Linked below are two articles which highlight the increasing loonieness and destructive results of the Man Made Global Warming Hoax. If you need links attacking the bad science of Global Warming and the fraudulent and heavy-handed tactics of its advocates there are links on my 'Where's The Warming?' post of March 19th. But this isnt about the pseudo-science behind the hoax but about some of the results of acting on that misconceived premise. We've all been told for the last fifteen years or so that if we didnt heed the warnings! and act yesterday to change our evil, consumerist ways that whole ecosystems would cease to be and that millions would starve!
One of the most holy intonations in the Global Warming mantra is the prayer for the renewable energy sources which will replace evil petroleum and even more evil coal as energy sources. Evil nuclear, the true non-greenhouse, safe, renewable, infinitely abundant energy source is, of course, not considered an alternative because it is Evil. This hasnt stopped countries like France, Germany and Japan from producing almost all their electricity from nuclear power but they've been ignored by the fanatics who HATE nuclear power unless its a hydrogen bomb on the tip of an SS-20 medium-range Soviet missile aimed at them by St. Mikhail The Wonderful, in which case its a step towards World Peace. The True Answer is Bio-fuels! Ethanol! The moldy hippies from the big cities and the ever-greedy lords of Agribusiness see eye-to-eye on this one. Monstrously huge subsidies have been passed in congress to pour tens of billions of dollars into this miracle fuel. Unfortunately, because the corn must be planted and harvested by petroleum-gobbling farm machinery, because ethanol is distilled by heat, because it cant be transported by pipeline because it contains water which would damage the pipes and so must be transported by trucks with diesel-burning engines and then blended with gasoline at the refinery because few cars can burn pure ethanol without destroying their engines, ethanol actually takes more energy to produce and distribute than you get from burning it for fuel. This also means, in the aggregate, that it also produces more pollution than gasoline. But the main side effect has been its effect on food prices and the environment. The price of corn and wheat have shot up astronomically. The effect in the poorer nations has been mass hunger and even starvation. Countries like Haiti are dissolving into chaos because the average people cant afford to survive. As pleasing as it will be to see people in international parasite countries like Egypt and Pakistan go hungry as China and India outbid them for shrinking food supplies the result of this will probably be an ever increasing flood of hunger refugees into the countries whose economies can still feed their populations. But how long will that last? A century of Socialist Central Planning has left mounds of skeletal corpses wherever the people have been misguided enough to dispossess the successful farmers and adopt the heavy hand of government-imposed fairness. Zimbabwe is the latest example. Before Mugabe kicked out the evil capitalist farmers and redistributed their land to his political cronies the population was 13 million well-fed people and a healthy food export industry. Today, a mere decade later, the population is seven million people, most of them on the brink of starvation.
Now, with the United States preparing to abandon capitalism and seriously discussing nationalizing industry after industry the continued supply of food, even to its own citizens, let alone the rest of the world, is in doubt. So in a sense, the mass starvation predicted as a result of Global Warming has already started to occur, not because of any change in the weather but because the 'threat' of Global Warming has increased government meddling in the production and distribution of food has caused chaos and dysfunction in food marketing. It also seems that the sacred Rain Forests have got to be sacrificed to create more bio-fuel producing farmland and hopefully enough food so that Brazilians dont die of starvation behind the wheels of their ethanol-powered cars. Screw the Rainforest, we cant let the environment get in the way of protecting the environment, can we?
Which brings us to our second non-solution. Wind power. We've all seen the forests of bird-pureeing windmills that government subsidies have caused to be set up in what used to be called 'The Pacific Flyway', where tens of millions of migratory birds followed the path of the winds from north to south and back again. You know birds, "Dirty, filthy, disgusting, lice-ridden, BOIDS!" as the lady in 'The Producers' once said. The ugly, noisy windmills arent very efficient at producing electricity but they are better at killing birds than ten million meth-crazed, shotgun-toting rednecks with an unlimited supply of ammunition. The same people who wept when the pigeons of Trafalgar Square were denied food in the name of urban cleanliness heartlessly turn their backs of these feathered bug-eating pests in the name of Renewable Energy. The article from 'The Scotsman' is about the campaign to seed the empty and beautiful heathlands of Northern England with ugly, noisy windfarms. Of course the fragile peat bogs will have to be broken up to lay roads, transmission lines and the concrete bases that these monsters sit on, just as the desert environment has been permanently damaged by the ones we have in Cali. Again, the infrastructure to make these things work, and the energy required to keep them online is immense and comes close to cancelling out the energy you get from them. On windless days they produce NO power, as several wind-powered towns in Texas found out recently.
The problem here is that Global Warming has never been anything but an excuse for the Central Planners in the government to get control of what's left of the free economy. The discredited Central Planning nostrums that have seen a century of failure and disaster are now necessary to cure our Evil Consumerist ways. if we dont adopt command Socialism THE WORLD WILL DIE! Welcome to the New Age of Feudalism.
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/latestnews/Wind-farms-or-peat-bogs.3980685.jp
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/16/biofuels.alternativeenergy
4 comments:
Nuclear power technically isn't renewable, assuming a finite supply of uranium. We will probably see increased use of nuclear power as other options become prohibitively expensive. The issue with ethanol is a separate one, I think - much of our modern infrastructure (transportation and shipping) runs on the internal combustion engine, and it would be a long time before we would have as many electric cars, for example, as conventional ones. I don't know if there is such thing as an electric airplane yet.
I think the real problem is that we are slowly running of out cost-effective energy sources and nobody really has come up with a good alternative yet.
Coal isnt expensive and oil is retrievable from tar sands and shale. There are new fields offshore and in North Dakota and Alaska. The problem is that using carbon-based fuels has become Evil and is being discouraged. So far the proposed alternatives are causing more damage than they are solving any kind of climate problems; in fact you could say that they are causing the chaos and starvation envisioned by the Gorians and are benefiting a lot of shady speculators who are bribing legislators to vote them huge subsidies in the name of The Planet.
I'm under the impression that alternative oil extraction techniques are more costly than traditional drilling methods. If you're right and the current production rate can continue via new traditional sources, then our energy costs should stop increasing. But otherwise, keeping conventional machinery, cars, and trucks running will become prohibitively expensive, no matter how much energy we're producing via coal, uranium, etc.
The market will determine what happens unless the government increases its interference, in which case outrages like the ethanol program, which dont make a dent in the problem and have lethal side effects will continue to lower our standard of living without solving the problem.
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