Your waistline: the latest global warming culprit

In case you were wondering what's next on the global warming/climate change agenda -- which is the same as the Obama agenda -- you may not have to look further than your (growing) waistline. A new study in the UK as reported by the BBC has found that getting back to the "slim trim days of the 1970s" would help to tackle climate change: "The rising numbers of people who are overweight and obese in the UK means the nation uses 19% more food than 40 years ago, a study suggests.

That could equate to an extra 60 mega tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year, the team calculated.

Transport costs of a fatter population were also included in the International Journal of Epidemiology study".

Apparently, then, that spare tire that you are more likely sporting  today is not only less attractive to look at, but  takes more fossil fuels and carbon to carry around town. In addition to calculating the increased food costs of the heavier population, the research also addressed how much additional fuel would be needed for transportation of modern-day UK compared with the 1970s version:

"Greenhouse gas emissions from food production and car travel in the fatter population would be between 0.4 to 1 giga tonnes higher per 1bn people, they estimated."

But lest you think this might lead to a campaign against obesity, the self-esteem police are making sure that everyone's "fatness" is to blame:

"This is not really just about obese people, the distribution of the whole population is what's important," said Dr Edwards.

"Everybody is getting a bit fatter. Staying slim is good for health and for the environment.

"We need to be doing a lot more to reverse the global trend towards fatness, and recognise it as a key factor in the battle to reduce emissions and slow climate change."

So, we're all at fault for not being able to fit into those 70s era hip-hugger jeans and tight knit tops with the wide stripes (not to mention the platform shoes). One wonders whether the fashion of the 1970s followed our collective level of slenderness, or whether those tight-fitting fashions and non-breathable poly-blends forced us into a perpetual state of starvation. Whatever the cause-and-effect, the eco-fanatics are now targeting our food consumption as the latest attack on mother earth. It's quite in line with the other prohibitions of personal enjoyment that are now on the chopping block, like taking that family vacation in your fuel-guzzling motor home or driving that V8 Dodge Charger you've always wanted. Nope, from now on you'll squeeze your tight little bum into a Prius and enjoy the rev of that high-performance electric motor -- that sweet hum only a committed tree-hugger could truly enjoy.

In any event, stay tuned. You can bet that this is the next agenda on the Obama mission to remake America. Last year I wrote a piece entitled "The Left's Nanny Aspirations", where I detailed attempts to ban smoking, fast-food and other sins. Left alone, these efforts -- linked to public health considerations -- pose a significant threat to our freedoms. But being able to link our eating habits to climate change will flow nicely with the EPA's recent ruling that CO2 is a pollutant that threatens our health -- even if it is the most common element in the earth's atmosphere. Finding a causal link to global warming should put us on notice that further regulation of our food consumption is coming. You can bet that second helping of potatoes on it!

Earth Day then & now

(Denver Post, Apr. 19) “The trouble with the eco-crusader is that his false guilt and his false fears feed endlessly upon each other.” With Earth Day coming up on Wednesday, I remembered this line from an old presidential speech. Can you guess who said it? “From the emotional remorse that we have sinned terribly against nature,” it continues, “there is but a short step to the emotional dread that nature will visit terrible retribution upon us. The eco-crusader becomes, as a result, deaf to reason and science, blind to perspective and priorities, incapable of effective action.” That’s telling’em, Mr. President. Or it would have been, if Richard Nixon hadn’t let staffers talk him out of giving the Eco-Crusader speech in September 1971.

Fired up by attacks on the “disaster lobby” by Look magazine publisher Thomas Shepard, and uneasy about his own role in establishing the Environmental Protection Agency after the first Earth Day in 1970, Nixon directed me and other speechwriters to produce a warning against ecological extremism that he could deliver as a major address.

Our draft died on his desk amid concerns about political backlash. I kept the file as a historical curiosity – the presidential bombshell that wasn’t. Today, four decades into the age of true-believing green religion, Nixon’s undelivered speech reads prophetically.

So does Shepard’s diagnosis that the environmental doomsayers “are basically opposed to the free enterprise system and will do anything to bolster their case for additional government controls.” So does the denunciation by Prof. Peter Drucker, another source we consulted at the time, of the green fallacy “that one can somehow deprive human action of risk.” The battle lines have changed little in 38 years.

I wish now that President Nixon, a gambler in foreign policy, had risked this piece of domestic truth-telling. One politically incorrect speech from the White House couldn’t have halted the tides of earth-worshipping guilt and fear that still engulf us. But it would have been a start. With braver leadership, sooner, America’s voices for environmental common sense might have been less outnumbered today.

Two of those lonely voices were in Colorado last week. Terry Anderson, head of the Montana-based Property & Environment Research Center, and Christopher Horner, a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, brought a coolly factual message to deflate some of the new-energy hype and carbon-phobia that Bill Ritter trades on and Obama wants to emulate.

Anderson literally wrote the book on free-market environmentalism – a 1991 volume by that title. He told the Independence Institute about PERC’s research on such inconvenient truths as the wildly oversold benefits of green jobs and the grim toll that cap-and-trade legislation to mitigate CO2 will take on our standard of living.

Horner’s current book is “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed.” He told the Centennial Institute, where I work, that a recessionary economy and ten straight years of global cooling make this the worst time for a burdensome new carbon tax that “would not detectably impact climate anyway.”

If the eco-crusaders were serious about cleaner energy, says Horner, they would support nuclear power. They aren’t, so they don’t. And again, we find the battle lines unchanged; the nuclear debate also pervades my 1971 White House file. No, their aim is control, as Thomas Shepard warned. “For a new enemy to unite us, the threat of global warming fits the bill,” gloated the anti-growth Club of Rome in 1991.

Cheerleading mainstream journalists have decided the likes of Horner and Anderson “are not news,” as one bluntly told me – so you heard little about their visit to Ritterville. The governor letting eco-crusading foundations pay his climate czar’s salary has caused no stir either. We're supposed to believe a staffer beholden to ideologues at the Hewlett and Energy foundations gives Ritter objective advice? What sheep we are.

Wow! Climate issue civilly debated

Amazingly enough there was an actual debate on global warming the other night. True, Al Gore and his followers in “The Church Of Global Warming” are loath to debate the subject. But some of us yearning for knowledge, so that we might make up our own minds, were able to listen to actual dialogue at a Centennial Institute forum sponsored by Colorado Christian University on April 8. On one side, there was the esteemed Professor James White of the University of Colorado in Boulder. He believes that man has grown to the point where we actually have the ability to change most anything on the planet: That does include the climate. He showed us some very impressive charts, most of which we have seen. He did include the warming that has occurred since the 1970s, but did not really address the cooling that has occurred in the last 10 years. He did do a very good job of explaining the science behind “Greenhouse Gases.”

The most notable part of White's presentation was his acknowledgement that while he does believe mankind has contributed to Global Warming, he is not sure it is wise to actually change the climate or to make major economic dislocations to mitigate “the problem.”

On the other side, we listened to the fast-talking and self entertained Mr. Christopher Horner. He is a noted author and senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. Mr. Horner spent much of his time noting the past occurrences of Global Climate Change, that occurred before humankind had any influence. He accurately noted how there have been times in the past where Carbon Dioxide levels were much higher than today.

A great deal of time was spent on how there has actually been cooling for the past ten years. I felt Horner could have spent more time on the fact that NONE of the climate change models predicted this, and how convenient it is that no one is talking about this issue. To his credit, he did address the issue of how much of the discussion about “Global Warming” is political.

Overall, the fact that two people willing to have a rational, open discussion entertained us made it a very enjoyable and informative evening. However, I would like to tackle two of the issues I felt were not really addressed.

1. How “Cap ‘N Trade” is really nothing other than a massive tax transfer of wealth from rich nations to poor nations. Other than increasing taxes, there will be no real reduction in Carbon Dioxide or any real effect on the climate.

2. There really needs to be a discussion about how we address energy independence while we create alternative energy sources. Yes we need to get away from burning carbon, but that will take many years. What are we to do in the meanwhile; continue to send our hard earned dollars to people that hate us or want to kill us? How about create a whole new energy source like Hydrogen Power? Not only could we stop using oil and gas, but we would also create a whole new set of industries that we would own, we would control and we could sell to the rest of the world.

I guess here is where the wise guy in me comes out; I have a saying, that where government, science and actual discussion are concerned, why anyone would actually expect the right thing to be done. That is where we are today for the most part.

Wednesday's discussion was an excellent start. More of this needs to be undertaken. It is only when people talk, debate and listen that creative solutions can be achieved. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE do not believe for one second that the debate about Global Warming, or Climate Change as they are calling it now, is over. It is not. It is only over if we the citizens don’t stand up and speak out. Otherwise, it will be over and we will all pay dearly for something that we have no control over.

2.

'Responsibility' vs. 'Do no harm'

Climatologist James White debated author and attorney Christopher Horner on policy responses to global warming, April 8 at the Lakewood Cultural Center, in the debut event of the Centennial Institute distinguished speaker series at Colorado Christian University. Interest from the campus community and metro Denver friends of CCU was high, with attendance of about 400 overflowing the 300-seat auditorium. "Global Warming: Is the Kyoto Agenda Warranted?" was the topic for an hour-long exchange between White, who directs a research center at CU-Boulder, and Horner, whose book Red Hot Lies alleges unfounded alarmism about CO2 emissions. The adversaries were respectful but forceful with their dueling slideshows. Audience questions continued past the scheduled hour of adjournment. If you'd like a DVD of the whole event, click here to request ordering information.

White insisted human activity is massively and adversely modifying the biosphere, but he stopped short of the doomsaying often heard from the Al Gore camp. People will get by even if warming worsens, he said, but we should take climate change as a warning to lighten our footprint -- "training wheels for sustainability." Change on earth is natural, he said, and that includes human-caused change -- "but unlike bacteria, we can control our actions. We can tell right from wrong, we have a sense of responsibility. What is our responsibility to the Earth?"

But Horner said that Obama's energy tax as contained in the cap and trade legislation before Congress violates the principle of "First do no harm." With 155 countries already signaling non-cooperation on carbon emissions, he said, stringent efforts by the US will have negligible impact on warming trends "while leaving us less well-off economically to deal with what's coming anyway."

If climate activists were serious about reducing carbon, he taunted, they would start with clean green nuclear power, not a job-killing tax. Further evidence that they are not serious, Christopher Horner noted, is in a 1991 strategy memo by Club of Rome which said in order to advance their no-growth agenda, "new enemies have to be identified [and] the threat of global warming fit the bill."

"Man has always adapted, and wealthier societies adapted best," Horner asserted in his closing argument. "Access to energy, not energy poverty," will position us to cope with whatever is ahead, another of his slides stated. For a future that may be literally more stormy than today, he pointed out, you'd rather live in affluent Florida than destitute Bangladesh. So the prescription is policies making all the world more like Florida and less like Bangladesh -- exactly opposite to the Kyoto agenda.

Centennial Institute Fellow Kevin Miller, an Aurora entrepreneur, commented afterward: "Can one begin to imagine such a debate being sponsored, let alone tolerated, on the CU-Boulder campus? That's the niche CCU is claiming with its new institute and thoughtful programs like this one."

John Andrews, institute director and former Colorado Senate President, joked that the event avoided being snowed out, only to be blacked out. The evening's mild weather put to rest worries about the "Al Gore jinx" of several recent warming conference, but the debate was ignored by mainstream media. For example, said Andrews, editors at Channel 7 for some reason didn't feel this fit their upcoming series on green issues, while the Denver Post environment reporter avowed Horner's presence made this occasion "not a debate... not news."

But CCU and the Centennial Institute shrugged it off. "Our two nationally-known experts on climate science and climate policy seemed to think it was a debate," said Andrews. "So did a century-old local university. So did our capacity crowd of several hundred open-minded Coloradans. If the MSM choose to be close-minded about this, it's really their problem, not ours."

Nature is always the standard for us

When the natural elements wreak their havoc on us, we are reminded that human power can extend only so far. Yet our submission to "the laws of nature and of nature’s God" is more cause for celebration than despair. Many people, educated and uneducated, seem to assume that nature is something outside us, forgetting that mankind is part of creation or the cosmos, and indisputably a powerful force within it. Some deplore and some rejoice that we seem to be the masters of all we see.

But, I believe, the truth is somewhere in between the extremes of minimizing and maximizing our position in "the great chain of being." We are not mere beasts and certainly not gods, for we have a nature no less than all other things in the world. Thus, there is freedom in but also limits to our power. We are the "in-between being" who partakes of both the bestial and the divine.

Some speak of creation or the cosmos rather than nature, for they understand that nature does not name all that exists but is a term of distinction for all things. That is, every thing has a nature, which is constituted by its form and characterized by its purpose.

For example, birds are designed to fly, possessing the wings, shape and feathers that equip them for this purpose. This definition also serves to distinguish them from other two-legged creatures and animals with other appendages. They do more than fly, of course, but we are speaking here of what is distinctive. Some insects fly too, but no one confuses them with birds.

Mankind is a warm-blooded upright animal with the capacity for thinking, visibly manifested in speech but also demonstrated in tool making. Some birds make sounds similar to speech but there is no inward meaning in them. Many animals build but they do not articulate a design or make blueprints.

Man’s rationality is the basis for his capacity to choose, not only among alternatives that present themselves in everyday life but to make plans for the future; to determine what is immediately pleasant or beneficial but also to discern what is good for families and nations. Nothing is more distinctively human than contemplating the purpose for our lives.

What has distinguished mankind in our time is technology. Through an industrial revolution, human beings generated greater power and demonstrated more productivity than ever in our history. As fundamental as this was to our higher living standards, it almost seems quaint compared to what has come about since in electronics, computers, and space and medical technology.

These remarkable advances have not and cannot change our fundamental nature as rational animals. I am far from minimizing the enormity and the value of technological progress, but we are still mortal and subject to the domination of passion as well as reason. In a world of brilliant scientists there are "ethically challenged" ones who need to be governed by the laws and customs of our humane civilization.

Just now our greatest danger is the passion for limitless experimentation and the urge to commandeer the whole world’s resources. Ironically, it comes in the guise of concern for mankind’s well being, whether that is the eradication of disease or the amelioration of our fears.

What could be more desirable, some believe, than utilizing the seemingly limitless possibilities of embryonic stem cells to combat diseases? Why should the loss of allegedly less than truly human blastocysts stand in the way?

And who wants to be incinerated in the zone of green house gases that are said to be threatening to dry up the world? Who wants to see the ice and snow melt and inundate the earth with water while turning the fertile portions of the earth into gigantic deserts?

These horrible scenarios depend for their credibility on the almost divine claims being made for modern science. Its practitioners believe that they can eliminate all human ills even as they accuse their fellows of making the world uninhabitable by past scientific progress! Their hubris (overweening arrogance) consists in overestimating man’s powers and ignoring the limitations of his nature.

We human beings are builders and thinkers but we are not gods. We are not free of nature. We are part of it. We cannot "save" mankind or the world. We can only live in accordance with our natures and the natural elements.