Archive for the ‘Government Policy’ Category

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Gore’s Case for Global Warming: Science or Psychobabble?July 15th, 2009 by The WeGetIt.org Team
  Gore: Science or Gore's case for global warming--science or psychobabble?
 

Video: Al Gore invokes spirit of Churchill

Former Vice President Al Gore, who has become the world’s most visible advocate of urgent action to stop manmade global warming, lately shocked at least one attendee at his speech at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford by giving what blogger Geoff Brumfiel called  “a pop neuroscience lecture.”

Saying climate change is “ultimately a problem of consciousness,” Gore, as reported by Brumfiel, said evolution had trained humans “to respond quickly and viscerally to threats. But when humans are confronted with ‘a threat to the existence of civilization that can only be perceived in the abstract’, we don’t do so well.” Why? Because ”the connecting line between amygdalae, which he described as the urgency centre of the brain, with the neocortex is a one way street: emotional emergencies can spark reasoning, but not the other way around.”

Aside from dubious neuroscience, Gore–who first demonstrated his willingness to mix science, New Age religion, and pop psychology in Earth in the Balance: Psychology and the Human Spirit (1992)–seems to be saying there’s some genetic inability for us to recognize and respond properly to global warming. Yet he thinks he and fellow alarmists can do so. They must be more highly evolved. And the rest of us must be suffering from a mental disorder.

That’s a scary thought. In the old Soviet Union, to oppose the Communist Party was evidence of mental illness–and therefore ground for involuntary confinement in the Gulag for “psychiatric treatment.” Would Gore, who in the same speech said growing awareness of manmade global warming would drive change “through global governance,” embrace such treatment? The totalitarian vision of a “Global Marshall Plan” outlined in the last chapter of Earth in the Balance suggests he wouldn’t be opposed.

Posted in Environmentalism, Government Policy, News & Events, World View | 1 Comment »

President’s Science Advisor Promoted Coercive Population ReductionJuly 15th, 2009 by The WeGetIt.org Team

Gore’s totalitarianism may be implicit, but not Gore’s fellow global warming alarmist John Holdren’s.

Science advisor to President Barack Obama, Holdren, in the 1977 book Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, which he co-authored with Paul Ehrlich (author of 1968’s The Population Bomb, in which he falsely predicted famines killing hundreds of millions around the world in the 1970s), prescribed as cures for overpopulation

  • forced abortions,
  • introduction of sterilization drugs into drinking water and food,
  • implanting contraceptive capsules in women at puberty and permitting their removal only “with official permission,”
  • forcing single mothers to have abortions, or seizing their babies and giving them to couples,
  • compulsory abortion or sterilization for people who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e., who are genetically inferior–the old eugenics view of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and Adolf Hitler), and
  • a transnational “Planetary Regime” to control economies and individual lives through an international police force.

In defense of legal limits on child bearing Holdren wrote, “. . . no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?”

The Planetary Regime’s powers would be vast. It could ”control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. . . . regulat[e] all international trade, . . . including all food on the international market.” It could “determin[e] the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”

In light of low birth rates among secularists, religious conservatives, who tend to have more children, might be a little disturbed by this suggestion by Holdren:

A legal restriction on the right to have children could also be based on the right not to be disadvantaged by excessive numbers of children produced by others. Differing rates of reproduction among groups can give rise to serious social problems. For example, differential rates of reproduction between ethnic, racial, religious, or economic groups might result in increased competition for resources and political power and thereby undermine social order.

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Suppression of Internal EPA Report Belies Commitment to TransparencyJuly 8th, 2009 by The WeGetIt.org Team
  Video: EPA analyst speaks out
 

Video: EPA analyst Carlin was told that “the administrator 
and the administration has decided to move forward on 
endangerment, and your comments do not help.”

On April 24, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a proposed “endangerment finding” that carbon dioxide poses a threat to human health and welfare. That action prompted Congress to begin considering global warming legislation.

(Click here for our report on House passage of a climate bill at the end of June.)

But more than a month before, EPA analyst Alan Carlin submitted an internal report that challenged the EPA’s intent to regulate carbon dioxide to reduce global warming. The 98-page report (PDF)  called the science underlying the EPA’s intents outdated and cited multiple refereed scientific and economic studies in recent years that show that human influence on climate change is minimal and efforts to fight it will cost far more than their effects will be worth.

Fox News reports that Carlin’s “boss told him in March that his material would not be incorporated into a broader EPA finding and ordered Carlin to stop working on the climate change issue.” That effectively covered up existence of the report until the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) obtained and released it.

Now Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and a leading Congressional critic of manmade global warming fears, has demanded an investigation. “He came out with the truth. They don’t want the truth at the EPA,” Inhofe told FOX News. “We’re going to expose it.”

The decision not to include Carlin’s report in EPA findings related to greenhouse gas regulation apparently was made by the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics Director Al McGartland, who e-mailed Carlin saying,

The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office. [Emphasis added]

That the comments didn’t help the legal or policy case for EPA Administrator Jackson’s decision to regulate carbon dioxide, however, is just the point. The decision appears to have been made despite contrary evidence known to the EPA but not revealed publicly.

As Kimberly Strassel points out in the Wall Street Journal, the EPA’s muzzling Carlin is particularly ironic in light of

  • claims by NASA scientist James Hansen, who has spoken publicly promoting alarm about manmade global warming over 1,400 times, that the Bush administration tried to censor him;
  • EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s promise, “As administrator, I will ensure EPA’s efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and program, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency”; and
  • the fact that one of President Barack Obama’s first acts was a memo to agencies demanding new transparency in government, and science.

Posted in Climate Alarmism, Climate Realism, Government Policy, News & Events | No Comments »

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