Posts Tagged: Global warming

Global warming — 2 Comments
20
Feb 10

Con #01 Anatomy of a Con job

ANATOMY OF A CON JOB

“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.” —George Orwell

If you look with your understanding, the crimes against humanity are written across the rotting visages of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Like a couple of aging prostitutes, these leading architects of twentieth-century evil still sell their wares to those with an insatiable lust for the power of the crown.

THE CLUB OF ROME

Birth Mother of the Environmental Movement

The moldy twosome have something else in common. Both have been active members of an international think tank from the dark side of the force called the Club of Rome. Founded at the Rockefeller’s estate in Bellagio, Italy, in 1968, some of the other fraternity brothers and sisters include Al Gore, David Rockefeller, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and Mikhail Gorbachev.

And there is no one better to give you the short version of the Club’s agenda than Gorby himself:

“The threat of environmental crisis will be the ‘internal disaster key’ that will unlock the New World Order.”

Who let this guy out of Lubyanka?

Their more precisely stated goal is population control. The solution? Create an environmental catastrophe like, oh, say, “global warming” and blame it on the planet’s most heinous villain—man himself.

But I should let them tell it:

“In searching for the new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. . . . But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned, namely mistaking symptoms for cause. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changing attitudes and behaviors that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”

Sounds like a good plan . . . if you’re Darth Vader.

In 1972, the Club took the world stage with the publication of a book they had commissioned to be written by a group of MIT scientists. It was called The Limits to Growth. Examining the planet’s population growth in relation to available resources, the report concluded that the planet would run out of resources sometime in the next 100 years, resulting in a catastrophic decline in population and industrial production.

As one reviewer put it, the authors examine

“. . . the impact of humanity on the world ecology and of steps taken toward remediating the accelerating approach to a train wreck that is mankind’s ill-managed and uncontrolled ‘footprint’ on this planet’s environment.”

Still, these trends and their consequences could be altered, it argued; we had to be less, do less and have less. The brand for this Orwellian path to planetary salvation was sustainable development.

Heavily promoted, the book reached opinion leaders in political, scientific and economic circles as it exploded around the planet like the Harry Potter of environmentalism. It sold 12 million copies in thirty languages despite the fact that the research had all the scientific rigor of a plagiarized term paper for a freshman biology class.

“An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.” —Mohandas Gandhi

Assailed by top scientists, the research was shoddy in the extreme. Population expert and author Professor Julian Simon said, “The Limits to Growth has been blasted as foolishness or fraud by almost every economist who has read it closely or reviewed it in print.”

Yale economist Henry Wallich reviewed the book saying, “. . . the quantitative content of the model comes from the authors’ imagination, although they never reveal the equations that they used.”

But it is a PR world and with the publication of this book, the modern environmental movement was born. Midwifed to life in a blanket of deceit, it was yet hailed as the savior, not of mankind, but of the planet it claimed was being fried to a crisp by humanity’s toxic binge of carbon dioxide.

The scientific fraud is its own malice, but few were able to see the underlying strategy—that the book would serve as the foundation of a global public relations campaign that would mesmerize legislators, educators, and countless organizations of goodwill and would eventually set the stage for the biggest rip-off in human history. But I am getting ahead of myself.

This then was Con #1: The scientific basis of the book that launched the environmental movement calling for “sustainable development” and a reduction of man’s leper-like carbon footprint on the planet was, and is, a scam, a hoax, a falsehood—environmental snake oil.

“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Which leads us to the second piece of the puzzle, Con #2. Who’d have thought that . . .

© 2010 by John Truman Wolfe. All rights reserved.

Global warming — 4 Comments
20
Feb 10

Con #04 Biofuel craze is destroying nature

BIOFUELS

A friend of mine drives around to restaurants late at night and collects used vegetable oil. He uses it in his diesel Mercedes that will qualify for Medicare next year. He has converted the Mercedes to burn vegetable oil as fuel.

One of the solutions to the “carbon crisis” is biofuels.

Biofuels are essentially fuels produced from plants.

There are two basic types of biofuels. Ethanol, which can be used as petrol and is made from corn, sugar cane, beets, wheat and other grains, and biodiesel which is made from oil seeds, tree nuts or waste oil (à la the Medicare Mercedes above).

Biofuels are supposed to be clean, convenient and carbon neutral. But don’t look too closely because the environmental consequences of their use are something out of a Stephen King novel.

DEFORESTATION

The planet’s tropical rain forests are being obliterated as if some frenzied Jolly Green Giant were running an immense weed wacker through the Amazon.

Biofuels are broadly promoted as a solution to the production of carbon dioxide. But a closer examination reveals that they damage the environment on two fronts: the first is massive planetary deforestation.

Tropical forests are the most powerful carbon reservoirs on the planet. In other words, they sequester and store carbon dioxide more effectively than any other resource.

Cutting forests down not only releases massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it eliminates them as both a carbon reservoir and a generator of oxygen. (Again, for those of you that slept through high school biology, or, like me, never had the guts to take it, plants use carbon dioxide and sunlight to make oxygen.)

But government mandates and corporate greed are pushing the cultivation of biofuels so intently that tropical forests are vanishing from the planet at an appalling rate.

The European Union, for instance, has mandated a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020. This is to be partly achieved by mandating that 10 percent of vehicles be powered by biofuel. Financial incentives, which we examine in detail below, have driven global investment in biofuels from $5 billion in 1995 to an estimated $100 billion in 2010. Everyone from George Soros to British Petroleum and Shell Oil are players in this market.

As a result, vast amounts of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil have been destroyed for soybean and sugar cane cultivation. Brazil proudly announced last year that deforestation was on track to double that year.

A report by Friends of the Earth revealed that between 1985 and 2000, the development of palm oil plantations in Malaysia was responsible for the deforestation of 87 percent of the country’s forests. Eighty-seven percent! In fact, palm oil is now referred to as “deforestation diesel.”

In Sumatra and Borneo, 4 million hectares of forest were lost to palm oil farms (9.8 million acres—almost twice the size of the state of New Hampshire).

As an added sucker punch to Mother Nature, biofuel-driven deforestation has also led to Holocaust-like species extinction. The forests in Malaysia and Indonesia are home to the orangutan, Sumatran rhinos, tigers, gibbons, tapirs, proboscis monkeys and thousands of other species, many of which are under serious threat of extinction from habitat loss.

And then there is this troubling little fact: while biofuels generate less carbon emissions than oil, they are doing so by replacing vegetation and soil that suck up even more carbon. In other words, the carbon absorption lost by razing the wilderness to cultivate biofuels is dramatically more than the gains achieved by using the cleaner- burning fuels.

The “inconvenient truth” is that the biofuel craze is destroying nature, and, incidentally, adding to the carbon dioxide on the planet, not decreasing it.

OCEAN POLLUTION AND DEAD ZONES

If you have ever walked by a body of water and noticed an acrid smell, felt your eyes burning or saw that it was blanketed by a thick red, blue or green plant covering, you’ve probably had an unfortunate run-in with an HAB, Harmful Algal Bloom.

In almost all cases, the production of biofuels is accompanied by the use of nitrogen, phosphorous, herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, etc.

Nitrogen, along with other toxic materials, filters downward to the water table and finds its way to rivers, streams and eventually the ocean. There, the nitrogen and, to a lesser degree, the pesticides generate massive, abnormal and very toxic “algal blooms,” which rapidly decay into huge areas of oxygen-sucking dead algae. This is highly destructive of marine life.

Corn cultivation utilizes the greatest application of fertilizers and pesticides. No surprise, then, that the heaviest concentration of these toxins occurs in the U.S. corn belt. The result? Nitrogen and other toxins in the Mississippi River system have mercilessly poured into the Gulf of Mexico creating a dead zone of 22,000 square kilometers (8,492 square miles, an area about the size of New Jersey). It’s not just the Gulf of Mexico. The number of oceanic dead zones has spread around the planet like an environmental cancer.

Since the onset of the biofuel craze in the 1980s, the number of dead zones has increased 450 percent.

But that’s not all.

Species Extinction

There are currently about 405 dead zones on the planet, the largest, 70,000 square kilometers (27,020 square miles—larger than the state of West Virginia), in the Baltic Sea. Species extinction is a direct effect of these zones. In the last ten years, 14,000 dead seals and dolphins have washed up on California’s coast and 650 gray whales have been found beached. In Florida, hundreds of manatees have been killed and 80 percent of the coral reef in the Caribbean has been smothered. Seventy-five percent of California’s fish-rich kelp forest has been ruined and the problem is beginning to affect the availability of seafood for human consumption.

About 1.7 million plant and animal species have been identified on the planet. According to some reports, species extinction is now occurring at the rate of about 20,000 to 30,000 annually. Whatever the number, the endangered species list increased 150 percent last year alone. The single largest reason for this is habitat destruction and pollution, most of which is a result of biofuel production.

Makes you feel warm all over, doesn’t it?

Oxygen Depletion

I don’t know about you, but I’ve grown rather partial to breathing. It brings a certain awareness to life.

So the fact that biofuel production is depleting the planet’s oxygen is more than a little troubling.

Sounds alarmist, doesn’t it? Perhaps even a bit conspiratorial. How could one of the most prolific solutions to global warming be destroying the planet’s supply of oxygen?

The oceans are the planet’s largest carbon sink. (The rain forests are the most effective carbon sinks; oceans are the largest.) It is the algae in the oceans that absorb the bulk of the earth’s CO2. That’s right; the earth’s primary CO2 sponge is the algae in the oceans.

The algae then convert sunlight and the CO2 in the ocean into oxygen.

Seventy to eighty percent (70%–80%) of this planet’s oxygen is produced by the algae in the oceans. Yet the nitrogen, phosphates and other chemicals pouring into the oceans around the world as a result of biofuel production are destroying the very element that produces the bulk of that oxygen—the algae in the oceans.

This is Con #4: Biofuels don’t reduce carbon; they destroy the rain forests and are depleting the very air we breathe. Which begs the question, have these people forgotten to pay their brain bills, are they just plain evil or . . . is there something else at play here?

And that brings us to the last piece of the puzzle and the final con.

© 2010 by John Truman Wolfe. All rights reserved.