It seems it's timely that after a lengthy Thanksgiving Day debate with my brother-in-law about climate change (he believes a majority of it is due to human activity and I don't) and what to do about it, this piece about how the US has reduced its carbon footprint more than anyone else shows up. What makes it ironic is that it was all done without the need for Kyoto or draconian measures that would cripple the already weakened economy. But even with that, the environmentalists say it isn't enough fast enough.
What I find funny is that even if these environmentalists got their way, the effect of the reductions they want would be minute on the environment based upon their own projections.
These so-called environmentalists (I say so-called because this flavor of environmentalist isn't concerned about the environment but about controlling everyone under the mantle of protecting the environment) will not be satisfied until we're back to subsistence farming, except for themselves, of course. They talk a good game about “green” this and “green” that but work against actually implementing those very same green technologies and energy. One example - promoting solar and wind but then protesting against the infrastructure needed to get the power where it needs to go, i.e. power lines.
I think my biggest gripe is that many of these 'environmentalists' make dire predictions about how a warmer planet would be disastrous despite plenty of historical evidence that says just the opposite, the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods being just two examples. They take any weather event that causes destruction, Hurricane/Tropical Storm Sandy being the latest example, and extrapolate it to show how every hurricane or tropical storm will be worse from here onwards. It doesn't matter that the severity of hurricanes and tropical storms hasn't lived up to their hype and there are plenty of hurricanes in the past that were far more destructive. I have to say that part of the reason Sandy was more destructive was because of the heavy development along the coastlines of New Jersey and New York. If those areas had been built up like this when the 1938 hurricane paid a visit to the northeast the destruction and death toll would have been orders of magnitude higher.
To get back to the matter at hand, it appears to me that the 'environmentalist will not be appeased until we're living the nightmare of Fallen Angels, proclaiming global warming is a dire threat even as glaciers bury Boston, New York City, Chicago, and Seattle.
