Quote of the Day belongs to the Oxytocinator:

"Global warming is not about science, it's not about saving the planet, it's about taking away people's freedom and getting them to go along with it on the basis of guilt, the fact that they have sinned in destroying the climate and killing the polar bears so you'll give up your freedom, make modifications in your guilty lifestyle, raise taxes that you will pay, gladly so just to feel better about yourselves. "As someone who lived under communism for most of my life, I feel obliged to say that the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity at the beginning of the twenty-first century is not communism or its various softer variants. Communism was replaced by threat of ambitious environmentalism." Well, lo and behold. I have been saying this since the early nineties, a giant See, I Told You So. "

Is actually a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and a contributing editor of the magazine Living Marxism.

Besides which, present day China and the USSR are/were actually perfect examples of of some of least environmental countries in the world :O

-David Ahlport

Guess I can't really say that. But at the same time, people on their own, rushing around and doing whatever the hell they like, are more likely to cause anarchy than peaceful solutions. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, and global warming is a bit of an extraordinary problem, and it's not one that will be solved democratically by people exercising their constitutional right to buy giant cars and get the petrol for them cheaply.

Their argumentation is based on the spreading of fear and panic by declaring the future of the world to be under serious threat.

Yeah, well, I have no problem with that statement. But then, that's because the world is under a serious threat!

If I share initials with 'Global Warming', is that a sign?

Remember McCarthyism?  It destroyed the lives of a whole generation of lefties after WWII.  This was a repeat of what happened after WWI.

I'm not suggesting that folks get paranoid, but that it wouldn't hurt to take a look at how the right has historically whipped the nation into a mass psychosis that made a wave of repression politically acceptable.

The rise of global warming as an issue is a double-edged sword:  This visibility can lead to important policy advances, but there is always the possibility of a powerful backlash, particularly if times get bad.

Its true, if you are a believer in religion.

If you believe in religion go F'ck the earth and its  flora and fauna, no worries..... God only loves YOU.... and come the last day, all good human believers will be saved.

Yes lovers of LIFE on Earth, you are communistic just as LIFE is, you are against personal religion, you are the antichrist.

Christians be afraid, be very afraid, because God left the planet a few billion years ago and it will never return.

This is your last days, and there is absolutely no hope for y'all to be saved.

Would you like to change course, there is still a chance that you might love the planet's life forms again?

LOL, no hope, y'all can't even become radicalised by the wanton dismembering of the world's children.

What hope have you got, none IMO.

First associate a popular and successful political movement with an unpopular and failed political movement.  Second associate unrestricted polluting and land use with all personal freedom.

Both of these assertion are so far away from reality that people pushing them are at best uninformed, and at worse deranged.

There is a positive correlation between open democracies and environmental protection. Why would enviro's be in favor of a political system that would destroy what they have accomplished and stop and further gains?

Economic activities that are done that are detrimental to other people's property have always been restricted since the time the US was settled.  The legal terms describing this are nuisance and tresspass.

Neoconservatives are not conservative, they are commies!  

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

More on-topic: Twice in the past week pieces have appeared in the local paper I write my column for on how climate change. One exchoriated what he calls "the Cult of Gaia", I think in large part thanks to my many articles on Gaia and climate change. This columnist teaches 8th grade history here in town, believe it or not, and is the father of one of my son's friends from high school. He's intelligent and should know better, but he doesn't. A Michael Creighton fan all the way. The other was a letter to the editor that lambasted "leftists" for trying to ruin the wonderful life we've created for ourselves here in the U.S., as well as "high priest" Al Gore for his lavish lifestyle, etc. What these folks are attempting to do is cast doubt on the science by insisting there are plenty of reputable scientists out there who disagree with the IPCC report, number one, and distrust in the messengers, number two, pointing out every inconsistency they can find between our talk and our walk. I have no idea how successful they are with the first, but I know they do have some success with the second. And it's frustrating. People like this associate dealing with climate change with a loss of our supposed freedoms, similar to the argument against zoning here in a rural area (a communist plot, no one is going to tell me what I can and can't do with my land, etc. etc.). These folks are definitely trying to put a major crimp in transforming towards a more sustainable, ecological way of living, and they may succeed, at least in the short term. Once more people find themselves negatively impacted by the changing climate they will be less effective, but we need to make major changes now. It's frustrating for sure.

Without a 'crisis' there would be no need for Hillary Clinton to become the Domestic Dictator she wants to be.

In fact, the global corporatism that the questionable Christians of this ilk support, wittingly or no, has an enormously greater right to be considered "the one-world government with a one-world religion."

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The communist agenda, whether in the form of global warming or homosexuality or abortion or teaching our children a watered-down pluralistic version of the Bible, is a form leading to the one world order.
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This is absurd.  It just goes to show that demagogues can use any words they choose and mean anything by them.  Is it not obvious that LGBT rights, reproductive rights for women, and the professional critical study of biblical literature represent the very opposite of a single world order?  And why is it not acknowledged that people who rally to the battlecry, "Jesus Was Not Tolerant!," e.g. people who write, read and support WDC Media, must surely be among the most radical global monolithicists on the globe?

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Do not be deceived.

"For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist."--2 John 1:7

"For false christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect."-- Matthew 24:24
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Here is a brilliant example of how Christians (of many denominations and traditions, unfortunately, but these evangelicals take the cake) abuse the Bible, and commit an injustice against those honest, simple seekers who are struggling to learn what the Bible really tells us.  Plainly, it is universally excellent advice, to urge anyone anywhere with a reasoning brain not to be deceived.  But to suggest that these two biblical authors were referring to the warners against global warming, and the supporters of women's rights and LGBT rights, is a falsehood pure and simple.

By the way, for a couple of laughs, look at the trailer of the movie advertised at the left of the screen on the linked page.  The cast is mostly good-looking, young, blondish people.  The good guy, the "Christian," sleeps in the same bed with his girl-friend, but with a ridge of pillows between them; he freaks out when she happens to touch his leg.  The adorable villain works in a stem-cell-research lab; he teases his "Christian" friends by asking, as he gets dressed, "Do you think Jesus would approve of this tie?," and when one says, "The Lord does not care what you wear," shoots back, "Then maybe I should go naked"; presumably the movie ends with his conversion.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

You cause damage to government property?
You have to pay to have it fixed.

Guess what, the air and the atmosphere is government owned property.

If you cause economic damages to the atmosphere,
In a true capitalist system,
you are therefore required to pay for it.

-David Ahlport

This is why the threat of government regulation of CO2 output scares them. It's a different world now. With 6.5 Billion of us all planning to pump CO2 galore into the atmosphere with our non-negotiable and ever more Western style of living (SUV's, incandecent electric lights everywhere, etc.), the government has to step in and attach a regulator valve to each of us. It ain't going to happen voluntarily.

I knew that some one was going to connect taking action on global warming to promoting gay marriage! I didn't listen to the video because I thought it was the same old stuff, but this is different.

Hill and Bill will rule like twin Stalins.  Grabbing your guns, spying on your organizations, and generally making your lives miserable.

What a wonderful way to help out social security.  A wing nut stress test!  The nuttiest of you (jabbering) faithbasers will worry themselves into an early grave.

Janet Reno?  Tanned, rested, and ready.  Go get 'em Jan!  Bring on the federal home invasions and fires.  Burn baby burn!   Hehehehey.  

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Now there is a WOMAN, I adore her clarity and honesty.  She is saying what we all should be saying.  Stand by this woman.

The thing that often bothers me about climate change (and boy, I'll probably get crucified for this) is that it tends to leave out people.  It focuses on what is happening to the earth, to biological systems that we can measure, and on physical degradation that our consumer/Western lifestyles are causing.   And while this is the norm in environmental problem rhetoric, I find it profoundly unsatisfying.

As someone who comes to the environmental movement as an unabashed lover of people and humanity, this omission grates me every single time I hear another study about what two degrees of warming will do to the earth and how we are all killing the planet.  Western capitalist modes of production/extraction are warming the planet and are also, on a daily basis, killing people's livelihoods, and a lot of this is related to each other, but rarely talked about since it deals with issues of justice and fairness and confronting aspects of consumer and producer behavior that we like to ignore.  I think that putting people into the debate about global warming is so important, and so not being done.

I think that with a focus on people we can find more common ground with evangelicals and other religious groups, as well as with most human beings.  Climate change is such an abstraction, and until we can bring it to the human level, I think it will remain an abstraction to the average individual--be it a soccer mom in Indiana or a swidden agriculturalist in Indonesia.

Stephanie

But it is not clear just what it is you are complaining about.  Certainly here in Gristmill, the connexion between environmentalism and social justice has been made often enough.  True, it is not a regular theme, but it appears time and again.  See David Roberts's fascinating recent interview with Van Jones, and the link in the following thread to Clarke-Atlanta University's site on Environmental Justice.

It is very possible that not many of us would say, with you, that we "came to the environmental movement as unabashed lovers of people and humanity."  Or at least we would not quite put it that way.  In fact I think it is fair to say that most of us do indeed feel a love for other human beings, in one form or another.  And most of us would want to relate our attraction to the environmental movement to that love, somehow.

Maybe it is up to you, to show us how to do that.

As an image of various forms of loving, in the context of a human and environmental disaster, consider the reactions of each of us, distant witnesses to the many forms of suffering that attended the inundation of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.  Countless news stories were reported; it was impossible to catch 100% of them; and so we chose the ones we found most interesting to us.  Which were of greatest interest to you?  Evacuees languishing for days at the Superdome and the convention center?  People stranded in their houses?  Patients and medical staff stranded at the hospitals?  Reports of looting?  Assigning blame to Washington, to FEMA, to the state government, the city government, the police department, the Army Corps of Engineers?  And so forth.

Was any one emphasis more valuable, more humane, more people-loving, than any other?  Possibly, but I would not know how to go about creating a hierarchy.

For myself, I could not be bothered to sit through all the details about looting incidents (an emphasis of Fox News, I believe), and about the failings of government agencies.  Reports on the architecture of the levees, on how they were overwhelmed, and on how they were being repaired, were middlingly interesting.  But I was enthralled by stories about the plight of evacuees, and about the boatrides in search of stranded people.  And as an animal-lover keenly interested in animal welfare, I read and listened to everything I could, on the separation of people from their animal companions, on the efforts of all the volunteers to rescue abandoned animals, and on the fate of the wild animals at the Audubon Zoo.

(And frankly, I am not very interested in how Al Gore used Katrina-related and hurricane-related images in "An Inconvenient Truth."  They were not really needed by him, to begin with, and they seem to have entangled him in unnecessary and distracting controversies.)

I would never claim that my selection of interests and stories was the best, the optimal, the one indubitably shared by all the highest-minded sort.  Never.  But by the same token, I would refuse to accept anyone's criticism of my selection as being inferior, inhumane or deficient.

So, that is just an example, a metaphor, which can be applied to the much greater range of people-related and animal-related stories contained within the huge subjects of global warming and environmentalism.  We all care about people, at some level.  (And hopefully, a few of us care about animals.)  But there is no single correct way to organize and hierarchize the many forms of love that we feel.

That is what writing is for, by the way.  Well, one of the things that writing is for.  They lie, and deliver falsehood and deception, pure and simple, who say that writing is a morally inferior activity, the resort of weak people, a piece of fluff, a piece of piffle, an evasion of true commitment to an activist cause.

When we write about what we love, there is no describing what beauty we have added to the cosmos.  And when we write, lovingly, to people whom we love, there is no reckoning the number of new cosmoi that we have been granted the power to create.

Best wishes to you, dear Stephanie, fellow client with me of the Proto-Martyr, in your career as a writer.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

To clarify my point above, it just seems to me that much global warming rhetoric focuses on crafting global warming as a technical/scientific problem, and then expressing scientific solutions.  This makes it less compelling (but not less important), I think, because it leaves out its human impacts as well as important human stories.

Stephanie

"Humans, their heartbeat annoys me" (So Beautiful and So Dangerous).  It's in that vein.

It's definitely a blind spot for the movement, identified here over and over again.  Humanity as an infection of mother earth.

So how do we overcome that?  By proposing solutions for environmental problems that also solve human problems.  Such as reproductive rights for women.  It vastly improves the human condition as well as saving the living planet.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

As for loving humans. Yes, I definitely love humans, especially specific humans. Humans in general though, I sometimes despair of. But it's nothing personal, really. Some of the people I most greatly respect, Thomas Berry for instance, believe that humans have great potential and have much to add to the beautiful composition of energies that is life. I have to trust them. . .

Make predictions without enough evidence and people will yell "alarmist!"

Is like... if Leonard Cohen came back as a republican.

I briefly considered him responsible for the Hillary-as-Big-Brother video, until I thought it through and realized he would not be endorsing Obama so early on.

But he is NO Republican.  And I am sure he would not take that suggestion well.  It would not be at all unlike him, if he were even now on his way to Georgia, pedaling an adult-sized tricycle, with a cutlass between his teeth ...

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Now I'll never figure out where any of this stuff belongs.