The first time Li Gengxuan saw the dump trucks from the nearby factory pull into his village, he couldn't believe what happened. Stopping between the cornfields and the primary school playground, the workers dumped buckets of bubbling white liquid onto the ground. Then they turned around and drove right back through the gates of their compound without a word.
This ritual has been going on almost every day for nine months, Li and other villagers said.
In China, a country buckling with the breakneck pace of its industrial growth, such stories of environmental pollution are not uncommon.
From CEI's OpenMarket
The weekend Wall Street Journal features an interview with Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who will be the keynote speaker at this year’s CEI dinner — on May 28 in Washingotn, D.C. — in which he discusses his interest in the politics of global warming.
“I am not a climatologist,” Mr. Klaus cheerfully admits. “I am not disputing the measurement of the temperature.” Even so, Mr. Klaus believes that his many years of experience in the fields of economics and econometrics give him some insight into the nature of the problems faced by climatologists and policy makers. In climatology as in economics, he says, “there are no controlled experiments. . . . You can’t repeat the time series.” So, just as you can’t run a controlled experiment to determine the effect of, say, deficits on interest rates, we can’t directly determine the effect of CO2 on climate. All we have are observations and inferences.
Mr. Klaus is also interested in the politics of global warming. He has written a book, tentatively titled “Blue, Not Green Planet,” published in Czech last year and due out in English translation in the U.S. this May. The main question of the book is in its subtitle: “What is in danger: climate or freedom?”
President Klaus’s book, I should mention, is being published by CEI in the United States.
House Democrats introduced legislation Thursday to overturn a decision by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to block California from setting its own emissions standards for automobiles.
Last spring, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could set their own regulations on the emission of carbon dioxide. The California emissions standards were scheduled to take effect in model year 2009 and provide a 30 percent fleet-wide reduction in emissions by 2016 – vehicles sold in California would have to meet those standards.
He has a mighty big carbon footprint.
Al Gore's opulent lifestyle and his virtuous plea to save the planet from global warming don't mesh, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which announced plans yesterday for a new national advertising campaign to showcase the contrast before the American public.
Who says that the issue of global warming is a matter of science, not faith? Just last week, Mayor Gavin Newsom proved belief trumps data. The Chronicle reported that a San Francisco Public Utilities Commission study found that the giant turbines he wanted to put underwater below the Golden Gate Bridge would cost way too much money to install and maintain. They would generate power at a cost of 80 cents to $1.40 per kilowatt hour — as opposed to Pacific Gas and Electric's 12 cents per hour commercial rate. It seems the turbines would produce only one or two megawatts of power — not the 38 megawatts Newsom envisioned.
The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.
Their findings, published in separate journals over the past few weeks, suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide.
In a major shift, a group of Southern Baptist leaders said their denomination has been "too timid" on environmental issues and has a biblical duty to stop global warming.
The declaration, signed by the president of the Southern Baptist Convention among others and released today, shows a growing urgency about climate change even within groups that once dismissed claims of an overheating planet as a liberal ruse. The conservative denomination has 16.3 million members and is the largest Protestant group in the United States.
Being president of the Czech Republic is more like being England's monarch than the president of the United States. While the Czech president has veto power over certain types of legislation, his role is supposed to be mostly ceremonial.
But Vaclav Klaus — who was re-elected last month after being chosen by the Czech Parliament as head of state in 2003 — has not been content to confine himself to ribbon cuttings and state dinners.
Czech President Václav Klaus was one of the speakers at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, and his message was unequivocal. It is not about climatology. It is about freedom.
“Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will, nevertheless, be identical – the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality.”
While most other politicians have gotten on the self-sacrifice-at-the-green-altar bandwagon, blinding themselves to the blood that is dripping from that altar, Václav Klaus has the intellectual decency to be Thomas Stockman of his peers. He was a dissident during the communist era, and now he is a dissident among international state leaders.
His recent portrait in the Wall Street Journal portrays several issues, where he chooses to stay off the bandwagons that other European politicians has gotten on, that includes climate change, Russia, and the Kosovo independence. It takes courage to be a lone voice of reason in a world of group think.
Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch
Mark Newgent, who blogs regularly at Red Maryland and has written extensively on Maryland's climate change commission and the work of the Center for Climate Strategies there, writes in the Baltimore Examiner about the phony scientific consensus of the IPCC panel that alarmists incessantly invoke when defending their indefensible panic attacks:
What goes unmentioned is the fact that the IPCC is a political body. Skeptics are critical of the IPCC because alarmists — even though they masquerade their political motivations in sanctimonious moral language — tout this nonexistent consensus in their patently political quest for massive government interventions into the economy and private life.
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