Will You Trade Liberty for Virtue? For Greens to Succeed, America Must Fail
Therefore, U.S. Vehicle Emissions Are 5.4% of Total World Man-made CO2 Emissions
(The above figure was corrected when we found the latest (?) world vehicle totals (750,000.000)
Globally, road transport is responsible for about 16% of man-made CO2 emissions. It is a common misconception that global warming is mainly caused by cars and trucks. It is important to understand that there are other, larger, contributors and ALL sources of CO2 emission must be addressed if the problem is to be solved. The chart is all global man-made CO2 emissions.
If, there is, in fact, a problem. The chart is from the International Association of Vehicle Manufacturers, here. If you don’t trust a global professional association that represents evil, polluting corporations, you are encouraged to do what I do: search the internet. I just thought it interesting that, if OICA is right with their chart, it is of more than passing interest that most of us thought vehicles were responsible for a greater share of CO2 emissions.
Incredibly, the EPA considers CO2 to be 95% of vehicle emissions. That implies to me, a non-scientist, that either the millions of tons of CO2 being constantly dumped into our atmosphere are having no provable or observable effect, or that there is something wrong with the theory of man-made green house gases causing global warming. It also seems to imply that the 5% of emissions that are sulpher dioxide, nitrogen oxide, ozone, carbon-monoxide, methane, lead and particulate matter have been successfully reduced to a non-threatening state, either to humans or the planet.
If humans are only contributing gases to the atmosphere that the planet is easily able to dissipate, and we are not demonstrably harming humans after putting 250 million vehicles on the road in the US alone, why are we being told that it is necessary to replace our entire ten trillion dollar economy with a so-called “Green Economy” – and who benefits from this idea?
Why our apparent interest in having eight dollar a gallon gasoline, as in Europe, when their prices are born out of necessity; they have no oil of their own, and most of their streets were designed hundreds of years ago, necessitating small vehicles for local access. They also impose onerous gas taxes in order to discourage driving. We, on the other hand, are said to be running out of oil and gas; our only alternative is to quickly find alternative, non-polluting fuels. This notion is known as “Peak-Oil” theory. Peak oil always makes sense as a concept, based on the very intuitive notion that there is no such thing as an inexhaustible resource, and so we must prepare for the day when that resource is exhausted.
Problem is, we have more oil today than when experts of all kinds (qualified or not) began predicting peak supplies. We don’t have a shortage of ‘fossil fuels” or other types of energy in the United States; we have a shortage of energy defined as recoverable or explorable at a given price in defined geographic areas. We have a shortage of drilling equipment and trained workers. We have a shortage of government leaders dedicated to continue the use of fossil fuels because they’ve bought into the theory that to do so would harm the planet. They are tragically, destructively wrong, and their persistence in this fantasy is liable to cause an ‘energy bubble’ that is based on having borrowed — on behalf of taxpayers — billions of dollars to be thrown at a non-existent problem fostering destructive, nonsensical solutions.
Which brings us to an overwhelming question: Are the American People so eager to be seen as virtuous that they are unwilling to let themselves see that self-interested governments and businesses, working together, are relying on that need for virtue to create opportunities for themselves. And are there enough Americans left whose BS detectors are well-developed enough to recognize a persistent propaganda campaign that is intended to rob them of their birthright so that others can construct a new society that benefits themselves and whoever they choose?
WHAT IS THE NEED? Surely, before deciding that our constitutional republic and free market economy are failures, we can pause to ask: Why the supposed necessity for change? The folks who used to warn against man-made Global Warming and have now abandoned that claim – in the face of enormous opposition – in favor of the even-more-general Climate Change (now, that’s chutzpah!), would seem to assert the following reasons:
1) Protect planet.
Does it really need protecting? All of humanity occupies only 1% of the entire surface of the planet. Our scientists have only just begun to understand weather and climate, even with the most sophisticated technology. The computer models constructed so far (on which the IPCC depends; the EPA then depends on the IPCC) have been unable to accurately predict even short-term events. They have also been unable to use the models to accurately describe historical events that correspond to GHG theory. MIT Meteorology professor Richard S. Lindzen explains the implausibility of the theory, here.
Some food for thought:
# CO2 is .038% of the atmosphere (one ten-thousandth of one per cent), a trace-gas that is alleged to be responsible for the disastrous warming of the planet due to human – mainly American – emissions.
# This insignificant trace-gas has limited ability to absorb heat. CO2′s ability to absorb heat is logarithmic, meaning the more CO2 there is, the less heat it can absorb. The first 20ppm of CO2 absorbs more heat than the next 500ppm and so forth.
# Apparently a mathematical error involving vectors contributed to the belief that massive amounts of CO2 were heating the earth (the climatologists counted both the inbound and outbound radiation, rather than allow them to cancel each other out – a zero sum).
# Our atmosphere does not, in fact, act like a greenhouse – clouds are not a pane of glass.
# The entire atmosphere is a greenhouse gas, absorbing heat and radiating it back out into space ( See scientist Alan Siddons article The Hidden Flaw in Greenhouse Theory by clicking on it at this blog’s Post titled Greenhouse Gas Theory Explained).
# A commenter to that Post said the theory is all about feedbacks – AGW says that clouds are a positive feedback because they reflect heat back to the surface; he claims its actually a negative feedback, forming clouds and producing rain when the surface heats, allowing radiation to exit the earth.
30,000 Scientists Say “No” to “Settled Science”
While you’re scouring the internet to satisfy your thirst for truth, please note the following:
The Polar Bear population is increasing – they are marine animals, accustomed to swimming; Kilimanjaro’s snowmelt has nothing to do with CO2; the ocean is neither acidifying nor rising; Antarctica’s glaciers are not disappearing; Arctic ice is thicker rather than wider, and does not melt and cause sea-rise (Archimedes’s Principle); hurricanes are not increasing in number and are not caused by AGW; highest recent temperatures were recorded in the 1930′s; steady cooling since 1998; sunspot activity biggest influence on variation; CO2 abundant in ice ages and in cold desert at night; Many scientists think CO2 increases follow warming periods.
That’s just off the top; I’m sure you can improve on the list with a little patient Googling at sites that are not dedicated to promoting the Alarmists’ attempts to fool you into giving them the political power to save the planet on your behalf, an endless task requiring monitoring of nearly every facet of life on earth.
Finally, regarding CO2. All of life on earth is part of the carbon chain. We are carbon. We breathe in nitrogen and oxygen, and exhale carbon dioxide. This makes plants and trees happy, because that is what they need for nourishment. CO2 is plant food. (And since we have a lot of forests, away from the big cities full of voters terrified of CO2, much of our emissions are sopped up by the trees.)
Not an elegant explanation, and I may have some of it wrong, but hopefully enough fact and rationality to keep you from being manipulated by dangerously ill-informed do-gooders. Go find your virtue elsewhere.
2) Curb pollution.
Our pollution problems have been left to the tender mercies of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. They’ve been around for forty years and had 17,384 employees as of 2010. They have ten regional offices which coordinate and supervise the environmental agencies of the fifty states. They have a reputation, at least among non-progressives, as being a very politicized agency, but are very proud of their progress in cleaning the environment, and the improvements, especially to air and water over the last forty years are manifest throughout the country. In other words, we have the problem covered, now and going forward.
3) Escape Peak.
Getting straightforward information on oil and gas supplies is tough, because both government and business have reason not to be candid. The current government, as most of us know, does not want anything to do with fossil fuels, and wants us to cut back on our use of energy of all kinds, by government mandate, if necessary. Oil and gas companies need to perpetuate the idea of scarcity in order to keep prices high. They also have to fool their competitors regarding their intentions about a particular exploratory project. They’re a lot like treasure hunters; even if they are pretty sure they know where the treasure is – maybe due to a map that only they possess – they can’t let others know until they find it and make their claim. Once having made that claim in oil or gas, they may be reluctant to reveal what they believe to be the full potential of the new find.
Thus, Peak Oil has become a self-perpetuating legend — constantly disproven by the passage of time and each new oil or gas discovery — that is embraced nevertheless, because the story is useful to so many different actors. If you are of a mind to hate ‘fossil fuels’ because you think they damage the planet, “Peak Oil” is for you. If you are a government that thinks the only way to curb energy usage growth is to raise prices, “Peak Oil” is a gift. If you’re in the energy business, well, as I said…
So, where is one to go for accurate info regarding availability of supplies. The United States Geological Survey(USGS), which reports on such matters, is too constrained by the definitions of the things on which they report. Most oil is owned by sovereign nations, who are either mum or mendacious on the subject. (Some probably don’t really know any data more useful than that these resources are a great political piggy bank.) What if we were able to ask someone who was recently prominent in the field and is now retired and no longer constrained by the exigencies of the business?
John Hofmeister, the recently retired CEO of Shell Oil is selling a book (Why We Hate the Oil Companies). We don’t know to what extent he is willing to stretch the truth in either the writing or the promoting of the book, but in all other aspects he should be a reliable source of information regarding his life’s work, which happened to be fossil fuels. He says we have more oil than Saudi Arabia. Sure, read the sentence again. Not a typo. He thinks there’s a trillion barrels in the Shale of the Piceance Basin of Western Colorado. He says another 500 billion bbl in the Bakken Formation of Wyoming, North Dakota and Canada. Maybe another 100 billion bbl off of our coasts. (We use about 9 million barrels/day.)
The Bakken and part of Colorado are being drilled right now, but probably not with the major actors that are needed to satisfy our growing fuel demands (no, we’re not ‘addicted’ to oil; it fuels our prosperity and creates our jobs and products). The shallow offshore fields are off limits by government fiat, as well as some inland exploration sites. The deeper offshore sites in the Gulf are very productive, but the federal moratorium on new projects will, in Hofmeister’s estimation, cost a million barrels a day, causing a $1.50-$2.00 rise in gasoline prices, and a recession in the Gulf states.
It would come as a surprise to most Americans, but not to environmentalists (who hate the idea) that the Russians, and perhaps the Chinese, drill for oil on a completely different theory regarding its origins. They don’t believe there is any such thing as Fossil Fuel, that is, oil and gas resulting from the long-ago decay of plants and animals. The largest Saudi oil well, for instance, would require a cube of decayed matter 19 miles per side to explain that well’s volume of oil. They believe, instead, that oil is formed under great heat and pressure beneath the earth’s mantle, and is spun up along the tectonic faults. The opponents of this theory say the oil would not survive the heat, and that chemical analysis always shows biological identifiers in the oil.
A topic for another Post, but a good source for in-depth info is this article with hyper-links. Nevertheless, as of mid-2009, the Russians have become the world’s biggest oil producers.
4) Protect diversity.
This is a bit of a puzzle. Richard Heinberg is an avowed opponent of the abiotic oil theory and has written about it extensively; you can google him and a lot will come up. I read one of his analyses of the phenomenon, wherein he concludes that, although there may, indeed, exist the possibility that oil is continuously formed in the bowels of the earth, it really doesn’t matter, because he considers an overabundance of oil to be as much a disaster as a shortage. He goes on to cite CO2 emissions & Global Warming, of course, but then, without explanation, he adds the last two items on our list: diversity and other resources.
I’m just going to wing these two. If you want to make a research project of them, be my guest. The diversity issue seems to be an anti-mobility complaint. The more fuel we have, the more travel, inevitably resulting in destruction of habitat as we build roads and continue to “sprawl.” This is a viewpoint widely held by those who would have us all living in high-density communes, eating locally grown foods, and walking or cycling everywhere. In a country of 300 million people who rely on mobility and individual choice, there is no way for this to be other than a disaster, but that seems to be the dream.
5) Preserve resources.
This also seems to be pretty straight-forward, Rousseau-ian anti-modernity stuff. If we keep using oil and gas and driving cars powered by internal-combustion engines, we will also continue to use the finite supplies of all the components that go into cars (steel, aluminum, fabrics, plastics, etc.), which just encourages destruction and selfish “materialism.” These folks are resistant to our history of discovering uses for materials that previously had either limited utility, or none at all. It is our inventiveness, based on our freedom, that turns these organic and inorganic materials into what then become known as “resources.”
Unless we try to let government decide everything, we will alway invent and innovate; always creating new technologies and processes. Americans are free to choose not to like technology; it’s just that without it, approximately 200 million of their fellow citizens would no longer be able to survive. Put more simply, it’s our technological infrastructure that allows so many to live in comfort and security, rather than “On Walden Pond.”
Now, I understand that the BS detector I’ve begged you to sharpen up can easily be turned on me. Fair enough. Just remember that there are determined people who think the Constitution is a malleable document written by a bunch of outmoded bigots who don’t understand that Social Justice requires a modern, Progressive mindset. These folks are unabashedly part of a movement that is out to create a just world. Unfortunately, our old, unjust world will have to be discarded in the process. Environmentalism is a great political tool for capturing the minds of even the most sophisticated; after all, who is opposed to saving the planet? And it’s just dandy as a vehicle for obtaining — and keeping — political power.
Our founders were brilliant, and prudent enough to understand that even a democracy can turn into a tyranny of the majority. That’s why they made it so hard for the federal government to reach consensus, to have a runaway branch, to bully the states, or to interfere in the lives of individual citizens. This country is neither a commune nor a parking place for folks who think their physical presence entitles them to be called Americans. America is a shared concept about liberty and protecting the individual from capricious rule.
Environmentalism is about replacing that. The CO2 part is just hot air.
