, and few of them were very happy about the spending, but they weren’t idiotic enough to think that the Democrats would be better. And sometimes quantity has a quality all its own.
Anyway, I think that what Beijing Tom really wants is a watermelon tea party.
Maybe politicos should do more research before imposing half-baked energy mandates?
It wouldn’t do any good. They’re mostly too stupid to understand the results of the research, or too much on the take from the benefitting industry to care. But they get to pretend to be saving the planet.
Speaking of biodiesel, will the same be true of biokerosene? Is the “green aviation” initiative another unintended consequence on the way?
Somewhere, the other day, I saw someone note on the Intertubes a tale of two religions. One believes that boobs cause earth quakes, and the other believes that global warming does.
…some national recycling experts have begun calling for government restraint in trash recycling, which can be more costly and environmentally damaging than dumping.
“We just assume recycling is always better,” said J. Winston Porter, president of the Waste Policy Center, an environmental consulting and policy organization. “But there’s a point at which you shouldn’t just recycle for recycling’s sake.”
I think we’re well past it. It’s become the new secular state religion.
My cynicism over it peaked a few years ago when (as I related in a blog post, but don’t want to look for it right now) I watched the recycling truck come by, and unceremoniously dump the contents of my yellow paper bin and my blue plastic and cans bin into the same repository on the truck, completely negating all of my entropy reduction efforts in sorting them. I do notice now, on my return to CA after five years, they’ve at least ended that fraud, and just have one big blue recycling bin.
McIntyre’s findings did not make him very popular. In the hacked Climategate emails, he is referred to as a “bozo,” a “moron” and a “playground bully.” But with their self-aggrandizement, the climatologists made him into a legend on the Internet. A million people a month visit his blog, climateaudit.org. They include climate skeptics and the usual conspiracy theorists, but also, more recently, many academics who are able to do the math themselves.
McIntyre asserts that he does believe in climate change. “I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water,” he says, “but when I find mistakes, I want them to be corrected.”
He repeatedly bombarded Jones with emails in which he drew his attention to freedom of information laws. This tenacity would prove to be disastrous for Jones.
McIntyre doggedly asked for access to the raw data. Jones was just as dogged in denying his requests, constantly coming up with new, specious reasons for his rejections. Unfortunately for Jones, however, McIntyre’s supporters eventually included people who know how to secretly hack into computers and steal data.
Their target was well selected. Jones was like a spider in its web. Almost every internal debate among the climate popes passed through his computer, leaving behind a digital trail.
But the US media continues to ignore the fraud and loss of credibility.
I’m struggling to say something polite about this. By way of an illustration, can you imagine the reaction if a scientist reported in the safety literature that there was a critical flaw in the design of a nuclear power station, but told policymakers that everything was fine? Do the committee really think it’s fine to hide important information from policymakers so long as you report it in the literature?
Astonishing.
Or it should be astonishing. Unfortunately, it’s become increasingly difficult to be astonished at these power mongers.