Listening to Al Gore Would Ruin the World

Al Gore has succeeded in bringing global warming to the forefront. All those fossil fuel burning private jet trips to promote his movie have paid off. Let me try to inject some sense into the debate. Is global warming happening? Probably. Are we causing it? Maybe a tiny little bit (.28%). This is where I could spend 50 pages reiterating all the scientific info from the skeptics which is commonly ignored in the media, but I would rather focus on something else...well OK, I will list just a few items:

• A fun exercise is to actually crunch the numbers and see what percent of global warming gasses actually come from man. It is only about .28%
• One scientist says warming is a natural trend that adds moisture to the air right before the next ice age, which is overdue.
• A think tank that shreds Gore's movie.
• Other scientists link global warming to solar activity. And another one more.
• There is the Oregon Petition where 19,000 scientists have agreed to the following statement: There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.
• There is the MIT professor who disputes Global Warming as man made. He also lays out how skeptics are intimidated and have their grant money revoked.
• How about the story that claims cows pollute more than cars. If cows create that much pollution, then what about the billions of non-domestic animals?
• There is the Canadian scientist who says, Global Warming, as we think we know it, doesn't exist. And I am not the only one trying to make people open up their eyes and see the truth.
• An article that claims the earth hasn't warmed since 1998.
• A scientist who says gloabal warming would help the world.
  
• There is the former director of the National Weather Satellite Center who says ground temperature measurement is flawed and that satellite temperature readings show no warming. He also claims that only about 100 of the 2500 scientist in the latest UN study are qualified to say anything about global warming.
• What about the fact that Vikings raised crops and cattle in Greenland 1000 years ago, while Britons grew grapes in England. Four hundred years later, the Vikings were frozen out, Europe was gripped in a Little Ice Age, and priests performed exorcisms on advancing Swiss glaciers.
• Then there is something I thought up, but have heard nowhere else. I am guessing, but there has to be at least 1 billion temperature controlled building in the world. That means there are 1 billion little heaters set at 69 (66 for us tightwads) degrees Fahrenheit (remember - air conditioners actually put out more heat than cold). Is it not possible to surmise these 1 billion heaters are raising the earths temperature and not “pollution”?

I’ll let you dig through the info and make your own determination. I would rather focus on what would happen if we listened to Al Gore and drastically cut CO2 emissions. Also, what we never hear about are the good things this evil substance called CO2 does and how liberal scaremongering has harmed billions of people in our world. Paul Driessen sums it up rather good:

• Just the current Kyoto Protocol could cost the world up to $1 trillion per year, in regulatory bills, higher energy costs and lost productivity. That’s several times more than the price tag for providing the world with clean drinking water and sanitation – which would prevent millions of deaths annually from intestinal diseases.
• Elsewhere, government and private studies calculate that the Protocol would cost the United States up to $348 billion in 2012. The average American family of four would pay an extra $2,700 annually for energy and consumer goods, and in US minority communities, the climate treaty would destroy 1.3 million jobs and “substantially affect” standards of living.
• Yet, even perfect compliance with Kyoto would result in Earth’s temperature being only 0.2 degrees F less by 2050 than under a business-as-usual scenario. Assuming humans really are the culprits, actually controlling theoretical global temperature increases would require 40 Kyoto treaties – each one more restrictive, each one expanding government control over housing, transportation, heating, cooling and manufacturing decisions.
• Over 2 billion of the Earth’s citizens still do not have electricity, to provide basic necessities like lights, refrigeration and modern hospitals. Instead they breathe polluted smoke from wood and dung fires, and die by the millions from lung diseases. But opposition to fossil fuel power plants, in the name of preventing climate change, ensures that these “indigenous” lifestyles, diseases and deaths will continue.
• Opposition to hydroelectric projects (damming rivers) and nuclear power (radioactive wastes) likewise perpetuates endemic Third World poverty. So would a new European Union proposal to tax imports from China, India and other poor countries that are exempt from the Kyoto Protocol, because this gives them an “unfair trade advantage” over EU countries that are struggling to meet their Kyoto #1 commitments.

Listening to people like Al Gore would mean wide spread economic ruin and has already harmed billions in the third world. I know people like Gore mean well, but they cause far more damage to the world than global warming ever could.

Another downside of listening to Al Gore would be the necessary government regulations and intervention into our lives. Government would have to stick there nose into every aspect of our lives in order to be the CO2 police. The door will also be opened for world government intervention.

• With global warming, however, greenhouse gasbags can argue that auto emissions in Ohio threaten people in Paris, and that only global government can tackle such problems. National sovereignty? Democracy? Forget it: global warming has now brought the Left closer to global government, statism, and the eradication of individual rights than it has ever been before.

Personally I don’t want anyone in France telling me what to do. Liberals would love this, but freedom is more precious than trying to fix a questionable problem. I don’t want to sound conspiratorial, but I somewhat think the global warming bandwagon is more about knocking down America and capitalism (to be replace by "green" socialism) than stopping pollution. Dr. George Reisman has a shocking quote:

• …it should not be surprising to see hordes of former Reds, or of those who otherwise would have become Reds, turning from Marxism and becoming the Greens of the ecology movement. It is the same fundamental philosophy in a different guise, ready as ever to wage war on the freedom and well-being of the individual.

Now don’t call me an evil capitalist polluter. I encourage and practice cleaner lifestyles and energy conservation. I love the beauty of my home (Montana) and will fight to keep her that way. I also strongly support the efforts to develop clean energy and this is exactly where solutions should be sought. But we have a catch-22 situation. To develop the technology needed to move past fossil fuels, we need a strong and vibrant economy. Past economic prosperity has already taken us from wood, to coal, to oil, to gas, and soon to hydrogen. With each step there is more energy output for less pollution. We can force ourselves back into the stone age and get nowhere or we can plunge ahead and take the natural progression beyond fossil fuels.

Don’t force the world to ride bikes, don’t make the items people need to survive skyrocket in price, and don’t you dare take way my freedoms to fix something that may not even be a problem. Instead of destroying our standard of living let's focus on using technology to better the world. We are well on our way with the great strides being made in wind, solar, bio-fuels, hydrogen, etc. We can only guess what else is just around the corner, but a crappy economy will only move that corner farther away.

Oh yeah and if all else fails and I am completely wrong about CO2, we can use technology to fix that too. Some of the world’s scientists have devised ways to correct global warming.

I’ll leave you with a good read on the junk science behind global warming.

Minimum Wage – Democrats Hurting Those They Claim to Help

Here we are again. The democrats are using the minimum wage to divide the country into “compassionate” liberals and “evil greedy” conservatives. They run around on their almighty high horse shouting how they want to help the little guy. But they know damn well a rise in the minimum wage will do little to help people, but will potentially do lots of damage. The reality is that democrats care more about looking good than actually helping people.

Let's first take a look at who actually earns the minimum wage and see how it correlates to what the democrats claim. The following is from a Heritage Foundation Study.

Minimum wage workers under 25 are typically not their family’s sole breadwinner. Rather, they live in middle-class households that do not rely on their earnings. For the most part, they have not finished their schooling and are working part-time jobs. These workers represent the largest group that would directly benefit from a higher minimum wage.

Even the vast majority of older adults who earn the minimum wage live above the poverty line. They have an average family income of $33,600 a year, well above the poverty line of $19,806 per year for a family of four. Most of them choose to work part-time, and a sizeable number are married. The average older minimum wage-earner simply does not fit the stereotype of a worker living on the edge of destitution.

Only one in five minimum wage-earners lives in a family that earns less than the poverty line. Three-fifths work part-time, and a majority are under 25 years old. Minimum wage-earners’ average family income is almost $50,000 per year. Very few are single parents working full-time to support their families—no more than in the population as a whole. It is not surprising, then, that studies show that higher minimum wages do not reduce poverty rates. Instead of raising the minimum wage, Congress should look at other ways to aid the working poor that actually focus on providing help to those who need it.

***more on the topic of who the minimum wage really helps***

So few people under the poverty line actually earn the minimum wage. Minimum wage earners are largely teenagers and retired people looking for something to do. But democrats would have us think people are starving in the streets and we have a crisis from which they can rescue us. In other words, they have found an emotionally charged topic that will gain them votes but do almost no good. If that was it I would applaud the democrats for their clever political move, but like most liberal ideas that seem compassionate on the surface when you dig deeper we find they actually do great harm. Let's explore some or the more obvious unintended consequences of this liberal idea.

I personally would love to sleep in every morning and spend my days drinking beer and watching movies. If I could make living doing that I would. Within that same train of thought, if a person is able to make a living doing menial work there is less incentive for them to improve their lives and become something like doctors or engineers. Removing hardships from people's lives is sometimes the worst thing we can do as hardship is an incentive to improve. The fear of hardship and the desire to improve ones life is largely the reason why America is a leader in medical advances and new technologies. Compare us to advancements coming for socialistic nanny countries like….well France. (A little off topic, but fewer medical advances mean more dead people. Yes, I’ll say it, the socialistic ideas pushed by liberalism, kill people. Instead on condemning America and “big business”, the world and democrats should be praising us for saving their asses when they are too lazy to do it themselves.)

Secondly, the minimum wage has destroyed our sense of community in regards to mentoring the growth of our children. Many of us remember working for local businesses as a kid to earn a few dollars. Well the minimum wage has made that almost impossible. Before you call me a cruel child abuser read this article . Walter Williams says it better than I can.

The little bit of money a kid can earn after school isn't nearly as important as the lessons gained through early work experiences such as: good work habits, respect for supervisors, and being prompt. Plus, early work experiences give youngsters a chance to make job mistakes at a time when they are not as costly as when there are dependents counting on a continuous source of income. Then there's the self-respect from being at least semi-financially independent. These benefits are important for any young person. However, they are even more important for young people growing up in dysfunctional homes and neighborhoods and attending rotten schools. If they are to learn anything that will make them more valuable employees in the future, they won't learn it at home, in the neighborhood or in the schools. Their only chance is in the world of work. Government has cut off that rung of the economic ladder.

Thirdly, let me make a prediction…the sales of industrial dishwashers will soon rise. Why you ask…because it will soon be more economical to buy an automatic dishwasher than to pay a manual one. The sad thing is that democrats will end up benefiting with new votes by causing job losses, as automation becomes more economical than manual work. Won’t it be great to be a democrat, the more damage you do the more power you gain.

The best thing a politician can do to help people is to get the government out of the way and let people use their natural talents and abilities to get ahead. I would be willing to wager that if there were no minimum wage people would get higher pay and services would improve. Both the employer and the employee get accustomed to the minimum wage and just accept it instead of letting market forces set the wage. The minimum wage creates a mindset that employers don't need to pay more and the employees don't expect more and therefore don't need to work harder. Without the minimum wage employers would have to compete for the better employees, and the employees would have more incentive to hand you a hamburger with a smile. But that wouldn’t create more democratic votes, so yet again we get to be subject to the democratic lies of how compassionate they are.