Street lights in suburban areas are to be switched off after midnight as part of council plans to save energy.
A series of trial blackouts will be carried out over the next few weeks by local authorities in the Home Counties, Hampshire and Essex among others.
Buckinghamshire council is reported to be switching off more than 1,700 lights along 25 miles of road in an attempt to meet energy targets.
Japan, famous for its hybrid cars and solar panels, may become an environmental pioneer in another sense: buying cheap carbon offsets abroad to minimize the burden on its domestic industry to clean up its act at home.
Japanese and Russian officials agreed over the weekend to launch talks about Japan buying surplus greenhouse-gas emission permits from Russia. Such a sale would mark a major – and controversial – development in the geopolitics of what to do about global warming.
Reuters wrote a piece the other day making a statement that struck me as odd. Specifically, “Global warming has become a key issue in the race for the White House.” I had missed that, and Reuters’ evidence also betrayed the theory: it is an issue because “…the top candidates in both political parties seek[] to put a cap on greenhouse gases blamed for rising global temperatures.”
Back in the day, political issues arose when candidates disagreed.
The piece also contained another great-debate-that-isn’t line. “‘The debate is between the carbon tax and cap and trade,’ [Sen. John McCain] said. ‘I will do whatever I can to get consensus on cap and trade legislation.’” I confess that I am unaware of any cognizable political movement to impose a carbon tax, with politicians instead huddling safely around the fire of the less menacing “cap-and-trade” scheme…which of course the Congressional Budget Office calls an (inefficient) energy tax, giving McCain’s whole effort to construct a me-vs.-them strawman scenario an even stranger patina.
In short, candidates are trying to make global warming an issue where it isn’t, even if it should be. This was affirmed in a speech by McCain’s fellow and presidential candidate Barack Obama at a rally in College Park, MD, yesterday. In the course of this address Obama seized the mantle of “hopemonger,” in contrast to those other “mongers” out there. He then proceeded, however, through three separate stanzas about global warming, to reveal he is also a warmmonger, offering a fairly routine routine about impending disaster unless we demand the government assume various interventions in the economy.
A key line is plush for political cynics like me: “we are going to spend billions of dollars on solar, wind and biodiesel.”
Yes, it's criminal we haven't done that yet. Can’t you just smell the debate this will prompt?
Not so amusing was the end of that paragraph: “We will hire young people who don't have a trade and give them a trade making homes more energy efficient, insulating homes, changing light bulbs, reducing our dependence on dirty power plants.” So, the idealistic, modern-day version of the ask-not-what-your-country-can-do-for-you president stakes out the turf of telling slackers who only get exercised about “global warming” not to worry, the government will provide (the somehow romanticized) windmill and light-bulb-changing jobs after graduation.
That’s not Camelot, it’s the New Deal, which oddly hadn’t seized on global warming alarmism as a hook even though it was warmer in the 1930s.
In the first such program in California, and perhaps the United States, Bay Area air pollution regulators are proposing to charge an annual fee to thousands of businesses based on the amount of greenhouse gases they emit.
The fee – 4.2 cents per metric ton of carbon dioxide – would affect everything from oil refineries to power plants, and landfills, factories and small businesses like restaurants and bakeries.
It’s distressing to see that some of the “Emerging Church” and some Baptists are getting involved with the “Creation Care” movement. From Sierra Club’s website:
In early 2008 the Sierra Club is cosponsoring an eleven-city tour to promote Christian author Brian McLaren's newest book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crisis and a Revolution of Hope. Focusing on creation care, global justice, and a concern for the poor, this book calls upon its readers to take action in a time of global crisis.
Inspired by our shared values of environmental stewardship, global justice and care for our neighbors, the Sierra Club is proud to partner with Sojourners: Faith & Justice Churches, Emergent Village and others, in promoting this message of responsible stewardship
Although the Bible counsels good stewardship of the Earth, this does not trump care for the neediest on the planet. The early church counseled the Apostle Paul, “Remember the poor,” to which he replied, “the very thing I was eager to do.” But cap-and-trade policies, carbon taxes, mandatory efficiency reductions, and the like place the environment over people. And the effects are already being felt around the world.
In the article “Rising Food Prices Curb Aid to Global Poor,” the World Food Program director Gregory Barrow said, “We've not been put in a position where we’ve had to shut down a program or reduce the rations, but prices have risen to a point where they're going to have an impact … sooner or later.” And the food riots, such as Indonesia’s response to soybean prices doubling because of an ethanol mandate, have already begun.
Energy shortages, often caused by the stone-walling regulations of environmentalists, are now beginning in Africa, which joins Brazil, Cuba, Pakistan, Chile, the Baltic states, Iraq, and Uganda. Faced with energy-rationing resulting from global warming policies, the outlook for the one-quarter of the earth’s population that has no electricity ever getting electricity is bleak.
And for Christian groups to join forces in this way to a group such as the Sierra Club, whose stated goals are “to limit human population numbers” and who take actions promoting abortion, seems contradictory to most Christians’ basic tenets.
The risk of a fatal heatwave in the UK within five years is high, but overall global warming may mean fewer deaths due to temperature, a report says.
A seriously hot summer between now and 2012 could claim more than 6,000 lives, the Department of Health report warns.
But it also stresses that milder winters mean deaths during this time of year – which far outstrip heat-related mortality – will continue to decline.
Maybe New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is running for higher office. He has gone from tempering media alarmism to, as of today, being the alarmist’s alarmist.
As NewsBusters reported last November:
“On Monday’s CBS ‘Early Show,’ co-host Harry Smith interviewed New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg. The liberal mayor has followed in the footsteps of Al Gore and implored the government to take action to address an impending environmental crisis, saying ‘We need to do something now.’ To match Bloomberg’s alarmist rhetoric, Smith added ‘Manhattan will be underwater by 2050.’ Amusingly, even Bloomberg thought that assertion went too far, ‘There’s a — I don’t know that Manhattan will be underwater, but certainly the environment’s going to be a lot worse that we leave our children’.”
Times change, and the New York Sun now cites Bloomberg saying that global warming “has the potential to kill everybody” (conveniently, others today have a quite different view).
Now, it has been quietly suggested that to call the global warming doomsayers alarmists is to engage in name-calling just like them. This episode offers a good pressure test for that position. The tag “alarmist” is simply not in the same solar system as calling anyone who disagrees with you – nay, with your prophesying of the future, no less – akin to a Holocaust denier.
“Alarmist” also is far less tame than this behavior demands. People insisting that catastrophe is ensured – even that quite possibly everyone on the planet will be wiped out – unless you do what they want are hysterics. Be happy with “alarmist”.
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