The Thomas Chronicles

With gas prices unaccountably soaring to unprecedented heights, one wonders if our Environmentalists and multinational billionaire overlords are cackling over their clubhouse sherry.

Why do I include the multinational billionaires in this equation of gas, environmentalism and the middle class? According to OPEC, it is not the oil producing nations that are causing this spike in oil. It’s the central banks, who are owned by the billionaires; and the Congressional desire to sue OPEC for the gas prices is about as infantile as a pigtailed three-year-old throwing a tantrum for not having all the candy she wants.

A former Iraqi oil minister says record high oil prices are more to do with speculators, including central banks, than supply and demand.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is pressuring G8 leaders to push for OPEC to increase oil supply.

Isam Chalabi was Iraq’s oil minister before the first Gulf War and has more than 40 years experience in the industry.

He says Mr Rudd’s strategy will not work.

“The question of prices today is not related to supply and demand fundamentals - everybody knows that,” he told AM.

“Everybody has said so and hence it is not a matter of increasing supplies because whoever is in need of oil has been able to get it, so there is no need of problem of getting the oil.”

Brian Wilson, former British energy minister under Tony Blair, agrees.

“What takes it from $US100 to $US130 is that there is a huge speculative element and the actual connection between the paper trading price of oil and anything that is happening in the physical world is now extremely remote,” he told the BBC.

The gas prices near my house is a leap frog away from five bucks…

You know, all this makes me think back to earlier this year when Obama proposed the “Global Poverty Act” in the Senate. He doesn’t propose and sponsor many bills since he’s busy politiking across the nation, but every once in a while he sneaks one in under the radar.

This act “could result in the imposition of a global tax on the United States. The bill, which has the support of many liberal religious groups, makes levels of U.S. foreign aid spending subservient to the dictates of the United Nations.”

The legislation itself requires the President “to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day.”

The bill defines the term “Millennium Development Goals” as the goals set out in the United Nations Millennium Declaration, General Assembly Resolution 55/2 (2000).

…

In addition to seeking to eradicate poverty, that declaration commits nations to banning “small arms and light weapons” and ratifying a series of treaties, including the International Criminal Court Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol (global warming treaty), the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

As alarming as all this is, you might well ask yourself, “What in tarnation does this have to do with Global Warming and taxing the American public out of existence?”

Well, all this money has to come from somewhere, right?

Jeffrey Sachs, who runs the U.N.’s “Millennium Project,” says that the U.N. plan to force the U.S. to pay 0.7 percent of GNP in increased foreign aid spending would add $65 billion a year to what the U.S. already spends. Over a 13-year period, from 2002, when the U.N.’s Financing for Development conference was held, to the target year of 2015, when the U.S. is expected to meet the “Millennium Development Goals,” this amounts to $845 billion. And the only way to raise that kind of money, Sachs has written, is through a global tax, preferably on carbon-emitting fossil fuels.

These high gas prices got me thinking along these lines.

If OPEC is not the primary factor driving up prices and the central banks are, one wonders, What is the point of this whole exercise? Are we, in effect, being taxed by some international body without our consent?

Speaking at the National Press Club the other week, there is no doubt what Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus thinks. In his new book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles - What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?, President Vaclav Klaus writes, “The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity at the end of the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st century is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.”

President Vaclav Klaus is sixty-six year old man who grew up during the Stalinist era. He’s lived the bulk of his life under the heel of Soviet Communist tyranny behind the Iron Curtain, so when he speaks on the subject of freedom and tyranny, I perk up my ears and listen.

Washington - Czech President Vaclav Klaus said Tuesday he is ready to debate Al Gore about global warming, as he presented the English version of his latest book that argues environmentalism poses a threat to basic human freedoms.

‘I many times tried to talk to have a public exchange of views with him, and he’s not too much willing to make such a conversation,’ Klaus said. ‘So I’m ready to do it.’

Klaus was speaking a the National Press Building in Washington to present his new book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles - What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?, before meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney Wednesday.

‘My answer is it is our freedom and, I might add, and our prosperity,’ he said.

And if this wasn’t enough of a statement President Klaus went on to say this:

‘Like their (communist) predecessors, they will be certain that they have the right to sacrifice man and his freedom to make their idea reality,’ he said.

‘In the past, it was in the name of the Marxists or of the proletariat - this time, in the name of the planet,’ he added.

Klaus said a free market should be used to address environmental concerns and said he oppposed as unrealistic regulations or greenhouse gas capping systems designed to reduce the impact of climate change.

‘It could be even true that we are now at a stage where mere facts, reason and truths are powerless in the face of the global warming propaganda,’ he said. [Emphasis Mine]

This is a question I’ve frequently posed to my friends who advocate the Global Warming agenda and occasionally on this blog: Why do the proposal of Environmentalists always entail the elimination of the American Middle Class?

All their proposed regulations and “carbon caps” becomes an indirect means of taxing the American public, specifically the American Middle Class, out of existence.

Long time readers of this blog would know that I think the Global Warming hysteria is a combination of junk science and totalitarian group-think. The synergy between these elements and the imposition of this religious earth worship in the media, in “documentaries”, in grade schools and in other public institutions make the whole Global Warming phenomena a unique event in the history of humanity.

I said it’s totalitarian in nature because it demands individuals to behave according to their scriptures– er…I mean, strictures, and no dissenting opinion is tolerated. To voice protest at the idea or challenge its veracity is to be stamped a close-minded, intolerant, head in the sand, blithering moron. A more extreme expression of this is when they liken people of dissenting opinion to Holocaust deniers.

“There’re Holocaust deniers; then there’re Global Warming deniers,” as though people of dissenting opinions are equivalent to Neo-Nazis, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the KKK. This is a rather base accusation, don’t you think, especially since there is hardly a consensus of scientific opinion behind the Global Warming CO2 theory?

If there is not a clear consensus of scientific opinion on the cause of climate change, despite Al Gore’s hysterical lectures to the American people, why is there such a stampede to force others to comply with these bizarre rules, such as no smoking, no red meat, no SUV’s, must recycle paper, must fly less, etc.?

Chicken Little is saying, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” There’s no doubt that there could be lots of trouble ahead of us with climate change, but to say definitively that the cause is X in a system no one really comprehends and then proscribing restrictive solutions to impose upon the “unwashed masses” is ludicrous to say the least. Especially since Al Gore and Co’s every prescription would mean the destruction of the American middle and lower class into poverty.

Instead of viewing Global Warming as a human induced phenomenon, many scientists suggest that the climate change could be due in no small measure to the activities of the sun. And, wonder of wonders, many scientists are concerned about Global Cooling rather than Global Warming.

Climate Change: Not every scientist is part of Al Gore’s mythical “consensus.” Scientists worried about a new ice age seek funding to better observe something bigger than your SUV — the sun.

Back in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that the Earth was in the balance, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles.

To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better “eyes” with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth’s climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.

And they’re worried about global cooling, not warming.

Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada’s National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity.

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.

Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

Tapping reports no change in the sun’s magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.

Like prideful gnat snuggling on the back of a camel and claiming to have caused the camel’s intolerable stench, I think mankind has delusions of grandeur. A couple of volcanic eruptions can throw us into global ice age (and by the way, spit out the total CO2 of the history of the industrial world many times over.). The sun’s insanely powerful solar fares can fry us with the swipe of its hands.

In a word, I think we’re full of it.

These past few years, we’ve seen devastating hurricanes like Katrina. We’ve seen crippling ice storms, like the ones in Oklahoma and the Midwest. Tornadoes. Snow. Strange rains that fall in areas unaccustomed to rain. We’ve seen people ice skating in places you’re not supposed to ice skate (see Jerusalem). Droughts in the American Southeast and Southwest. Famine and droughts in China.

Generally speaking, the world’s climate is going bonkers. We are bumping up against titanic forces, like the sun and the earth’s electromagnetic field, and it is rather simplistic to say it’s because of cow farts and SUV’s, don’t you think?

Just another note on Al Gore’s zany antics. As you are probably aware, our former Vice President has become a veritable “prophet” of Global Warming.

Vanity Fair in their Green Issue a few months back, literally had a semi-serious/ semi-humorous comic of the “prophet” Al Gore pacing on the breadth of the earth in monastic robes. Beneath him raged the fires of Dante’s nine circles of Hell.

Instead of people being tortured and eternally being devoured by their deadly sins, like greed, avarice, and so on, the “sinners” were guilty of polluting. They were the auto industry CEO’s, the non-recyclers, and those horribly selfish SUV drivers! Of course, President Bush and Vice President Cheney was down in there. I don’t remember, but I think they were the ones being devoured by the Devil at his frozen ground floor.

And so the eco-prophet is back at it again. Along with his usual sneer at the country that bred him, America, he added a little something extra this time at the Bali conference.

Al Gore savaged the US government’s “obstructing” attitude and urged delegates at the UN conference on climate change to ignore Washington if necessary to pursue the “moral imperative” of a new global regime.

“My country is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali,” the former US vice-president told 2,000 of the 12,000 people attending the conference on Thursday. “[But] over the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now.”

The Bali meeting is trying to reach an agreement to start negotiations that will culminate in 2009 with a new global deal to tackle climate change. The US is due to elect a new president in November 2008 and the majority of the frontrunners have a more proactive attitude to climate change than the Bush administration.

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— Read Part 1

The cartoon of Global Warming persists despite all. So much so that the EU is risking an all out trade war with the US.

“The Association of European Airlines (AEA) has warned that implementation of this plan [to impose a carbon-dioxide charge on flights that cross EU airspace] could lead to a trade war between the US and the EU, according to the Times.

It seems the EU has gotten tired of the consistently defiant attitude displayed by the world’s major environmental culprit.”

The world’s major environmental culprit?. The EU seemed to have conveniently forgotten that China has surpassed the US in the level of pollution earlier this year.

Isn’t funny how China is treated as the golden child who can do no wrong? They enslave millions of people in concentration/ labor camps. They are more destructive to the environment in their attempts to catch up to the US than any other country in the world. And I’m not just talking about CO2 emissions. Personally, I think it’s because the EU (and the US for that matter— Can you say leaden toys?) has sunk their billions upon billions into China and they don’t dare threaten China with a burp and a pointy stick for fear of losing that investment.

It seems whatever their intentions, the environmentalist’s every proposal means punishing America and it means the decimation of the American middle class. There is just no getting around it. Europe will remain at their status quo level of prosperity. Despite signing the Kyoto Treaty, the Mediterranean Sea is becoming stagnant from all their pollution and the corral reefs around the Aegean are dying.

Also, I’m not sure, but I’ll wager that most of the provisions under the Kyoto Treaty are not rigorously enforced in any of the signed nations. Oh, I’m sure that the state can fine a company into oblivion for violating the treaty, but it doesn’t really have to. It’s only if a company strays from the party line, you see, or if they want something inconvenient done. Under ordinary circumstances, it would be called extortion, except in this case it’s called saving the environment.

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Thus saith the augers at the Oracle of Brussels— or else.

“EU climate policy is gearing up to confront the US. Imports from countries that refuse to ratify the Kyoto Protocol could be subject to punitive tariff duties — a new measure intended to pressure the Bush Administration. A climate tax on flights may also be introduced.”

This is the basic message of environmentalists the world over. In addition to their attempts to make you wet your pants with fear at your impending doom from flooding, a sun scorched earth, and enormous wild Herculean hurricanes, our friendly environmentalists/pacifists have resorted to a more direct route of persuasion: coercion.

Or to be more succinct, save the earth or be punished.

This has been the tenor of our rabid environmentalists for some time. They tend to hold Mankind in the highest contempt as a Gaia polluting miscreant, while simultaneously they wish to be Mankind’s quasi-saviors. It’s a contradiction they don’t bother to resolve.

We can’t leave the house or turn on the news without being assaulted by the notion of just how terrible we Americans are by our oil consumption, our level of production, our antiquated belief in Christ. Etc, etc, etc. You’ve heard it all before.

Continue Reading »

***Update Below***

After yesterday’s post about the Angora wildfire in Lake Tahoe, another blog responded with this comment:

In my obsessive search for news about the fires, I decided to read blogs to hopefully read some first-hand accounts. But instead of that I am treated to drivel by dickweeds (That’s yours truly) who are suggesting environmentalists are to blame for the fires. Blogs really might be the worst thing that has ever happened to people because it makes you realize just how ignorant and self-centered people are. My hometown is slowly being destroyed and instead of worrying about the people who are losing their homes, people are using the opportunity to push their ignorant political agenda. Picking up some sticks in the forest would have done nothing to help prevent the fire. Nevermind that there are 150,000 acres in the Lake Tahoe Basin. Everything is so simple and obvious when you are behind a keyboard.

Yyy-ouch.

Well, that morning on Foxnews, a park ranger working in the Lake Tahoe area said that all efforts to remove deadwood and underbrush had been successfully blocked by environmentalists for 11 years. He further said that the entire area was like a “furnace” with plenty of fuel laying around. All it needed was a match.

I can’t find a video to substantiate it for this blog, but there’s an article from the Tahoe Daily Tribune that says much of the same thing.

Even before the ash from the Angora fire has settled, some South Lake Tahoe residents have begun to lob accusations that decisions based on politics contributed to Sunday’s devastating blaze.

The League to Save Lake Tahoe, the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club’s influence drew much of the ire of Sue Abrams, a resident of the Mountain View Estates subdivision heavily damaged during the blaze. These groups exert too much control over Tahoe Regional Planning Agency policy decisions, according to Abrams.

“No policies in the 30 years I’ve been here allow us to create defensible space,” Abrams said during a phone interview on Monday. “Every ordinance that was put together over the past 30 years except for the past year or so has been hands-off. Every bit of this was preventable had politics moved aside.”

Abrams, unsure of the status of her house as of Monday evening, filed suit against the federal government in 1997 concerning the management of hazard trees in the basin and is looking to bring issues surrounding the Angora fire into court as well.

drivel by dickweeds who are suggesting environmentalists are to blame for the fires?… People are using the opportunity to push their ignorant political agenda?

I would greatly prefer to preserve our forests. Somehow I don’t think leaving dessicated kindling wood all over the ground in a fire-prone forest is a good idea. But maybe I’m just a stupid ignoramus behind a keyboard.

Update 6/26/07:

Boy howdy, the folks up at Lake Tahoe are angry. Here’s an LA Times article describing the residents’ extreme annoyance and displeasure.

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE — The mood of the crowd jammed into the meeting room was angry.

Many had lost their homes to the forest fire that swept through the Sierra Nevada just south of Lake Tahoe.

They said they were angry at bureaucrats and environmentalists who made cutting of trees and clearing of land difficult. There was always too much red tape, they said, and now it was too late.

In all, a crowd of nearly 2,000 people descended on the South Tahoe Middle School auditorium Monday night, wanting to be heard in the face of their losses.

And if there was an object of scorn in the crowd, it was the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, a powerful bi-state environmental land use agency charged with managing the resources of the basin.

When a speaker mentioned the agency, the crowd responded with a chorus of boos. “What a joke!” yelled one man.

The wrangling began in earnest over the assignment of blame, including arguments over whether federal and state forest managers had made their tree clearing rules too strict in the face of pressure by environmentalists.

A common sentiment Monday was expressed by Jerry Martin, a bartender at the Horizon Casino Resort, whose house was still standing, although eight others around it had burned to the ground. He said U.S. Forest Service rules regulating the harvesting of dead trees were too stringent for those living next to government land.

“I hate to get political, but environmentalists wouldn’t let us cut down the dead trees,” he said.

The amount of fuel in the Tahoe Basin has reached critical levels after years of discord among environmentalists and government agencies over how to thin forests and reduce the fire threat. And it has led to predictions of a devastating wildfire because the basin is one of the areas with the most fire starts in the Sierra Nevada.

….

…the people at the meeting Monday said that regional planning agency regulations were the source of much of the problem when it came to clearing the land.

A man got up and said, “I’ve lived here 35 years. Is this going to open TRPA’s eyes?” The room erupted into cheers and applause.

According to the SFGate.com, though, the blame for this fire laid squarely on the shoulders of all the people who moved to Lake Tahoe, from the Gold Rushers to the current residents of the area to… Global Warming?

The raging fire that is denuding hillsides and darkening the clear blue waters of Lake Tahoe is the final product of 150 years of mismanagement of the Sierra Nevada ecosystem, fire management experts said Monday.

….

Ecologists and local residents said they saw such a disaster coming.

“It’s the fire we’ve been anticipating for 20 years,” said Patsy Miller, who owns a residence at Fallen Leaf Lake, about a mile from where the flames had spread by late Monday.

“People have interjected their homes into a system that has a natural tendency to burn very frequently, and where we have suppressed the frequency of those fires for so long, there’s an ungodly amount of fuel there,” Forest Service regional ecologist Hugh Safford said.

The immediate cause of the Angora fire was under investigation Monday. But the fire’s beginnings can be traced all the way back to the Gold Rush and the Comstock-era mining boom.

“They clear-cut about two-thirds of the basin,” said Shane Romsos, science and evaluation program manager for the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency.

…

Federal officials began to shift fire-management policies in the mid-1990s and in recent years have sought to clear away dense underbrush and thin trees in the forests around Tahoe and in the rest of the Sierra. U.S. Forest Service officials said those efforts probably saved at least 500 homes that otherwise could have been engulfed by the Angora fire.

So, what’s the solution to all this? How do we prevent another catastrophy like this?

Just letting nature handle the recovery isn’t an option after 150 years of human activity and mismanagement.

“We need to more aggressively manage our forests,” Miller said. “In the days of the Indians you had a lot of periodic small fires that kept the forests clean, so fires wouldn’t get huge and out of control. We can’t rely on that anymore.”

The Forest Service’s Safford noted that even the climate has come under human influence, as evidenced by global warming and increased forest fires in a dryer, warmer West.

Okay, let’s get this clear. The residents of Lake Tahoe are all up in arms over what they view as government overreach. They are blaming the environmentalists for throwing up one obstruction and red tape after another to halt or slow down the rate of clearing the deadwood and underbrush. They are so upset over the matter they are willing to sue environmental groups for directly causing the Angora fire.

The environmentalists on the other hand, represented by SFGate.com, suggested that, at root, humans residence in the area is the real cause of the fire. The Gold Rush miners destroyed the original forest and it’s been mismanaged ever since. Though they don’t overtly advocate it, it almost sounds as though the environmentalists want all the residents in Angora to take a hike because it was their fault anyway.

It seems like their solutions to halt future fires is to draw up more regulations…

Yeah, like the regulations that started this one?

(hat tip: NewsBusters)