It's inevitable. The talk at work, or in the coffee shop, or at school tomorrow, will be Live Earth. The memes are already evident: The attendance was poor, the participants were phoney, there will be no permanent effect. I heard them all on MSM yesterday. Even XM Radio, who devoted six channels to 24 hour coverage, perpetuated the fallacies.
Like good scouts, we must all Be Prepared. So take a minute to review the garbage that the corporate global warming debunkers will have planted at the water cooler tomorrow, so you can respond.
First, don't go to that cooler without ammunition. Surprisingly, the best source for your Republican co-workers this week may be the June 28 issue of Rolling Stone.
The reporting is outstanding.
In one of several theme articles ("Six Years of Deceit") Tim Dickinson charts the concerted effort by Cheney and Co. to obfuscate and therefore destroy climate science.
Even former White House insiders were shocked by the vice president's see-no-evil performance." "I don't see how he can say that with a straight face anymore," Christine Todd Whitman, who clashed privately with Cheney over climate policy during her tenure as the administration's first chief of the Enviornmental Protection Agency, [said]...Cheney believes...that [climate science] is a hoax..."They've got a political clientele that does not want to be regulated..."
The mag also has a great chart "The Climate Cabal" that includes everyone from Phil Cooney (erstwhile chief minister of misinformation for the American Petroleum Institute, Chief of Staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and now "Corporate Issues Manager" for Exxon Mobil) to the deservedly indicted J. Steven Griles (who never met a coal mine he didn't love.)Pin it up over the urinal in the men's room, for those who want to pretend they aren't looking (but laminate it first.)
But the real challenge will come when the folks at the cooler begin to spout the memes that this administration and their black hearted hydrocarbon addicted supporters have embedded into our culture as urban legends.
The Science Isn't Solid. It's been 20 years since anyone with true scientific credentials challenged the facts of global warming. This week's Science (the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) includes another article clearly proving through chemical analysis that the carbon that's changing the atmosphere is our carbon. The only people that MSM can get to make their dumb point/counterpoint pieces "fair and balanced" are those on the take from big carbon.
It will destroy the economy. President Bush has cited a discredited study that claimed Kyoto would have cost us 4.9 million jobs. That study ignored the "cap and trade" components of Kyoto. In fact, we are paying for our addiction to oil in Iraq every day--about $100 billion a year. And there are many other costs--$4.6 billion a year in damages to forests, rivers, buildings and monuments, $54.7 billion a year to treat debilitating air pollution diseases. If we actually made the oil companies pay all the damages they cause, gas would cost $13 a gallon. (In fact, of course, it does.)
Making changes will make us all poor.There are very small changes that could achieve very big effects. Just a few examples...Replacing incandescent light bulbs with those curly fluorescents eliminates more than 150 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. Staggering work times to get rid of rush hour would save 60 million barrels of oil a year. We could displace all of our use of foreign oil with simple, off-the-shelf technology.
And that picture above the fold? Just capping the natural gas wells in Tanzania that are burning because no one is interested in building the infrastructure to use the gas would save more carbon emissions than all the Kyoto goals together.