More deluded Greenie misanthropy

Excerpts below from Paul Watson, Founder and President of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. He not only wants to kill 5 out of six people on earth but he even wants to kill your cat! He says that doom for all is the only alternative but the fact that for centuries world living standards have been steadily RISING as the world's population grows shows that it is hatred of people rather than the facts that drives him. That he even thinks it is worth proposing unprecedented mass murder shows how deeply unhinged he is

Today, escalating human populations have vastly exceeded global carrying capacity and now produce massive quantities of solid, liquid, and gaseous waste. Biological diversity is being threatened by over-exploitation, toxic pollution, agricultural mono-culture, invasive species, competition, habitat destruction, urban sprawl, oceanic acidification, ozone depletion, global warming, and climate change. It's a runaway train of ecological calamities. It's a train that carries all the earth's species as unwilling passengers with humans as the manically insane engineers unwilling to use the brake pedal.

The latest reports from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List (IUCN) - a database measuring the global status of Earth's 1.5 million scientifically named species - states quite confidently that we will lose half of them by 2150. This is a cataclysmic prediction, yet it is strangely absent from the world's media. No one wants to hear about it. It's depressing. We would rather collectively deny ecological realities.

I've heard from some denialists that species extinction is natural. Yes it is, but the normal extinction rate over millions of years has been about one species per year and the niche vacated is readily filled by another species that begins to specialize in filling that niche. But, we are now losing species faster than they can be replaced and entire ecological niches are being vacated permanently.....

But, would we do this if we were diagnosed with a terminal disease? No, as depressing as that revelation would be, we would address possible remedies. We would look for a cure. We would try to survive.

The planet's ecosystem is a collective living organism and operates very much like the human body. Water is the blood of the earth. It provides the same function in the body as it does for the earth. Water transports nutrients to the land and transports waste to the sea or more specifically the estuaries and salt marshes that function as the liver for the earth, cleansing the water of the toxins. Water circulates through the ecosystem from the sea into the clouds falling back onto the land and returning to the sea again. It is pumped by the energy of the sun, the heart of the earth. It's a continuous cyclic movement of nutrient bearing, waste removing action that keeps the land fertile.

A river is an artery and a vein, and streams and brooks are capillaries. Put a dam on a river and you cut off an artery preventing nutrients from moving downstream and you cut off the vein preventing the waste from the land from being removed and cleansed. Plankton, plants, and especially forests are the lungs of the earth, removing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. Overfishing, plankton harvesting, and deforestation is literally diminishing global lung capacity. Species work interdependently to develop mutually beneficial strategies that maintain and strengthen ecosystems. Every species removed diminishes the system and weakens the collective body of the biosphere.

Humans are presently acting upon this body in the same manner as an invasive virus with the result that we are eroding the ecological immune system. A virus kills its host and that is exactly what we are doing with our planet's life support system. We are killing our host the planet Earth.

I was once severely criticized for describing human beings as being the "AIDS of the Earth." I make no apologies for that statement. Our viral like behaviour can be terminal both to the present biosphere and ourselves. We are both the pathogen and the vector. But we also have the capability of being the anti-virus if only we can recognize the symptoms and address the disease with effective measures of control....

I remember walking along the beaches in Vancouver harbour a few decades ago. Every single stone overturned sent a flurry of disturbed baby crabs scurrying to find new cover. I was fascinated by the sheer number of tiny crustaceans that I observed on those walks. Today, I have not found a single young crab under a single rock on those beaches. They were picked clean by Vietnamese immigrants that descended like locusts onto those beaches and stripped them clean. And criticism of that exploitation immediately elicited accusations of racism.

Today racism, cultural rights, and the right to exploit nature for commercial gain are the weapons used to defend gross over-exploitation of species and the destruction of natural habitats. An extinction event is a quickly accelerating process. The number of species removed will rise relevant to the rising number of host species. There is only one cure, only one way of stopping this rising epidemic of extinctions. The solution requires an extraordinarily immense effort by all of human society but it is achievable.

We need to re-wild the planet. We need to "get ourselves back to the garden" as Joni Mitchell once so poetically framed it. This is a process that will require a complete overhaul of all of humanities economic, cultural, and life style systems. Within the context of our present anthropocentric mind-set the solution is impossible. It will require a complete transformation of all human realities.

We should not be living in human communities that enclose tiny preserved ecosystems within them. Human communities should be maintained in small population enclaves within linked wilderness ecosystems. No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas. Communication systems can link the communities.

In other words, people should be placed in parks within ecosystems instead of parks placed in human communities. We need vast areas of the planet where humans do not live at all and where other species are free to evolve without human interference.

We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion. We need to eliminate nationalism and tribalism and become Earthlings. And as Earthlings, we need to recognize that all the other species that live on this planet are also fellow citizens and also Earthlings. This is a planet of incredible diversity of life-forms; it is not a planet of one species as many of us believe.

We need to stop burning fossil fuels and utilize only wind, water, and solar power with all generation of power coming from individual or small community units like windmills, waterwheels, and solar panels. Sea transportation should be by sail. The big clippers were the finest ships ever built and sufficient to our needs. Air transportation should be by solar powered blimps when air transportation is necessary.

All consumption should be local. No food products need to be transported over hundreds of miles to market. All commercial fishing should be abolished. If local communities need to fish the fish should be caught individually by hand.

Preferably vegan and vegetarian diets can be adopted. We need to eliminate herds of ungulates like cows and sheep and replace them with wild ungulates like bison and caribou and allow those species to fulfill the proper roles in nature. We need to restore the prey predator relationship and bring back the wolf and the bear. We need the large predators and ungulates, not as food, but as custodians of the land that absorbs the carbon dioxide and produces the oxygen. We need to live with them in mutual respect.

We need to remove and destroy all fences and barriers that bar wildlife from moving freely across the land. We need to lower populations of domestic housecats and dogs. Already the world's housecats consume more fish than all the world's seals and we have made the cow into the largest aquatic predator on the planet because more than one half of all fish taken from the sea is converted into meal for animal feed.

We need to stop flying, stop driving cars, and jetting around on marine recreational vehicles. The Amish survive without cars and so can the rest of us.

Who should have children? Those who are responsible and completely dedicated to the responsibility which is actually a very small percentage of humans. Being a parent should be a career. Whereas some people are engineers, musicians, or lawyers, others with the desire and the skills can be fathers and mothers. Schools can be eliminated if the professional parent is also the educator of the child.

This approach to parenting is radical but it is preferable to a system where everyone is expected to have children in order to keep the population of consumers up to keep the wheels of production moving. An economic and political system dependent on continuous growth cannot survive the ecological law of finite resources. There is, of course, a complexity of problems in adjusting to a new design that will simply allow us to survive the consequences of our past ecological folly.

Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach. It won't be easy but then it's better than the alternative.

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Truthless Tasmanian Greenie

Greenie "facts" are rarely anything of the sort

CELEBRITY protesters are giving activism a bad name. Australians have endured the truly mediocre musician Pink blathering on about the wool industry, actress Toni Collette sounding off on wool and mining, and now Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan has weighed in (again) on the timber industry... Highly quotable, he is frequently consulted by the ALP's media arm, the ABC, whenever the national broadcaster wants an articulate critic to paint a word portrait of an island state populated by oafish rampaging thugs intent on raping the environment. As the poster boy for the deep Greens, his work has been featured in The Guardian, the voice of the Left in Britain, and has a longish whine currently featuring in London's conservative newspaper The Daily Telegraph, and the Melbourne-based left-wing periodical The Monthly....

Sufficient to say that an injection of fact might enhance some of the author's exports. Another who feels the same way is Federal Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation Minister Eric Abetz, who yesterday took a critic's blue pencil to Flanagan's most recent work at the biennial conference of the Institute of Foresters of Australia and the New Zealand Institute of Forestry at Coffs Harbour on the NSW North Coast.

According to Abetz, who actually does know something about forestry, as opposed to Flanagan, whose knowledge may lie in the literary field, the essay "tells more untruths than Pinocchio on a bad day". In fact, Abetz claims Flanagan has inserted some 70 "deliberate or inexcusably negligent errors of fact, selective citing of fact, or twisting of facts".

He takes the writer to task for making claims such as "the great majority of Tasmanians appear to be overwhelmingly opposed to old-growth logging", and asks, if this is so, why the Greens, the only party with a policy to completely end old-growth forestry in Tasmania, polled just 17 per cent of the vote at the 2006 state election - a decline on the previous election. He also cites the 2004 federal election, noting that Labor, supported by the Greens, lost two House of Representative seats and a Senate seat, and the Greens' vote went backward, with policies aimed at shutting the Tasmanian forest industry.

In the second paragraph of his article, Flanagan makes the claim that the Federal Court has found the forestry industry to be illegal, but this, too, is at best a huge stretch and at worst an untruth because the court actually ruled that in one small patch of forest, Forestry Tasmania was operating outside the terms of the Tasmanian Regional Forest agreement, as defined by the court. Readers on the mainland and in Britain wouldn't have a clue about the details of the case and would no doubt believe Flanagan's bald assertion.

It is a pity his audience won't and don't want to hear Abetz's response, but though the author claims that Tasmania's great forests will soon "belong only to myth as the last of these extraordinary places is sacrificed to the wood-chipper's greed", the reality is that Tasmania will continue to have 47 per cent of its forests forever protected, including 79 per cent of the old-growth forests, and more than half of the Styx.

Nor do Flanagan's repeated claims that old-growth forests are logged for wood chips stand up. Those trees are logged for their precious timber for craft wood, furniture and veneers. Only the residue is chipped for paper - which is better than permitting it to be wasted.

What is it about timber - the most sustainable, most energy efficient of all our resources - that people like Flanagan cannot get their heads around or dislike so intensely? Do they really want to live in concrete boxes decorated with moulded plastics and admire fittings made of long chains of polymer? Tasmania is home to all manner of self-appointed protest groups, Doctors for Forests, Lawyers for Trees, whatever. Perhaps Flanagan wants to initiate Novelists for Paperless Books. What is obvious is his fiction is apiece with the myths that have sustained the Greens and the loopier members of the Green Left for decades, and bears no relation to the realities underpinning the island's industry and economy.

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BUSH CLIMATE POLICIES AVOID HYSTERIA

Along with almost all intellectually gifted, sophisticatedly modern and environmentally conscious people, I was horrified last week when I first heard President Bush's so-called proposals on global climate change ahead of the G8 summit this week in Germany. How could he? After all the hopes placed in the world's leadership for sensible policies to combat the greatest threat to our civilisation since Hannibal crossed the Alps? How could he let us down this time?

Of course, the reasons for my concern were somewhat different from those of the vast and expanding climate change lobby; all those hip young people from Greenpeace and all those teachers who want compulsory readings from Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth to replace morning assembly. My concern was that, as it was initially presented, the proposals seemed to represent a genuinely alarming change of heart by Mr Bush. After years of steadfastly resisting the insistent demands of the climate alarmists, of bravely ignoring the ridicule of the world's media elites, Mr Bush was finally caving in.

The talk from officials in Washington was all about the global scientific consensus on the need to reduce carbon emissions, about the need for international agreements. Over in Brussels C. Boyden Gray, Mr Bush's sibilantly smooth Ambassador to the European Union, was out there on all the news programmes, confirming that, yes, this really was Mr Bush's Damascene moment.

Fortunately, as the rest of the world quickly discovered to its horror, it took only a slightly more detailed perusal of the speech than Ambassador Gray had obviously given it to realise that this great capitulation by the United States was nothing of the sort. Mr Bush was not, after all, kneeling at the altar of the Church of Environmentally Aware Correctness and asking to be baptised anew in the healing waters of Kyoto-style targets and carbon emissions caps. He was, in fact, to the disgust of the climate change lobby's hierarchy, politely declining to join the Gadarene rush of European Union's leadership into the economic abyss and, instead, largely repeating the only really sensible set of proposals to deal with the challenge.

The parties meeting at the G8 this week will do their best to hide their divisions on the subject, but there is no getting away from it. Europe remains intent, at least in its public declarations, to commit itself to policies that are based on what can only be called an ideology of climate change, a faith-based approach to long-term environmental policy, with scant reference to hard political and economic facts. The US has opted for pragmatism.

The broad outlines of the American approach can be summarised as follows. Yes, global warming is a reality. Yes, it is caused in significant part by human activity and, yes, much of that is the result of the production of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide. But, no, we will not sign up to targets that are either unattainable or meaningless, or worse, if taken seriously will prove economically self-immolating.

Into this category can certainly be put Angela Merkel's plans for strict targets on global temperatures (can we also aim for compulsory targets on the number of wars, terrorist attacks and embarrassing defeats by our national football teams while we're at it?) No, we will not ignore the inescapable reality that three quarters of the increase in greenhouse gas emissions in the next 50 years will be produced by developing countries, which means that, even if we reduced our own countries to a stone-age level of economic activity, we would make barely a dent in the scale of C02 emission concentrations in the atmosphere.

And so, yes, we will continue to place much hope (and quite a lot of our cash) in the rapidly expanding possibilities of technological change. Early estimates for the US in 2006 show that emissions actually fell last year for the first time since 1991, and for the first time ever in a year when the US did not experience a recession. That suggests that American companies and consumers are already finding ways to trim their carbon footprint and to lower the carbon concentration of their economic activity.

This progress would certainly be further assisted by good public policy, such as a carbon tax, a proposal many of the current crop of presidential candidates on both sides of the political divide, now favour.

Have you noticed, by the way, that Europeans like to sneer at the US for being antiscience and replacing the rule of reason with Biblical fundamentalism? In fact, almost all the really exciting new research into the technologies of emissions reduction, carbon capture and carbon sequestration are being done by clever scientists in the US.

Most of the dire warnings of the global climate change crowd are based on the most extreme projections of the impact of warming, combined with projections of absolutely no improvements in the technology that will help us deal with the challenge over the next century. You don't have to be a sunny optimist to think that that gloom-laden scenario, wholly at odds with historical precedent, will prove to be more than a little off the mark.

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EU CLIMATE TARGET LACKS SCIENTIFIC BASIS, SAYS CHINA

The developing world's resistance to Western-led initiatives over climate change stepped up yesterday when China rejected the European Union's key global warming target. Unveiling its own long-awaited "Climate Change Action Plan", the Chinese government said the EU's goal of keeping a rise in global temperatures to within two degrees centigrade was in need of more work. "I fear this lacks a scientific basis," said Ma Kai, the minister in charge of China's chief economic planning body, the National Development and Reform Commission.

China has already given notice that it will reject any calls for a mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions at the G8 meeting of major economic powers in Germany this week. India, which like China is not a member of the G8 but attends as a representative of major emerging economies, has also rejected emissions caps. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, a third member of the same "developing nation club", has meanwhile attacked a proposal by President George W Bush for a summit of 15 polluting nations to come up with a global climate change plan by the end of next year.

Developing countries supported the Kyoto accord on global warming partly because it set them no clear targets for their contribution to the fight against global warming. All argue that with per capita emissions far lower than the West's, they should be allowed to first focus on development and the environment later.

China has become increasingly defensive since the International Energy Agency reported that it could overtake the United States this year as the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. The goals which China announced yesterday do not differ from existing targets, several of which are not yet being met. Among them is a plan to improve energy intensity - the consumption of energy per unit of gross domestic product - by 20 per cent from 2005 to 2010. Given that its GDP is rising by an average of about 10 per cent per year, even that figure would only slow the growth of energy use, not cut it. Last year, the reduction in China was only 1.2 per cent, far short of the four per cent needed every year to meet its stated goal.

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Congress: Don't interfere with oil and gas ... please!

Congress could take concrete steps to help consumers at the pump by removing roadblocks to new oil production, reducing restraints on refining capacity, and improving the investment climate, says H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis. Congress bears far more blame than private oil companies for high gas prices, explains Burnett:

* While oil companies' overall profits are large, at about 9 cents per dollar of revenue, their profit margins are much lower than many industries including banking, pharmaceuticals, computers and many household goods.

* The oil industry has been repeatedly investigated by multiple agencies at the request of both Democratic and Republican Congresses, and Democratic and Republican administrations, but it's never been found to be guilty of colluding or price fixing.

* This is no surprise, since even the largest private oil company in the world owns less than 3 percent of the oil that it delivers to the market each day.

* World oil prices are not set by big oil companies in the United States, but rather by supply and demand conditions in the market, as often manipulated by state-run oil companies -- who own most of world's oil -- in OPEC and Russia.

* Even in the face of congressional hostility and forced nationalization of foreign-owned oil and gas deposits, the industry has done its best to increase oil reserves -- the number of oil and gas wells operating in the United States has tripled since 2000.

By contrast, rather than helping consumers, Congress's actions have reduced the available supply of gasoline and made us more dependent on foreign oil, says Burnett.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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