“Turning Up the Heat on Gore.”

[asch]

Rather than jacking big's thread I'll just start fresh.
The former VPOTUS wants to change attitudes more than he wants to solve problems.
By Jonah Goldberg
As fate would have it, the same week Al Gore was testifying before Congress, I was doing a little testifying myself. Admittedly, there were a tad fewer paparazzi in the Madison, Wis., classroom where I was giving a talk on global warming (sponsored by Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow). The debate in Washington offered some familiar echoes.
One student asked a long and rambling question that went basically as follows: He understood why I think Al Gore is dishonest and misleading. But how can I criticize Gore when all he wants to do is make people change their behavior and take care of this planet?
Translation: Gore is on the side of the angels and therefore it’s mean-spirited to throw inconvenient truths back at the Oscar winner for An Inconvenient Truth. “Yeah, exactly,” the kid responded when I rephrased the question thusly.
The press and the Democrats seem to share this kidÂ’s sensibility. Covering GoreÂ’s congressional testimony, The Washington PostÂ’s Dana Milbank portrayed Gore as a man of science versus a bunch of creationist nut jobs.
Gore says global warming is “a crisis that threatens the survival of our civilization and the habitability of the Earth.” It’s graver than any war. He compares it to the asteroid that allegedly killed the dinosaurs.
But hereÂ’s the thing. If there were an asteroid barreling toward earth, we wouldnÂ’t be talking about changing our lifestyles, nor would we be preaching about reducing, reusing and recycling. We would be building giant wicked-cool lasers and bomb-carrying spaceships to go out and destroy the thing. But Gore doesnÂ’t want to explore geo-engineering (whereby, for example, weÂ’d add sulfate aerosols or other substances to the atmosphere to mitigate global warming). Why? Because solving the problem isnÂ’t really the point. As Gore makes it clear in his book, Earth in the Balance, he wants to change attitudes more than he wants to solve problems.
Indeed, he wants to change attitudes about government as much as he wants to preach environmentalism. Global warming is what William James called a “moral equivalent of war” that gives political officials the power to do things they could never do without a crisis. As liberal journalist James Ridgeway wrote in the early 1970s: “Ecology offered liberal-minded people what they had longed for, a safe, rational and above all peaceful way of remaking society ... (and) developing a more coherent central state.”
This explains Gore’s relentless talk of “consensus,” his ugly moral bullying of “deniers” and, most of all, his insistence that because there’s no time left to argue, everyone should do what he says.
Isn’t it interesting how the same people who think “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” when it comes to the war think that dissent when it comes to global warming is evil and troglodytic?
“If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor,” Gore said this week. “If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don’t say, ‘Well, I read a science fiction novel that told me it’s not a problem.’ If the crib’s on fire, you don’t speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action.”
True enough. But if your babyÂ’s crib is on fire, you donÂ’t run to a politician for help either.
You can tell that Gore’s schtick is about something more than the moderate and manageable challenge of global warming when he talks of sacrifice. On the one hand he wants everybody to change their lifestyles dramatically. These are the sacrifices the voracious energy user Al Gore won’t have to make because he can buy “carbon credits”
[for example, for your “carbon footprint” see: http://www.e-bluehorizons.net/product.php?productid=4]
for his many homes and his jet-setting.
But when asked this week about the enormous and unwise costs his plan would impose on the U.S. economy (according to the global consensus of economists), Gore said that his draconian emissions cuts are “going to save you money, and it’s going to make the economy stronger.”
Wait a second. This is the gravest crisis weÂ’ve ever faced, but if we do exactly as Gore says (but not as he does), weÂ’ll get richer in the process as we heal Mother Earth of her fever? GoreÂ’s faith-based initiative is a win-win. No wonder so many people think itÂ’s mean to disagree.
The quotes by William James and James Ridgeway should be memorized by anyone who wonders what the hidden agendas are behind the rhetorical veils of “global warming” campaign.

[asch]

This is the other one. When the principles of Ethanol production and "changing attitudes" rather than solving the so-called climate problem are observed side by side, it's easy to see where this
might be headed.
Pescovitz, David. Lab Notes: Research from the College of Engineering, University of California, Berkley
http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/labnotes/0305/patzek.html
In 2004, approximately 3.57 billion gallons of ethanol were used as a gas additive in the United States, according to the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA). During the February State of the Union address, President George Bush urged Congress to pass an energy bill that would pump up the amount to 5 billion gallons by 2012. UC Berkeley geoengineering professor Tad W. Patzek thinks that's a very bad idea.
For two years, Patzek has analyzed the environmental ramifications of ethanol, a renewable fuel that many believe could significantly reduce our dependence on petroleum-based fossil fuels. According to Patzek though, ethanol may do more harm than good.
"In terms of renewable fuels, ethanol is the worst solution," Patzek says. "It has the highest energy cost with the least benefit."
Ethanol is produced by fermenting renewable crops like corn or sugarcane. It may sound green, Patzek says, but that's because many scientists are not looking at the whole picture. According to his research, more fossil energy is used to produce ethanol than the energy contained within it.
Patzek's ethanol critique began during a freshman seminar he taught in which he and his students calculated the energy balance of the biofuel. Taking into account the energy required to grow the corn and convert it into ethanol, they determined that burning the biofuel as a gasoline additive actually results in a net energy loss of 65 percent. Later, Patzek says he realized the loss is much more than that even.
"Limiting yourself to the energy balance, and within that balance, just the fossil fuel used is just scraping the surface of the problem," he says. "Corn is not 'free energy.'"
Recently, Patzek published a fifty-page study on the subject in the journal Critical Reviews in Plant Science. This time, he factored in the myriad energy inputs required by industrial agriculture, from the amount of fuel used to produce fertilizers and corn seeds to the transportation and wastewater disposal costs. All told, he believes that the cumulative energy consumed in corn farming and ethanol production is six times greater than what the end product provides your car engine in terms of power.
Patzek is also concerned about the sustainability of industrial farming in developing nations where sugarcane and trees are grown as feedstock for ethanol and other biofuels.
"One farm for the local village probably makes sense," he says. "But if you have a 100,000 acre plantation exporting biomass on contract to Europe, that's a completely different story. From one square meter of land, you can get roughly one watt of energy. The price you pay is that in Brazil alone you annually damage a jungle the size of Greece."
If ethanol is as much of an environmental Trojan horse as Patzek's data suggests, what is the solution? The researcher sees several possibilities, all of which can be explored in tandem. First, he says, is to divert funds earmarked for ethanol to improve the efficiency of fuel cells and hybrid electric cars.
"Can engineers double the mileage of these cars?" he asks. "If so, we can cut down the petroleum consumption in the US by one-third."
For generating electricity on the grid, Patzek's "favorite renewable energy" to replace coal is solar. Unfortunately, he says that solar cell technology is still too immature for use in large power stations. Until it's ready for prime time, he has a suggestion that could raise even more controversy than his criticisms of ethanol additives.
"I've come to the conclusion that if we're smart about it, nuclear power plants may be the lesser of the evils when we compare them with coal-fired plants and their impact on global warming," he says. "We're going to pay now or later. The question is what's the smallest price we'll have to pay?"

[Moneypitt]

Anyone else see the Bali conference? This ****sucker stood up there and said the USA is a roadblock to correcting GW........Why? Because we're not dumb enough to listen to, or buy carbon credits from this TREASONOUS ass hole........The nerve of this moron, the unmitigated gaul...Who does this wanna be savior think he is?.......Treason, hang the MF er............MP

[Old Texan]

Anyone else see the Bali conference? This ****sucker stood up there and said the USA is a roadblock to correcting GW........Why? Because we're not dumb enough to listen to, or buy carbon credits from this TREASONOUS ass hole........The nerve of this moron, the unmitigated gaul...Who does this wanna be savior think he is?.......Treason, hang the MF er............MP
You'd like to think of him as some harmless imbecile, but the fool influences a lot of important matters with his general tripe.
The next Pres ought to make him the ambassador to Mars or some other solar system. Send him off on a goodwill mission to bring back clean air. Kind of a slow spaceship to nowhere deal. The pompous fool would probably volunteer to go if they told him it would put him over the top to get elected Pres, his main goal in life.:idea: :devil:

[asch]

Apparently he's already reached god status.
http://www.***boat.net/forums/attach...1&d=1197676863

[bigq]

Good stuff.
I use to be on the bandwagon for ethanol also till I researched it a little more. Something like that needs to come from waste that is recycled not something we need to grow.
Hydrogen looks like the best possibility to me right now. They can be built as internal combustion engines also, which is nice.
For homes solar is a good choice up to certain usage then geothermal looks like a great plan.
On a larger scale it looks like nuclear power?
Those are my choices, but as the articles suggest they are not really in favor of a solution, just money and power

[ULTRA26 # 1]

Good stuff.
I use to be on the bandwagon for ethanol also till I researched it a little more. Something like that needs to come from waste that is recycled not something we need to grow.
Hydrogen looks like the best possibility to me right now. They can be built as internal combustion engines also, which is nice.
For homes solar is a good choice up to certain usage then geothermal looks like a great plan.
On a larger scale it looks like nuclear power?
Those are my choices, but as the articles suggest they are not really in favor of a solution, just money and power
Same here

[SB]

I'm afraid it has to be nuclear power.
It's funny that even people like Barack, Bill Maher, and Cuomo have come around to nuclear power.