Plant Food and Dirty Harry

Here is a story from Reuters that combines the worst of both worlds, media biased portrayal with political black mail. Let's start with the media part. There is a two photo slide show with the story, here is the first photo (left);

Now I don't know how many people know that those towers at power plants are cooling towers and coming out of the top is nothing more than steam. In England a survey showed that two thirds of people thought what was coming out was pollution I would guess it is the same everywhere. This is done to protect the environment so as not to discharge hot water back into lakes etc.

The fact that the media uses these pictures constantly as an iconic representation of global warming is both misleading and ironic. The irony being that water vapor is in fact the number one greenhouse gas, though man's contribution is minuscule. Besides that is not what our purveyors of truth in the media are trying to portray anyway. When you see pictures like the above it is meant to represent pollution. The fact that it is not is obviously unimportant to them. Of course they are just following the lead of the most famous of such misdirection.




How do I know that Reuters was trying to convince us that those power plants represent pollution? Simple, the very next picture in the little slide show.




Heliogenic Climate Change where I first saw this story linked to the Planet Ark Site where they only used the second photo (of course) but gave a caption to it.

Century City and downtown Los Angeles are seen through the smog December 31, 2007.
Photo: Lucy Nicholson

So in one fell swoop without a word being written we are left with the impression that steam from power plants is the same as the smog in Los Angeles and this all has to do with Carbon Dioxide which is a harmless odorless natural element necessary for life on earth, plant food. Wow ain't journalism special.

Now to the story.

Risk of EPA move smoothes way for U.S carbon law: Rep

CAMBRIDGE - The threat of tougher regulation from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency should ease industrial opposition to a cap-and trade market on greenhouse gases, a U.S. lawmaker said on Monday.

U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, co-sponsor of a bill that would cut the nation's emissions of greenhouse gases associated with global climate change, said the EPA's authority to act should convince industrial lobbyists that it is in their best interest towork with Congress on the issue.

"Now you have a choice ... Do you want the EPA to make the decision or would you like your congressman or senator to be in the room and drafting legislation? So we think this is a very helpful development that focuses the mind," Markey said at a meeting on clean energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, just outside Boston...

"If Congress doesn't act, then clearly there is a residual authority now granted by the Supreme Court of the United States to the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases," Markey said. "The only way to avoid that is to have Congress act."

That should encourage business not to fight the proposed legislation, which Markey plans to begin committee hearings on next week.

"It becomes a real factor," Markey said. "Industries across the country will just have to gauge for themselves how lucky they feel if they kill legislation in terms of how the EPA process will include them."

Ah yes just what we wanted from our elected officials, Playing Dirty Harry with our industrial sector, ain't Democracy great.