What Holmes is Listening to

While reading these stories:

Steve Nash on living sugar-free.

The Green Death

Hatton on Hurricanes.

Charlie Martin on Climategate and the Big Picture.

(See that? See what I did there?)

Nothing's ever good enough for environmental activists

So why bother trying to please them? First they complained about landfills overflowing with old electronic equipment that wasteful members of our evil throwaway society were casting off.

So people started recycling electronic equipment and components. Markets rose up to meet that need. But now those markets are behaving badly.

"It is being recycled, but it's being recycled in the most horrific way you can imagine," said Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, the Seattle-based environmental group that tipped off Hong Kong authorities. "We're preserving our own environment, but contaminating the rest of the world."

The gear most likely to be shipped abroad is collected at free recycling drives, often held each April around Earth Day, recycling industry officials say. The sponsors -- chiefly companies, schools, cities and counties -- often hire the cheapest firms and do not ask enough questions about what becomes of the discarded equipment, the officials say.

Unnatural disasters

Frank Furedi takes note of the religious overtones in people's responses to the recent UK floods.

The prophets of Biblical times, who warned of the misfortune that would befall those who turned away from God, have been replaced by computer-generated models which apparently conclusively prove that ‘The End is Nigh!’ One green commentator and former adviser to the government said of the floods in England: ‘The drumbeat of disaster that heralds global warming quickened its tempo this week; some parts of Britain had a sixth of their annual rainfall in 12 hours…. It has all been foreseen, and for far too long.’ (2) Foreseen where? In the Book of Revelations?

Claims of a prophecy foretold add an ominous Biblical quality to all the media coverage warning of an impending age of apocalyptic floods. These alarmist interpretations of the rainfall in Britain seem to suggest that the Biblical cautionary tales about floods – in which floodwaters were seen as punishment for our sins – continue to excite the Western cultural imagination. We do not quite have a Deluge, and there is no new Noah to save us – but we have been left in no doubt that the floods in England show that God is displeased with the human species and our sinful ways. The Rt Rev Graham Dow, Bishop of Carlisle, was quoted as saying: ‘We are reaping the consequences of our moral degradation, as well as the environmental damage that we have caused.’ In the bishop’s view, the floods are some kind of payback for man’s ‘arrogant’ behaviour and especially for his disregard for the welfare of the planet. Sodom and Gomorrah meets irresponsible ecological behaviour, with disastrous consequences for humanity.

You mean it's not Bush's fault?

UN Secretary General blames slaughter in Darfur on global warming.

We live in a degraded age

Old-time religion:

--They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat but not its light, so, at the command of God, the fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness. It is a never ending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. Of all the plagues with which the land of the Pharaohs were smitten one plague alone, that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall we give to the darkness of hell which is to last not for three days alone but for all eternity?

--The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

New age religion:

Ryan Gwin is oblivious to everybody around him, hunched over the coffee table in the lounge room. He is toiling away with a pencil and paper, putting the finishing touches to an essay about climate change.

He is six years old.

"I wanted to make a book so we wouldn’t use cars so much,” he says, deadpan.

"Because cars use fuel and that goes up into the atmosphere and causes global warming."

Ryan’s book, titled, How To Save Our World: To Stop Globl Waming, contains sketches of cars and planes, crossed through with red pen. It is both disturbing and inspiring.

For the record, the reporter who found Ryan’s book “inspiring” is one Linton Besser. Poor little Ryan - shown by the SMH working in near darkness on his Junior Unabomber Manifesto - is bus crazy:

On the last page, a blue and white State Transit bus chugs its way through the suburbs. In small letters, Ryan has written: “powrd by nachrl gas”.

The bus has become something of a theme - when his father, Rhys, returns from work, Ryan usually asks anxiously if his bus was a gas-powered model ...

Is it acceptable that a six-year-old be rendered anxious every day by the mere matter of bus fuel? His teachers aren’t helping:

“At school, we’re talking about the living planet. Using cars and knocking down all the trees is causing animals to die, because they don’t have a home,” he said.

You couldn't get me to give up toilet paper

Colin Beavan and Michelle Conlin try to spend a year making "No Impact" on the environment.

Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.

...

Toothpaste is baking soda (a box makes trash, to be sure, but of a better quality than a metal tube), but Ms. Conlin is still wearing the lipstick she gets from a friend who works at Lancôme, as well as moisturizers from Fresh and Kiehl’s. When the bottles, tubes and jars are empty, Mr. Beavan has promised her homemade, rules-appropriate substitutes. (Nothing is a substitute for toilet paper, by the way; think of bowls of water and lots of air drying.)

Eeeuuuw! Me, I like to get the thickest toilet paper imaginable--and the biggest rolls. Have you seen these? They're the size of wagon wheels.

The global warming religion

Czech President Vaclav Klaus provides a counterpoint to Al Gore's testimony before Congress today. Klaus sent a letter to Congress urging against adoption of stringent climate control policies.

Klaus said poor nations would also be hurt by efforts to impose limits and standards on emissions of gases believed to cause global warming.

"They will not be able to absorb new technological standards required by the anti-greenhouse religion, their products will have difficulty accessing the developed markets, and as a result the gap between them and the developed world will widen," he wrote.

"This ideology preaches earth and nature and under the slogans of their protection -- similarly to the old Marxists -- wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central, now global, planning of the whole world," he added.

It's like Slavery and the Holocaust combined

Al Gore's "offensive" passion for the environment. Robert J Barro looks at Gore's book, Earth in the Balance.

Gore regards the threat to the environment as so serious and imminent that he likens it to the Nazi Holocaust: ''In the 1930s, when Kristallnacht revealed the nature of Hitler's intentions toward the Jews...the U.S. and the rest of the world [were] slow to act.... Now, warnings of a different sort signal an environmental holocaust without precedent.... Once again, world leaders waffle.... Yet today the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin.''

Gore goes on to compare the environmental danger to the injustice of American slavery: ''Most...of the generation that wrote the Constitution were partially blind when it came to the inalienable rights of the African-Americans as slaves.... Today, most...are partially blind when it comes to our connection with the natural world.'' Some people regard this passion as admirable, but I regard it as reckless and offensive.

In any event, the hyperbole is hard to reconcile with Gore's recent support of the release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Apparently, during a Presidential campaign, moderating the rise in oil prices is more important than saving the world from holocaust and slavery.

Thanks, Stuart, for the link.

An army of Al Gores

Al's on the march, recruiting hundreds of volunteers to go forth and spread his message.

Gore has trained nearly 1,000 of his foot soldiers to give the same presentation that he delivers in the movie [An Inconvenient Truth]. His disciples, who are required to give at least 10 talks a year, are not just scientists but volunteers from all walks of life including teachers, housewives and even celebrities like Cameron Diaz.

...

During this global-warming boot camp, Gore stands in front of his cavalry for about 12 hours and explains the slide show presentation he gives in the movie. The volunteers are not required to follow a set script, but Gore offers specific advice on how to engage the audience and use metaphors to explain complex scientific information. A scientist on Gore's staff is present during the training to answer any technical questions posed by the volunteers, and a professional speech trainer offers public speaking advice.