Hey, Hollywood! Time to walk the talk!

Writing for Big Hollywood, blogger Iowahawk pokes fun at movie stars whose lifestyles belie their claims to be concerned about the environment:

A Go-Green Guide for the Hollywood Community

More than ten years after the Kyoto accords, our planet continues to careen helplessly toward certain environmental destruction. The skies are choked with pollutants. Adorable helpless polar bears plunge through thinning ice caps. Ben Affleck still can’t find a decent comeback project.

The signs are ominous, but it’s not too late to do something. As a member of the entertainment community, you are uniquely qualified to save our planet from coming climate disaster. But it will take more than raising awareness — it will take action. Have your personal assistant add these 10 to-dos to your Blackberry, and let’s get the Earth on the road to recovery!

1. Reduce Water Consumption. One single dripping faucet or flushed bidet may not seem to be much of an environmental threat, but those numbers really add up when you’re hosting an NRDC fundraiser for Laurie David and all 10 of your bathrooms are in use. When possible, encourage guests to pee in the pool, and remind them that “if it’s yellow, let it mellow.” Unless you’re serving asparagus canapes.

2. “Green Begins At Home.” Whether you live in East Hampton or Topanga Canyon, there are dozens of little things you can do around your compound to reduce your carbon footprint. For instance, tell your groundskeeping crew to plant a tree. Save your leftover foie gras to grow your own homemade organic Botox. Turn off your energy wasting security cameras between 1 AM and 7 AM. If you own a vanity cattle ranch in Montana, email the trail boss and tell him/her to add Beano to your herd’s feed to reduce ozone-depleting methane emissions.

3. Upgrade To a New Gulfstream G550. Next time you take off for Cannes or Sundance or that big Environmental Defense Fund gala, stop and think how much fuel that clunky old G450 is using. Not only does the new G550 have real burled walnut and 10.8% better fuel efficiency, it has smoother ride — meaning 20% fewer annoying turbulence-related Cristal and cocaine spills. And with a maximum cruising speed of Mach 0.885 you’ll never be late for the red carpet at the Palm d’Or!

4. Crush a Third World Economic Development Movement. One of the most pressing threats facing our environment is rising income in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A generation ago these proud little dark people were happily frolicking in the rain forest, foraging for organic foods amid the wonders of nature. Today, corrupted by wealth, they are demanding environmentally hazardous consumer goods like cars and air conditioning and malaria medicine. You can do your part to stop this dangerous consumerism trend by supporting environmentally progressive leaders like Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe, and their programs for sustainable low-impact ecolabor camps.

The remaining suggestions are well worth the read.


(Cross-posted at C-Pol)

Is mandatory recycling destroying the planet?

One adviser to the British government has some heretical opinions about one of the sacraments of environmentalism, curbside recycling, as reported January 28 by The Telegraph:

Peter Jones suggested that an "urgent" review of Labour's policy on recycling was needed to make sure the collection, transportation and processing of recyclable material was not causing a net increase in greenhouse gases.

Mr Jones, a former director of the waste firm Biffa and now an adviser to environment ministers and the London Mayor, Boris Johnson, also dismissed kerbside recycling collections in many areas as "stupid" because they mixed together different materials, rendering them useless for recycling.

He suggested that much of the country's waste should simply be burnt to generate electricity.

"It might be that the global warming impact of putting material through an incinerator five miles down the road is actually less than recycling it 3,000 miles away," he said.

"We've got to urgently get a grip on how this material is flowing through the system; whether we're actually adding to or reducing the overall impact in terms of global warming potential in this process."

(Image credit: Chilliwack, BC)

Vegas: We're concerned about climate change! Really!

Las Vegas' infamous casino district, The Strip, with perhaps one of one of the largest carbon footprints per unit area to be found anywhere, will join others in pretending to be concerned about climate change on March 28. Las Vegas Review-Journal, January 29:

Planned marquee outages on the Strip come along about as often as Megabucks jackpots.

And like many of those slot-machine fortunes, lights-out events on Las Vegas Boulevard typically don't last long.

But on March 28, signs and message boards along the Strip -- the brightest spot on Earth when viewed from space, the lore goes -- will power down for 60 minutes as part of a global event intended to raise awareness of climate change.

Las Vegas is a flagship city for Earth Hour 2009, a World Wildlife Fund movement encouraging individuals, governments and businesses to dim or turn out lights. Casino executives and several local officials, including Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman and Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson, gathered Wednesday at a news conference on the south Strip to talk about Southern Nevada's role in Earth Hour.

Getting the Strip in on Earth Hour is a significant move, said David G. Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

"When it means something, turning down lights on the Strip is a very touching tribute, and it can be very effective," Schwartz said. "For the Strip to stop anything is a really big deal. The Strip doesn't like to do that."

It will be one of the few times Strip lights have been darkened for specific occasions, such as the deaths of presidents and entertainers.

This time, the lights will fade to honor Mother Earth. And it's not just resort owners on the Strip who'll participate: Nearly two dozen properties off the boulevard are scheduled to take part, including the Palms and properties belonging to Station Casinos and Boyd Gaming Corp.

Once the hour is done (with gamblers inside the casinos perhaps unaware of the spectacle outside), the warm glow of having Done Something To Save The Earth will be replaced by the warm glow of countless neon lights and incandescent bulbs, and The Strip will move on as if nothing had happened.

O Christmas Guilt, O Christmas Guilt...

Scientific American's blog reminds us today (November 28) that most of the items on your kids' Christmas lists are just more nails in the coffin of planet Earth:

Black Friday warning: video games waste energy and contribute to global warming

If you're planning this holiday season (perhaps even today) to become one of the tens of millions of people in the U.S. to buy a video game system, you may want to consider how the purchase of a Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation or Microsoft Xbox will impact your carbon footprint (or, at very least, your electric bill).

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a New York-based environmental organization, in a new report says that video game systems are huge energy wasters, mostly because people (read: kids) tend to leave them on even when they're not using them.

A couple of observations.

First, the real issue is that game consoles needlessly consume energy when they are on-but-idle. Power-saving features are a very sensible solution to this, and I agree that the console manufacturers would do well to make them standard:

Ecos and the NRDC offer some solutions, calling for video game console makers to develop more energy-efficient devices that use many of the same power-saving features found on PCs (such as the automatic powering down of a system if it is left idle for a certain period of time). After a period of one to three hours of inactivity, for example, the video game console could automatically save the status of the game to memory and initiate auto power-down. Or, the consoles could come with a "sleep" button that could be used to save power when the players are away from their games.

Second, the lifestyle scolds know that the average person is not motivated by simple appeals to energy conservation, but the average person has been conditioned to respond emotionally (not necessarily rationally) when the specter of global warming is invoked.

It's always a bonus when [insert cause here] can be linked (however tenuously) to AGW. I expect to see a lot more of this in the next presidential administration. Incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has acknowledged the appeal of exploiting public alarm to advance one's agenda, and AGW is at or near the very top of Obama's agenda.

The sunny side of a global economic collapse

It seems that some on the environmental left would like nothing less than a rollback of the Industrial Revolution, with a vastly reduced human population living sustainably: consuming only locally-produced durable goods and food (grown organically, of course), etc. Living in this manner would cut back on CO2 emissions in countless ways.

From this point of view, the worldwide collapse of financial markets is good news, because the resulting economic slowdown means a reduction in activities (manufacturing, transportation) that result in CO2 emissions. An October 7 Reuters article reports it this way:

A slowdown in the world economy may give the planet a breather from the excessively high carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions responsible for climate change, a Nobel Prize winning scientist said on Tuesday.

Atmospheric scientist Paul J Crutzen, who has in the past floated the possibility of blitzing the stratosphere with sulfur particles to cool the earth, said clouds gathering over the world economy could ease the earth's environmental burden.

Slower economic growth worldwide could help slow growth of carbon dioxide emissions and trigger more careful use of energy resources, though the global economic turmoil may also divert focus from efforts to counter climate change, said Crutzen, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the depletion of the ozone layer.

"It's a cruel thing to say ... but if we are looking at a slowdown in the economy, there will be less fossil fuels burning, so for the climate it could be an advantage," Crutzen told Reuters in an interview.

"We could have a much slower increase of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere ... people will start saving (on energy use) ... but things may get worse if there is less money available for research and that would be serious."

Solar wind theory may get its day in court

Advocates of the idea that solar influences on climate outweigh human influences may finally get their chance to test their theory.

New measurements from the NASA/ESA spacecraft Ulysses show that the sun's current period of low activity goes beyond an extended dearth of sunspots. As AFP reports in a September 24 article:

The intensity of the sun's million-mile-per-hour solar wind has dropped to its lowest levels since accurate records began half a century ago, scientists say.

Measurements of the cosmic blasts of radiation, ejected from the sun's upper atmosphere, were made with the Ulysses spacecraft, a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).

The solar wind "inflates a protective bubble, or heliosphere, around the solar system," which protects the inner planets against the radiation from other stars, said Dave McComas, Ulysses' solar wind principal investigator and senior executive director at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.

"With the solar wind at an all-time low, there is an excellent chance the heliosphere will diminish in size and strength," said Ed Smith, NASA's Ulysses project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"If that occurs, more galactic cosmic rays will make it into the inner part of our solar system," added Smith.

As we have noted before, some scientists (such as Svensmark) draw a link between variations in solar wind and variations in cloud formation on our planet. Svensmark argues that increased cosmic radiation acts as a catalyst for cloud formation in earth's atmosphere -- in turn leading to a general cooling of the world's climate if the pattern persists.

If the current lapse in the solar wind continues, Svensmark may soon get all of the data he needs to support or refute his theory.

Are polar bears going cannibal?

CNN, in the midst of a boilerplate September 23 article about the allegedly impending disappearance of Arctic ice, brings us an alarming development in the saga of the officially-threatened-but-not-actually-declining-yet polar bear:

"The Arctic sea ice melt is a disaster for the polar bears," according to Kassie Siegel, staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. "They are dependent on the Arctic sea ice for all of their essential behaviors, and as the ice melts and global warming transforms the Arctic, polar bears are starving, drowning, even resorting to cannibalism because they don't have access to their usual food sources."

Scientists have noticed increasing reports of starving Arctic polar bears attacking and feeding on one another in recent years.

Cannibalism! Yikes! Given the extent of the summer melt in the past two seasons, researchers must have a lot of anecdotal evidence of this. Let's read on to learn the gory details:

In one documented 2004 incident in northern Alaska, a male bear broke into a female's den and killed her.

2004? Four years ago? Did the male bear eat the female after killing her? What was the frequency of such behavior in the polar bear population before any significant melting occurred?

Does article author Marsha Walton realize that this one sentence (which, by the way, is the only example given) undermines her alarmist conclusion? Apparently not. Even though the main purpose of the article is to report on the just-ended ice-melt season, her article is entitled:

Polar bears resort to cannibalism as Arctic ice shrinks

Present tense: "resort". If there's evidence of it happening this season, Walton doesn't see fit to present it.

Perhaps because the true story gives no cause for alarm?

Perhaps because researchers have long known about cannibalism among the polar bears.


[P.S. Hello to everyone visiting here from the CNN article page!]

Sunspot milestone

August has the notable distinction of having passed without a single post by me to this blog (where did the time go?). Even more notable, however, is the fact that Mr. Sun was quiet the entire month as well, as Michael Asher reports:

The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.

The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots -- is an influencing factor for climate on earth.

According to data from the NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center, the last time such an event occurred was June of 1913. Sunspot data has been collected since 1749.

The alarmists will almost certainly yawn at the news, if they notice it at all. Sunspots, many argue, have no effect on the radiation output of the Sun.

This is correct, but misleading. The solar magnetic activity represented by sunspots affects our climate indirectly by influencing cloud formation on our planet, which in turn does affect our climate.

Sure, he may go to jail, but he may also have earned a carbon credit or two

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, July 25:

A 57-year-old south side man, who might have been struggling with a hangover, is charged today with shooting his lawn mower with a sawed-off shotgun.

"I'll tell you the truth," a criminal complaint quotes an apparently inebriated Keith Walendowski. "I got pissed because my lawn mower wouldn't start, so I got my shotgun and shot it.

"I can do that. It's my lawn mower and my yard, so I can shoot it if I want," Walendowski told police.

That beast'll never belch carbon again. Sure, it's only one lawn mower, but if each of us would commit to shooting our own lawn mowers, we might just end up saving the planet.

The War on Global Warming is the health of the state

Small-"l" libertarians are known for their opposition to policies that expand the power* of the state at the expense of individual liberty. That makes it all the more fascinating that the big-"L" Libertarian Party has nominated a man who has endorsed a plan that -- if implemented -- would amount to one of the biggest-ever expansions of government power*.

As CNSNews reports:

Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr praised Al Gore, who challenged the United States Thursday to run on 100 percent zero-carbon electricity within 10 years.

Barr, a former Republican congressman from Georgia who attended the former vice president’s Washington, D.C., speech Thursday, said Gore’s plan “makes sense.”

“America responds well to challenges, if it is laid out, if it’s in terms that people can understand and relate to, if it makes sense – and what he’s laid out makes sense,” Barr said in an interview with Cybercast News Service after Gore spoke.

In a speech at the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Constitution Hall, Gore said the United States should move towards producing all of its electricity from renewable energy and clean carbon-free sources, a strategy Gore said would “re-power America."

[...]

Barr, who attended Thursday’s speech, said he was “deeply” indebted to Gore for “laying the challenge out there.”

As any true libertarian will testify (I don't consider myself to be one, but I lean in that direction), the government almost never surrenders power* that is usurped in times of crisis.

So what do you think, LP members?

Of course, the candidate I'm most likely to vote for, although he represents the party that had a better-than-even chance of articulating a sane point of view on the AGW issue, has also completely embraced Gore's presuppositions (if not all of Gore's policy prescriptions). Sigh.


* (Given the subject matter of Gore's speech, I apologize for the repeated but unavoidable pun)

Gore's plan to bankrupt America

In a remarkable feat of understatement, The New York Times entitled its account of Al Gore's July 17 speech: Gore Urges Change to Dodge an Energy Crisis.

The word "change" has been bandied about so much in the current presidential campaign that people don't expect any specifics to be attached to the word. But Gore cannot be accused of empty rhetoric in this case. He believes that trillions of dollars should be shifted away from keeping our country's economic engine running and toward a complete replacement of our country's energy infrastructure. In ten years.

Gore was in fine TEOTWAWKI form in his Washington speech, as the NYT reports:

Former Vice President Al Gore on Thursday urged the United States to wean the nation from its entire electricity grid to carbon-free energy within 10 years, warning that drastic steps were needed to avoid a global economic and ecological cataclysm.

Like a modern Jeremiah, Mr. Gore called down thunder to justify the spending of trillions of dollars to remake the American power system, a plan fraught with technological and political challenges that goes far beyond the changes recently debated in Congress and by world leaders.

“The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk,” he said in a midday speech to a friendly crowd of mostly young supporters in Washington. “And even more — if more should be required — the future of human civilization is at stake.”

As this excerpt shows, no cost is too great for you and me to bear, because the future of human civilization is at stake.

“To those who say 10 years is not enough time, I respectfully ask them to consider seriously what the world’s scientists are telling us about the risks we face if we don’t act in less than 10 years,” he said.

No, no, no... don't evaluate -- there's no time! The time for thinking is over -- it's time to act! So the complete reengineering of our power infrastructure would completely bankrupt our economy, likely taking the rest of the world with it -- what's your point?

Obama and McCain, while they may not have endorsed Gore's plan yet, seem all too happy to go the first step, which appears in the form of the EPA's Proposed Plan To Control Every Aspect Of Your Life. The Bush administration won't let that monstrosity move forward for now, but January 2009 is not far away.

US dodges economy-crushing bullet: EPA declines to regulate CO2 (for now)

Environmentalists rejoiced when scientists* sitting on the US Supreme Court ruled that the government had every right to regulate CO₂ -- a gas essential for life on earth -- as a pollutant. Although it would seem a bit of a challenge to distinguish anthropogenic CO₂ molecules from naturally-occurring ones (perhaps we could tag ours), or to prevent foreign-generated CO₂ from mixing with domestic CO₂, it appeared certain that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under mounting pressure from the greens, was ready to assert jurisdiction over nearly every aspect of human activity in America.

Stunningly, the Bush administration's EPA declined an opportunity that would in effect have given the environmentalists everything they wanted.

In its voluminous document [588 pages!], the EPA laid out a buffet of options on how to reduce greenhouse gases from cars, ships, trains, power plants, factories and refineries.

"One point is clear: The potential regulation of greenhouse gases under any portion of the Clean Air Act could result in unprecedented expansion of EPA authority that would have a profound effect on virtually every sector of the economy and touch every household in the land," the EPA's Johnson said in a preface to the federal notice.

EPA said that it encountered resistance from the Agriculture, Commerce, Energy and Transportation departments, as well as the White House, that made it "impossible" to respond in a timely fashion to the Supreme Court decision.

"Our agencies have serious concerns with this suggestion because it does not fairly recognize the enormous — and, we believe, insurmountable — burdens, difficulties, and costs, and likely limited benefits, of using the Clean Air Act" to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, the secretaries of the four agencies wrote to the White House on July 9.

So, we've dodged a bullet, at least until the next administration takes office. It seems that John McCain, although he has embraced much of the propaganda, is far less inclined than Barack Obama is to use a heavy-handed, bureaucratic end-run technique like this to advance the AGW agenda.

* (Tim wrote with a straight face)

Funny numbers in TCPR 'Gore mansion' press release

The Tennessee Center for Policy Research made a splash last week with their press release claiming that energy usage in Al Gore's Nashville-area compound had actually increased ten percent since 'green' renovations had been completed.  TCPR was made news last year when they first brought Gore's conspicuous consumption to light. Although Team Gore denies any connection between TCPR's 2007 report and the subsequent renovations, the timing is, as they say, suspicious.

Your humble Heretic, of course, couldn't pass up an opportunity to highlight the latest release, joining countless others in the blogosphere.  I guess it is basic human nature that we are not as rigorous about fact-checking data that support our point of view.  It is also basic human nature that we try hard to find holes in data that appear to disagree with our point of view.  Sometimes such opposition research can yield results that further the cause of integrity in the AGW debate. 

Blogger Tim Lambert is no friend of the skeptic community, which no doubt made it easy for him to notice discrepancies between TCPR's 2007 release and last week's release.  At the risk of causing my readers to lapse into an eye-glazed stupor, let's look at the claims made in the two reports:

    February 2007 press release

• Gore's 2006 energy consumption: 221,000kwh/year [i.e. 18,417kwh/month]
  
• Average American household consumption: 10,656kwh/year [i.e. 888kwh/month]
  
• Gore's consumption 20 times the average American household
  

    June 2008 press release

• Gore's 2007 energy consumption: 213,210kwh/year [i.e. 17,768kwh/month]
  
• 2006 monthly consumption: 16,130kwh
• 2007 consumption 10% increase over 2006
• 2007 consumption would power 232 normal homes for a month
  

The 2008 report's numbers are internally consistent, but they do not mesh with what was claimed in the 2007 report.  Comparing the annual numbers, Lambert noted that a 2006 total of 221,000kwh and a 2007 total of 213,210kwh yields a 4% decrease, not a 10% increase.  On the basis of this observation, Lambert declared TCPR to be an unreliable source and summarily dismissed the larger point raised in the newest press release (namely, that Gore consumes energy like a drunken sailor).

Looking only at this month's release, however, the numbers do work out: the monthly consumption increased from 16,130kwh to 17,768kwh, which is indeed a 10% increase.  This raises problems with last year's press release, though.  That report gave Gore's 2006 annual consumption as 221,000kwh, but 16,130 x 12 is actually 193,560kwh. 

Sorry for the blizzard of calculations; let me get to my point.  The biggest discrepancy appears to be an incorrect annual total in the 2007 press release.  To my knowledge, TCPR has never corrected or clarified this number, and as of this moment TCPR has not yet responded to my request for a clarification.

As long as TCPR allows this discrepancy to stand, its credibility in the AGW debate will be open to legitimate question.  I'm hoping that integrity will win out over the simple desire to score political points over Al Gore.

eBay foils a good deed

Tom at Radio Free New Jersey has a tall, beautiful oak tree in his yard. He found that the tree was casting a shadow on the solar heater for his pool, so he planned to cut the tree down.

Then he had in inspiration: Why not leave the tree alone, and sell its carbon sequestration services to someone out there who was feeling guilty about their lifestyle? He would do a good deed, and for that he would be willing to put up with a slightly cooler swimming pool.

So, he put an ad on eBay, hoping to get a bid of $420 based on his calculation of how much carbon the tree would end up sequestering.

Alas, eBay yanked the auction after a few days without really explaining why. Tom speculates that eBay secretly knows that carbon credits are a scam, and thus is not willing for them to be sold on its site.

In my opinion, it is equally likely that the eBay folks accept the concept of carbon credits, and saw Tom's auction as mockery of the concept. Which it was, of course.

Bravo, Tom, for giving it a try. Perhaps you could find a way to contact the Gore estate; it seems that they could use a little feel-good P.R. right now.

When I think of all of the trees I've cut down on my property for one reason or another, and think about people who are more than willing to part with their money in the belief that the act frees them to maintain their wasteful lifestyles...... sigh...... what could have been.

If only we commoners could afford Al Gore's carbon footprint...

A year ago we saw that Al Gore was investing a lot of money in his Tennessee mansion to help it comply with U.S. Green Building Council standards.

You would think that after all of those improvements, we would see the efficiency improvements reflected in an overall decrease in the amount of energy consumed in Gore's home. You would be wrong.

The Tennessee Center for Policy Research has been watching Gore's energy usage for a long time. It was their first press release about his wasteful lifestyle that appears to have prompted last year's renovations.

TCPR issued another report this week letting us know how things are going at the Gore estate:

In the year since Al Gore took steps to make his home more energy-efficient, the former Vice President’s home energy use surged more than 10%, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research.

[...]In the past year, Gore’s home burned through 213,210 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, enough to power 232 average American households for a month.

In addition to efficiency improvements, Gore relies on the purchase of carbon offsets to somehow make his off-the-charts consumption (both at home and in his extensive travel by private jet) okay.

What he has really done is prove that reliance on carbon offsets tends to lead to an increase in wasteful consumption. This makes sense, because carbon offsets amount to doing penance for your bad behavior without actually making an effort to modify the bad behavior.


June 20 UPDATE: Although the numbers in TCPR's June 17th press release are internally consistent, it is true that, as detractor Tim Lambert observes, the numbers are not consistent with TCPR's 2007 press release about Gore's 2006 consumption (linked above). It appears to boil down to a misstated number in the 2007 press release -- which to my knowledge TCPR has never corrected. I have asked them for an official clarification, and will post an update if and when I hear back from them.