The Great Hypotheses Scam Continued

It is important to recognize that projections of climate change in specific areas are not forecasts comparable to tomorrow’s weather forecast. Rather, they are hypothetical examples of how the climate might change and usually contain a range of possibilities as opposed to one specific high likelihood outcome. (EPA)

Wherein: Climate models which are nothing more than hypothesis are used to generate studies of future events, which are unmeasurable and unverifiable. Also known as CYBER WAG (Computer generated Wild Ass Guesses)


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It is not as if the scientific community, especially the climate science community does not know that the qualifier on future "climate change" as adequately described in the short caption (from the EPA) I have posted under the picture above is true. The scientific community is well aware of the fact that all these doomsday predictions of future climate induced disasters are solely based upon "hypothetical examples of how climate might change" all derived from climate models that have shown themselves to be both less than robust in actually predicting future climate but also the product of assumptions derived from unproven science.

With all of that they continue to spew out studies, reports, press releases and even major policy recommendations as if these hypothetical might's are instead irrefutable fact. Note in the statement from the EPA that they state that projections in "specific areas"  can not be trusted even to the accuracy of local weather forecast which are made at most a week or so in advance let alone years or decades into the future. Yet it is precisely "specific areas" which are most often used to warn of disaster scenarios which are decades in the future .

If I were to say that I predict that a category 5 hurricane is going to strike south Florida in early August and local officials ought to prepare by shutting down hotels and evacuating millions of people in late July would anyone take me seriously ?  Would NOAA's hurricane center even think to make such a projection even in mid July and even if conditions were very favorable for development of a hurricane in early August? Of course not and they would rightly loose all credibility if they made such forecast. Yet we are constantly inundated with forecast for climate conditions in specific areas not months in advance not even years in advance but rather decades away.

These totally hypothetical projections of a future world are not only presented as if they were scientifically verified but are also used to promote policies which have had and will have real life consequences for real people now and into the future. To show how unreliable these forecast are I need only point to two projections highly publicized by climate scientist from two different  "state of the science" organizations almost a decade apart.

The first is a well known and often mocked forecast of the future by a well respected climate scientist made in March 2000.

According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event" 

"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.... 

....David Parker, at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Berkshire, says ultimately, British children could have only virtual experience of snow. Via the internet, they might wonder at polar scenes - or eventually "feel" virtual cold. 

Heavy snow will return occasionally, says Dr Viner, but when it does we will be unprepared. "We're really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years time," he said.

Not a decade later this seemingly "written in stone" forecast of the future world made by eminent scientist working for a most respected of climate science institutions is totally reversed by forecast made by eminent scientist working for another most respected science institution in June of 2010.

We can expect more cold and snowy winters in Europe, eastern Asia and eastern North America.

"Cold and snowy winters will be the rule, rather than the exception," says Dr James Overland of the NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in the United States. Dr Overland is at the International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference (IPY-OSC) to chair a session on polar climate feedbacks, amplification and teleconnections, including impacts on mid-latitudes....

Obviously both forecast of future climates for Europe can not be correct, yet policy recommendations were made and in some cases instituted as the result of the earlier of the two scenarios causing waste and hardship for very real people in the very real world.

The scientist, in both cases, made their forecast based on their interpretation of what climate modelling was telling them. The same modelling which as we repeatedly point out and as the EPA says are no more than  "hypothetical examples of how climate might change"

 Recently we have another example of this deceptive practice of promoting as certainty that which is at best a guess far less accurate than a long range weather forecast. This example of scientific and institutional malpractice comes from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in a report with policy reccomendations titled Climate Change, Water, and Food Security .

The report not only makes forecast and recommendations based upon "hypothetical examples of how climate might change" it does so by targeting "specific areas" and determining for the sake of these recommendations what conditions will be in these areas decades in the future.

They make these recommendations while simultaneously undercutting the scientific foundation for those policy recommendation in the end leaving only a faith based justification for major policy changes. From the report itself:

However, the long-term climatic risk to agricultural assets and agricultural production that can be linked to water cannot be known with any certainty. While temperature and pressure variables can be projected by global circulation models with a high degree of ‘convergence’, the same cannot be said of water vapour in the atmosphere. The levels of risk associated with rainfall and runoff events can only be determined with provisional levels of precision. These may not be sufficient to define specific approaches or levels of investment (e.g. the costs of raising the free-board on an hydraulic structure) in many locations.

provisional 
.

1.

providing  or serving for the time being only; existing only until permanently or properly replaced; temporary: a provisional government.

2.

accepted or adopted tentatively; conditional; probationary.

So all the conclusions and recommendations which follow are based upon provisional data subject to change. The same could be said for everything that comes from climate modelling. Would you invest substantial sums of your money in a company if the accountants for that the company told you that the data for their projections for future profits were merely provisional and subject to change? Especially if the accountants previous projections had been both suspect and unreliable? Of course you would not, yet the world's governments are constantly making exactly those decisions based on that type of scientific accounting.

This report is filled with caveats which while providing cover for the authors, totally undermines the conclusions and the recommendations they make.  An example:

The prediction of impacts relies heavily on simulation modelling with global climate models (GCMs) that have been calibrated as closely as possible to historical climate data. Modelling scenarios have been standardized from a set defined by the IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) to allow more consistent comparison of predicted impacts. The predictive ability of climate models is currently much better for temperature than for rainfall . Indeed, models tend to solve primarily on temperature and pressure. The spatial and temporal patterns of rainfall are affected by land atmosphere interactions that cannot be accomodated in the existing algorithms, and the models’spatial resolution is anyway too coarse to capture many topographic effects on climate patterns. The predictions for one scenario of economic development vary considerably from model to model, and contradictory predictions, such as increased or decreased precipitation, can result for specific parts of the world. 

Despite the fact that the report is primarily focused on water resources, they make clear the tool they are using to forecast (climate models) do not do a good job at the exact thing they are telling us is going to be a problem. In fact the climate models are so bad at projections on this issue that they are prone to  "contradictory predictions, such as increased or decreased precipitation, can result for specific parts of the world". The idea that you would use admittedly unreliable tools on which to base policy does not deter them from almost immediately jumping to definitive and authoritative conclusions:

Climate change will significantly impact agriculture by increasing water demand, limiting crop productivity and by reducing water availability in areas where irrigation is most needed or has comparative advantage. 

Excuse me? After all those caveats about the inability of climate modes to adequately represent precipitation they then make a definitive statement  such as climate change will have the affect of
"reducing water availability in areas where irrigation is most needed" 

To show how contradictory and silly this report is, a few paragraphs later they again restate how unreliable the models are in forecasting the very thing they are forecasting

Since the scale of GCM simulation precludes the analysis of specific impacts at river basin and even national scales, there is increasing effort to downscale modelling in order to assess agricultural and hydrological consequences in a specific location. 

So if they admit that they can not simulate the impact at river basin or even national scales how then have they determined that there will be reduced water availability in areas where irrigation is most needed ? To be specific, if they are saying that current climate modelling is not able to forecast future snowfall in the Sierras how can they then say that the Central Valley of California will suffer severe droughts decades down the road as the result of AGW? They can't either in California or anywhere else in the world, yet that is precisely what this report claims to do.

A small example of the specificity this report gets into while simultaneously recognizing that they are really presenting nothing more than crystal ball gazing science.

In Africa, by 2020, between 75 and 250 million people will be exposed to increased
water stress and in some countries, yields from rainfed agriculture could be reduced by 50 percent.

• Significant reductions in runoff are forecast, with a 10 percent reduction in
rainfall in the higher precipitation areas, translating into a 17 percent reduction in runoff. This compares with severe falls (30–50 percent) in the medium (500–600 mm) rainfall zones (de Wit and Stankiewicz, 2006).  

• However, there remains a high level of inconsistency between models across different macro-regions – western, eastern, and southern Africa in particular (SEI, 2008). There is urgent need for detailed predictive modelling across these extensive regions.

 In Asia, by the 2050s, freshwater availability in Central, South, East, and Southeast
Asia, particularly in large river basins, will decrease. The heavily populated mega
deltas in the South, East and Southeast will be at risk due to increased flooding
from the sea and rivers.

Note the dire predictions in very specific regions at very specific time scales something they repeatedly tell us they are incapable of doing. Note too the desperate cry for future funding for more predictive modelling because everything they are saying is is based on "a high level of inconsistency between models". In other words, "Our models give us a wide variety of possibilities to choose from, so we will present the most dire in order to make a plea for more money to study the problem" Cha Ching.

The entire report is filled with nonsensical contradictions and obviously biased conclusions not supported scientifically or by common sense. And it must never be forgotten that the entire exercise is based upon a hypothesis created by climate models that predict dangerous global warming to begin  with. From that unproven, intellectually dishonest poisoned fruit supposition do all these other deceptions sprout.

There are some good policy recommendations in the report but they are not "climate change" dependent, they would be worthwhile recommendations and goals regardless. But that is not the true purpose of this report as the report itself plainly states.

Since climate change impacts may be difficult to internalize in some countries, given the host of other pressures on water resources and agriculture, there is need for a broad level of advocacy. 

Advocacy would lead on the integration of climate science with agricultural water management and include a strong focus on the preservation and enhancement of natural ecosystems, which are tightly bound to the development and management of irrigated agriculture. This will see further development of an integrated perspective at river basin level, and also across a spectrum of irrigated and rainfed agriculture.

The purpose of this report as is so much of the AGW advocacy is to infect all aspects of society with their leftist dogma in this case agriculture. Although the science and modelling upon which all of this is based can not "simulate the impact at river basin or even national scale" this does not mean that the ideology behind it can't and that rather than science is what is behind this report.

Green money, not green jobs

FROM-Washington Examiner

By: Star Parker

Van Jones is back, reconstructed and rehabilitated.

Jones, recall, departed from his White House job as "green jobs czar" after publicity about his association with a "9/11 truther" organization, which alleges complicity of the Bush administration with the Sept. 11 attacks.

He was already a lightening rod, having characterized President George W. Bush as a "crackhead," using profanity to describe Republicans, and offering gems like blaming "white polluters and white environmentalists" for "steering poison" to minority communities.

But, as White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel understands that power brokers should "never waste a crisis," those on the Left grasp that you never waste an asset like a black self-described communist from the 1990s with an Ivy League degree and a best-selling "green jobs" book.

So now Jones has new jobs at Princeton University and Washington's Center for American Progress. And, to seal the public rehabilitation, he will be awarded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Image Award and has been called by NAACP President Benjamin Jealous a "national treasure."

Central to Jones' work will, of course, be the continuation of his "green jobs" agenda. The Center for American Progress announcement says he'll be a senior fellow and leader with its Green Opportunity Initiative.

CAP was founded by rich liberals who thought the Left needed a think tank as conservatives have (as they concluded they needed talk radio and hence founded the now defunct Air America).

One of the major sources of funding of CAP was Marion and Herbert Sandler, who got rich building Golden West Financial selling adjustable-rate mortgages with teaser rates to unsophisticated buyers. Yes, the very greedy kind of businesspeople that the Obama administration would have us believe caused our current economic crisis.

But the beauty of the Left is that facts will never get in the way of ideology.

The recent scandal associated with the use of research data at the Climate Research Unit in England -- which has been essentially the headquarters of global warming research -- has brought claims of man-made climate change into serious doubt.

Sober minds realize that this must be a time for reassessment about assumptions driving the belief that irreversible climate change has occurred and that this alleged change is caused by human activity.

As expressed in an editorial in Britain's Prospect Magazine, "We cannot rely on highly imperfect climate models as a basis for policy initiatives that cost billions and change how we live."

But this hasn't put a dent in the green jobs movement. President Obama continues to push this idea as central to economic recovery, as he did the other day speaking to chief executive officers at the Business Roundtable in Washington.

The love affair on the Left with "green jobs" is, of course, about ideology, which is why facts are irrelevant. It is another excuse to grow government and bring European socialism to America. What could be a better opportunity than to claim that the planet's atmosphere is now out of whack because of capitalism?

Jones is important because he uses environmentalism as a new platform to welcome poor blacks onto the government plantation.

This is important spin because poor folks do have common sense. In a Zogby poll done after the presidential election, 73 percent of blacks said they were opposed to taxing fossil fuels to promote alternative energy.

The Carter administration invested $2.1 billion in the Great Plains Coal Gasification Plant to convert coal to gas. The result -- zero. Federal government spending since 1961 on "advanced energy technologies and basic energy science research" totals $187 billion with hardly anything to show.

Poor folks don't need socialism or green jobs. They need green money. They'll get more of it being free, going to school, getting married and going to work.





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The Long March From California to Copenhagen

FROM-Pajamas Media

Victor Davis Hanson

The Great Debate Oddly Is Not Over

We are still in a great public debate between capitalism and socialism, and individual freedom versus statism — odd since hundreds of millions worldwide have escaped poverty the last 30 years due to the spread of Western-inspired free markets.

Many choose sides in the debate based on their own predicaments. Sometimes the more independent and secure who have thrived under capitalism promote it, the more dependent who have not detest it.

At other times the realist mind is opposed to the idealist. And we can also envision the split as an age-old dichotomy between the tragic view and the therapeutic: either man is born pretty awful and must toughen himself through denial of the appetites, or he is by nature wonderful but corrupted and hurt through the burdens placed on him by society.

Free Will

In whatever way we frame the debate, again more than ever Americans are choosing sides.

On the one, are those who believe personal freedom and liberty trump egalitarianism and fraternity. Oh, they don’t believe in letting the less successful perish, but they seek to help those who do not do as well in the open arena through three mechanisms:

1) a limited government that in extremis would support only the needy, sick, disabled and aged (no more self-esteem counseling, 6-year student loans, or research grants for self-adjustment);

2) reliance on entrepreneurship, freedom of action, and private enterprise to allow real economic growth that enlarges the pie itself rather than perennially haggling over the pieces of a shrinking whole.;

3) A culture of shame that makes the more successful help those less so in his family, in his community, and in his nation through philanthropy and private giving.

Collective Concern

On the other side are those who wish a large government to ensure an equality of result. Their notion is that personal responsibility, talent, behavior, luck, fate, etc. do not so much determine why one is well off and another not so. Instead, there is insidious racial, gender, and class oppression everywhere — sinister forces at work that conspire to keep those down who otherwise in a fair system would thrive.

Therefore a big paternalistic — all-knowing, all-powerful — government must step in, rein in the wild horses, break them, and harness them to pull the collective cart. At the end of the day, those who like to work long hours, start businesses, or take risks can continue for the sheer enjoyment of it; while others who chose not to will end up with about the same house, car, medical care, college, and travel opportunity. Does the son who likes to lay inside on Saturday mornings go unfed, just because he won’t help his brother mow the lawn? Is he any happier for his sloth, the other any better for his zeal?

Key to the statist mind is the acceptance that compensation is inherently unfair: why should a brain surgeon who takes out 3 meningiomas successfully a day make any more than the poor floor cleaner who washes the linoleum between operations? The former gains more status anyway, so why deepen the wound of inequality through unequal pay for the latter?

Ultimately that is what the present struggle is over. The Obamians wish to err on the side of egalitarianism rather than freedom of the individual. Traditionally there has been a balance in the US, but we are witnessing a genuine attempt to swing the pendulum hard to the left.


Nowhere is there a better example of the collective effort than in California. Politics don’t matter here; both Republicans and Democrats embrace statism, high taxes, and growing entitlements.

So — we have the highest gasoline taxes, highest income taxes, highest sales taxes and collect enormous amounts of revenue to pay the highest-compensated and most numerous state employees in the nation to allot these revenues for others. We have the largest number of illegal aliens, and offer the most generous state subsidies for health, welfare, and education and legal aid. We pay more per prison convict than anywhere else, and have more of them per capita as well.

State Worker Paradise

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If one is a teacher, a public nurse, or a state bureaucrat, and stays close to home, life is not too bad. Two tenured teachers at midlife can easily make together $160,000 with summers off — far more than the owner of a brake shop or a farmer of 40 acres of trees — and without worry over burdensome regulations or the daily need to drive down the 99 for a living, or to fly out of LAX for business, or to depend on the local CSU to provide literate, skilled employees. Life is therefore pretty good, at least so far.

But if you are a private company, dealing with high taxes, all sorts of regulations, a crumbling infrastructure (take a 300-mile drive from Gilroy south on 101; spend a day at LAX, or try finding a convenient east-west route out of California in the winter), and poorly educated employees, the experiment in egalitarianism has failed.

Answer? The best job in California is a state one; the worst a private-sector one. Result? 3,500 flee per week with capital, education, and know-how; 2,500 arrive with far less capital and training.

The state is billions in the hole; the public employee unions are furious that there is no “they” left to fork up more money.

And the big companies are gearing up to leave as well. Agriculture is under assault by affluent green state-employed professors, biologists, lawyers, and park officials. Prison union employees, prison administrators, lawyers etc. are all haranguing each other over shrinking funds. Los Angeles is a mess — broke, subpar schools, a place where grandees arrive for the work day and leave asap at 5. San Francisco survives by its natural beauty that snags tens of millions of tourist dollars; without it, it would devolve into Lima or Cairo.

On the National Scene

This California model is important because Obama is adopting it as a blueprint on a national scale. If he wins (and don’t count him out), life really would be more patterned on an equality of result. New payroll, income, state, local, and health care surcharge taxes would hit those over $200K with about a 70% take of one’s income. The public sector employees double in number, unionize, and demand ever more from “them.” Cap-and-trade charges raise monthly utility bills 20%. Things like SUVs, Winnebagos, and private jet travel are taxed out of reach — except for a guardian class that uses public moneys for a rarefied lifestyle of governance and enforcement (sort of like the jets parked on the tarmac at Copenhagen or Barack’s night out on the Big Apple).

We would all want a job at the DMV but would never want to go there for any service — a model for health care to come. In short, the poor get a little better off, the better-off a lot worse, and America becomes a sort of collective lower middle class at about a 1950s lifestyle, praised and congratulated for ending “poverty.”

And On to the World

Hugo Chavez was greeted as a rock star at Copenhagen, despite his anti-democratic, anti-Semitic, violent and corrupt rule. The climate change conference doesn’t seem to be just about climate change, but rather is degenerating into a call for universal socialism, with money going from West to the South.

America’s model, we see now at Copenhagen, can be expanded globally as well. The “poor” nations (many fabulously wealthy, like Zimbabwe, in natural resources) demand money from the wealthy West to even the playing-field under the guise of carbon-offset penance.

The West taxes its populace to hand over trillions to those without as many polluting cars and industries — on the socialist belief that impoverishment in Latin America and Africa is due to oppression, neo-colonialism, and economic imperialism rather than endemic corruption, tribalism, ethnic and religious strife, gender apartheid, the lack of legal protection for property and the individual, and statist bureaucracies. “They,” not “we,” did it to “us.”

(Never mentioned is the corollary of the Copenhagen shake-down: wealthy countries produce the steel, plastics, and information-based knowledge that poor countries use: paying a Zimbabwe billions for using less carbon would be as asinine as charging them billions for R&D full costs for the cars, industries, pharmaceuticals, eyeglasses, and technology their people use, but have not invented, fabricated, and in most cases maintained and repaired.)

The Great Chain of Socialism

In other words, we are seeing a strange era in which the once last bastion of capitalism, the free-market US, is trying to emulate the California model—and in turn the world wishes to follow what the Obama administration is trying to do in America.

Note well: California depends on “them” producing real wealth in food, fiber, manufacturing, oil, gas, timber, construction, and high-technology. In turn, the US depends on 50 states doing the same to provide for the expansive regulatory and administrative federal class, and the world relies on the US economy to provide the growth and capital to redistribute. (e.g., We can’t all be the Obamas, Valerie Jarretts, David Axelrods, Rahm Emanuels, Van Jones, Timothy Geithners, etc. who have made good livings as advocates, regulators, bureaucrats, legislators, etc. without having to worry about meeting a payroll).

The Unsung?

In truth, in some ways, the world economy depends every day on some engineer, farmer, architect, radiator shop owner, truck driver or plumber getting up at 5AM, going to work, toiling hard, and producing real wealth so that an array of bureaucrats, regulators, and redistributors can manage the proper allotment of much of the natural largess produced.

The whole system from California to Copenhagen will keep on working as long as the productive classes feel there are still incentives to jump out of bed at 5AM. When they don’t, the power is cut off to thousands of gears and cogs — and the world looks more like Ecuador or Somalia than the U.S.

Reds turn Green in Copenhagen

FROM- CFACT TV



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The Environmental Shakedown

FROM-RCP

By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- In the 1970s and early '80s, having seized control of the U.N. apparatus (by power of numbers), Third World countries decided to cash in. OPEC was pulling off the greatest wealth transfer from rich to poor in history. Why not them? So in grand U.N. declarations and conferences, they began calling for a "New International Economic Order." The NIEO's essential demand was simple: to transfer fantastic chunks of wealth from the industrialized West to the Third World.

On what grounds? In the name of equality -- wealth redistribution via global socialism -- with a dose of post-colonial reparations thrown in.

The idea of essentially taxing hard-working citizens of the democracies in order to fill the treasuries of Third World kleptocracies went nowhere, thanks mainly to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (and the debt crisis of the early '80s). They put a stake through the enterprise.

But such dreams never die. The raid on the Western treasuries is on again, but today with a new rationale to fit current ideological fashion. With socialism dead, the gigantic heist is now proposed as a sacred service of the newest religion: environmentalism.

One of the major goals of the Copenhagen climate summit is another NIEO shakedown: the transfer of hundreds of billions from the industrial West to the Third World to save the planet by, for example, planting green industries in the tristes tropiques.

Politically it's an idea of genius, engaging at once every left-wing erogenous zone: rich man's guilt, post-colonial guilt, environmental guilt. But the idea of shaking down the industrial democracies in the name of the environment thrives not just in the refined internationalist precincts of Copenhagen. It thrives on the national scale too.

On the day Copenhagen opened, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency claimed jurisdiction over the regulation of carbon emissions by declaring them an "endangerment" to human health.

Since we operate an overwhelmingly carbon-based economy, the EPA will be regulating practically everything. No institution that emits more than 250 tons of CO2 a year will fall outside EPA control. This means over a million building complexes, hospitals, plants, schools, businesses and similar enterprises. (The EPA proposes regulating emissions only above 25,000 tons, but it has no such authority.) Not since the creation of the Internal Revenue Service has a federal agency been given more intrusive power over every aspect of economic life.

This naked assertion of vast executive power in the name of the environment is the perfect fulfillment of the prediction of Czech President (and economist) Vaclav Klaus that environmentalism is becoming the new socialism, i.e., the totemic ideal in the name of which government seizes the commanding heights of the economy and society.

Socialism having failed so spectacularly, the left was adrift until it struck upon a brilliant gambit: metamorphosis from red to green. The cultural elites went straight from the memorial service for socialism to the altar of the environment. The objective is the same: highly centralized power given to the best and the brightest, the new class of experts, managers and technocrats. This time, however, the alleged justification is not abolishing oppression and inequality but saving the planet.

Not everyone is pleased with the coming New Carbon-Free International Order. When the Obama administration signaled (in a gesture to Copenhagen) a U.S. commitment to major cuts in carbon emissions, Democratic Sen. Jim Webb wrote the president protesting that he lacks the authority to do so unilaterally. That requires congressional concurrence by legislation or treaty.

With the Senate blocking President Obama's cap-and-trade carbon legislation, the EPA coup d'etat served as the administration's loud response to Webb: The hell we can't. With this EPA "endangerment" finding, we can do as we wish with carbon. Either the Senate passes cap-and-trade, or the EPA will impose even more draconian measures: all cap, no trade.

Forget for a moment the economic effects of severe carbon chastity. There's the matter of constitutional decency. If you want to revolutionize society -- as will drastic carbon regulation and taxation in an energy economy that is 85 percent carbon-based -- you do it through Congress reflecting popular will. Not by administrative fiat of EPA bureaucrats.

Congress should not just resist this executive overreaching, but trump it: Amend existing clean air laws and restore their original intent by excluding CO2 from EPA control and reserving that power for Congress and future legislation.

Do it now. Do it soon. Because Big Brother isn't lurking in CIA cloak. He's knocking on your door, smiling under an EPA cap.
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IMAGE OF THE DAY-Watermelon Madness

FROM-Australian Climate Madness

The hidden agenda of climate change

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The Game Plan

The green movement has never much been shy in terms of their vision of the future of this world. Despite some minor differences in the draconian measures they present in how to achieve their perfect ‘sustainable’ world the overall theme remains the same, a crude form of socialistic society with strict bureaucratic regulations governing anything and everything that could possibly make a profit ‘more than fit for one’s needs’.

A shining example of this way of thinking was on display during a follow up to the ‘Planet Earth’ series. A re-run of a 2007 one hour (with commercials) program featuring interviews from scientists and policy makers aired on ‘The Science Channel’ this past week (several actually).

The more I read this quote the more I want to bang my head into a wall. Since when is economic growth such a bad…wait, let me not give it away. Here goes.

“The only way that we can get a deal with the people of the world to preserve human civilization is to say, ‘It’s not any longer going to be economic growth…economic growth’ say ‘It’s the more equitable world where everyone has the basic things that human beings need’ and then we cease to find the meaning of life out of more and more economic growth and more and more consumption. Because in that kind of society – well, that’s what’s happening – it’s not only plundering the world and unsustainable, it’s making people miserable.”

- Clare Short, former Secretary of State, International Development.

There’s a lot to dissect there, isn’t there? Let’s start at the beginning.


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First, why do we have to make a deal with the people of the world. When we were a struggling nation the rich nations in Europe didn’t come running to make a deal with us to build our country for us. We did it all on our own! We worked harder than any nation ever has to make it so the next generation wouldn’t have to fight the same grueling battles as those who came before on principles of liberty and individualism. These beliefs have guided us to prosperity because we made a deal with ourselves that we wouldn’t let the will of others stand in the way to a better life. The way to achieve this better life is through economic growth but unfortunately the greens see this otherwise.

As seen in the quote above what the game plan of the green movement is a ‘more equitable world’ with an end to economic growth and that’s the deal they want us to make with the people of the world. It’s a shame knowing that if they succeed the same people they’re trying to help will never know that feeling of liberty or achievement or self-reliance because they will be reliant on everyone else to meet their needs for them.

The statement is already seething in anti-capitalist, pro-socialist rhetoric but it gets even better. Apparently, this thirst for achievement in one’s self in pro-economic capitalist society is also ‘plundering the world’ and ‘making people miserable’. So feel guilty for filling your gas tank up and taking your kids to the country fair to consume sausage and peppers knowing that you’re plundering it from some poor developing nation that will soon be unable to cope with global warming as their entire population spontaneously incinerates. Be miserable as you watch your television, or browse the internet or read a book by light provided by electricity routed to your house through infrastructure built by hard working Americans trying to ensure an easier, better life for the generations to follow.

Perhaps the most amusing aspect of this entire quote was that it was uttered by someone working for International Development (emphasis on development). One would assume, by her title, she would be in the business of promoting development rather than vilifying it. How’s that job working out?