Re: Please, Tell Me Why

Bush is helping Al Qaeda, and hurting America.

Decent people don't support that, they reject it.

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (GilgameshII) wrote:

>"Al-Qaida and the Iraqi bombers have no need to bother.
>America is destroying itself."
>
>Before you of right wing extremist land climb on me about "the sky is
>falling', let me say that when I post articles like this I have two
>over-arching purposes:
>to remind people that we have passed a fork in the road on the
>environemnt to the land of permanent ecotoxism and to say yet again;
>there is a better way; meaning not so destructive of the environment
>as our present methods of production.
>A better and cleaner way to burn coal.
>A better and cleaner alternative to personal transportation
>Better ways to house people in denser population patterns that would
>place smaller footprints on the land.
>Ths list goes on-let me know if you are serious about discussing this
>before you rant.
>
>
>...Those of us without a degree in climatology can have no sensible
>opinion on the truth about climate change, except to sense that the
>weather does seem to have become a little weird lately. Yet in America
>the subject has become politicised, with rightwing commentators
>decrying global warming as "bogus science". They gloated when it
>snowed unusually hard in Washington last winter (failing to notice the
>absence of snow in Alaska). When the dissident "good news" scientist
>Bjorn Lomborg spoke to a conservative Washington thinktank he was
>applauded not merely rapturously, but fawningly. ...
>
>
>. . . But the Bushies have perfected a technique of announcing regular
>edicts (often late on a Friday afternoon) rolling back environmental
>control, usually while pretending to do the opposite. Morale among
>civil servants at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington
>was already close to rock-bottom even before its moderate leader,
>Christine Todd Whitman, finally threw in her hand in May. Gossip round
>town was that she had endured two years of private humiliation at the
>hands of the White House. Few environmentalists have great hopes for
>her announced successor, the governor of Utah, Mike Leavitt
>
>   AMERICA PRODUCES A QUARTER of the world's carbon dioxide emissions,
>the population has risen by 100 million since 1970 and when an area
>three times the size of Britain was recently opened up for mining,
>drilling, logging and road building, no one took much notice. WHAT
>DOES THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION DO? It ignores all attempts to curb
>environmental damage. In a major investigation that took him from the
>Salton Sea in California to Crooked Creek in Florida, Matthew Engel
>reports on how America is ravaging the planet
>
>Road to ruin 
>Friday October 24, 2003
>The Guardian 
>
>   On the map of the United States, just below halfway down the east
>coast, you can see a series of islets, in the shape of a hooked nose.
>These are the Outer Banks, barrier islands - sun-kissed in summer,
>storm-tossed in winter - that stretch for 100 miles and more,
>protecting the main coastline of the state of North Carolina. They are
>built, quite literally, on shifting sands.
>Twenty years ago, these were, by all accounts, magical places, hard to
>reach and discovered only by the adventurous and discerning. They are
>still fairly magical, at least the seemingly endless stretch of
>unspoiled beach is. It is the lure of that which causes the traffic
>jams on the only two bridges every Saturday throughout the summer. The
>narrow strip of land behind the beach, however, has been built up with
>enormous holiday homes, costing up to $2m (£1.2m) each. And prices
>rose by 15-20% (25% for those on the ocean front) in 2002 alone,
>according to one agent.
>    This is what local agents call "a very nice market", and last
>month their area had a week of free worldwide publicity. Hurricane
>Isabel swept in, washing out much of the islands' only road and
>picking up motels from their foundations and tossing them, according
>to one report, "like cigarette butts". One island was turned into
>several islets, with a whole town, Hatteras Village, being cut off
>from the rest of the US - for ever, if nature has its way.
>    Residents, journalists reported, were in shock. Many scientists
>were not. Speaking well before Isabel, Dr Orrin Pilkey, professor
>emeritus of geology at Duke University in North Carolina, described
>the Outer Banks property boom to me as "a form of societal madness".
>"I wouldn't buy a house on the front row of the Outer Banks. Or the
>second," agreed Dr Stephen Leatherman, who is such a connoisseur of
>American coastlines that he is known as Dr Beach.
>    For the market is not the only thing that has been rising round
>here. Like other experts, Pilkey expects the Atlantic to inundate the
>existing beaches "within two to four generations". Normally, that
>would be no problem for the sands, which would simply regroup and
>re-form further back. Unfortunately, that is no longer possible: the
>$2m houses are in the way. According to Pilkey, the government will
>either have to build millions of dollars worth of seawall, which will
>destroy the beach anyway, or demolish the houses. "Coastal scientists
>from abroad come here and just shake their heads in disbelief," he
>says.
>
>The madness of the Outer Banks seems like a symptom of, and a metaphor
>for, something far broader: the US is in denial about what is, beyond
>any question, potentially its most dangerous enemy. While millions of
>words have been written every day for the past two years about the
>threat from vengeful Islamic terrorists, the threat from a vengeful
>Nature has been almost wholly ignored. Yet the likelihood of multiple
>attacks in the future is far more certain.
>    Earlier this year, just before he was fired as environment
>minister, Michael Meacher gave a speech in Newcastle, saying: "There
>is a lot wrong with our world. But it is not as bad as people think.
>It is actually worse." He listed five threats to the survival of the
>planet: lack of fresh water, destruction of forest and crop land,
>global warming, overuse of natural resources and the continuing rise
>in the population. What Meacher could not say, or he would have been
>booted out more quickly, was that the US is a world leader in
>hastening each of these five crises, bringing its gargantuan appetite
>to the business of ravaging the planet. American politicians do not
>talk this way. Even Al Gore, supposedly the most committed
>environmentalist in world politics, kept quiet about the subject when
>chasing the presidency in 2000.
>    Those of us without a degree in climatology can have no sensible
>opinion on the truth about climate change, except to sense that the
>weather does seem to have become a little weird lately. Yet in America
>the subject has become politicised, with rightwing commentators
>decrying global warming as "bogus science". They gloated when it
>snowed unusually hard in Washington last winter (failing to notice the
>absence of snow in Alaska). When the dissident "good news" scientist
>Bjorn Lomborg spoke to a conservative Washington thinktank he was
>applauded not merely rapturously, but fawningly.
>    While newspapers report that Kilimanjaro's icecap is melting and
>Greenland's glaciers are crumbling, the US government has been telling
>its scientific advisers to do more research before it can consider any
>action to restrict greenhouse gases; the scientists reported back that
>they had done all the research. The attitude of the White House to
>global warming was summed up by the online journalist Mickey Kaus as:
>"It's not true! It's not true! And we can't do anything about it!"
>What terrifies all American politicians, deep down, is that it is true
>and that they could do something about it, but at horrendous cost to
>American industry and lifestyle.
>    In the meantime, all American consumers have been asked to do is
>to buy Ben & Jerry's One Sweet Whirled ice cream, ensuring that a
>portion of Unilever's profits go towards "global warming initiatives".
>Wow!
>
>Potential Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination have
>been testing environmental issues a little in the past few weeks. Some
>activists are hopeful that the newly elected Governor Schwarzenegger
>of California is genuinely interested. But, in truth, despite the
>Soviet-style politicisation of science, serious national debate on the
>issue ceased years ago.
>   Of course, nimbyism is alive and well. And, sure, there are
>localised battles between greens and their corporate enemies: towns in
>Alabama try to resist corporate poisoning; contests go on to preserve
>the habitats of everything from the grizzly bear to rare types of fly;
>Californians hug trees to stop new housing estates. Sometimes the
>greenies win, though they have been losing with increasing frequency,
>especially if Washington happens to be involved. These fights, even in
>agglomeration, are not the real issue. Day after day across America
>the green agenda is being lost - and then, usually, being buried under
>concrete.
>
>"We're waging a war on the environment, a very successful one," says
>Paul Ehrlich, professor of population studies at Stanford University.
>"This nation is devouring itself," according to Phil Clapp of the
>National Environmental Trust. These are voices that have almost ceased
>to be heard in the US. Yet with each passing day, the gap between the
>US and the rest of the planet widens. To take the figure most often
>trotted out: Americans contribute a quarter of the world's carbon
>dioxide emissions. To meet the seemingly modest Kyoto objective of
>reducing emissions to 7% below their 1990 levels by 2012, they would
>actually (due to growth) have to cut back by a third. For the Bush
>White House, this is not even on the horizon, never mind the agenda.
>
>Why has the leader of the free world opted out? The first reason lies
>deep in the national psyche. The old world developed on the basis of a
>coalition - uneasy but understood - between humanity and its
>surroundings. The settlement of the US was based on conquest, not just
>of the indigenous peoples, but also of the terrain. It appears to be,
>thus far, one of the great success stories of modern history.
>
>"Remember, this country is built very heavily on the frontier ethic,"
>says Clapp. "How America moved west was to exhaust the land and move
>on. The original settlers, such as the Jefferson family, moved
>westward because families like theirs planted tobacco in tidewater
>Virginia and exhausted the soil. My own ancestors did the same in
>Indiana."
>
>Americans made crops grow in places that are entirely arid. They built
>dams - about 250,000 of them. They built great cities, with
>skyscrapers and symphony orchestras, in places that appeared barely
>habitable. They shifted rivers, even reversed their flow. "It's the
>American belief that with enough hard work and perseverance anything -
>be it a force of nature, a country or a disease - can be vanquished,"
>says Clapp. "It's a country founded on the idea of no limits. The
>essence of environmentalism is that there are indeed limits. It's one
>of the reasons environmentalism is a stronger ethic in Europe than in
>the US."
>
>There is a second reason: the staggering population growth of the US.
>It is approaching 300 million, having gone up from 200 million in
>1970, which was around the time President Nixon set up a commission to
>consider the issue, the last time any US administration has dared
>think about it. A million new legal migrants are coming in every year
>(never mind illegals), and the US Census Bureau projections for 2050,
>merely half a lifetime away, is 420 million. This is a rate of
>increase far beyond anything else in the developed world, and not far
>behind Brazil, India, or indeed Mexico.
>
>This issue is political dynamite, although not for quite the same
>reasons as in Britain. Almost every political group is split on the
>issue, including the far right (torn between overt xenophobes such as
>Pat Buchanan and the free marketeers), the labour movement and the
>environmentalists. The belief that the US is the best country in the
>world is a cornerstone of national self-belief, and many Americans
>still, wholeheartedly, want others to share it. They also want cheap
>labour to cut the sugar cane, pluck the chickens, pick the oranges,
>mow the lawns and make the beds.
>
>But the dynamite is most potent among the Hispanic community, the
>group who will probably decide the destiny of future presidential
>elections and who do not wish to be told their relatives will not be
>allowed in or, if illegal, seriously harassed. "Neither party wants to
>say we should change immigration policy," says John Haaga of the
>independent Population Reference Bureau. "The phrase being used is
>'Hispandering'". Yet extra Americans are not just a problem for the
>US: they are, in the eyes of many environmentalists, a problem for the
>world because migrants, in a short span of time, take on American
>consumption patterns. "Not only don't we have a population policy,"
>says Ehrlich, "we don't have a consumption policy either. We are the
>most overpopulated country in the world. It's not the number of
>people. It's their consumption." Ehrlich may be wrong. It is, though.
>somewhat surprising that the federal government's four million
>employees do not appear to include anyone charged with even thinking
>about this issue.
>
>This brings us to the third factor: the Bush administration, the first
>government in modern history which has systematically disavowed the
>systems of checks and controls that have governed environmental policy
>since it burst into western political consciousness a generation ago.
>It would be ludicrous to suggest that Bush is responsible for what is
>happening to the American environment. The crisis is far more
>deep-seated than that, and the federal government is too far removed
>from the minutiae of daily life.
>
>But the Bushies have perfected a technique of announcing regular
>edicts (often late on a Friday afternoon) rolling back environmental
>control, usually while pretending to do the opposite. Morale among
>civil servants at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington
>was already close to rock-bottom even before its moderate leader,
>Christine Todd Whitman, finally threw in her hand in May. Gossip round
>town was that she had endured two years of private humiliation at the
>hands of the White House. Few environmentalists have great hopes for
>her announced successor, the governor of Utah, Mike Leavitt.
>
>What is really alarming is the intellectual atmosphere in Washington.
>You can attend seminars debunking scientific eco-orthodoxy almost
>every week. Early in the year, there was much favourable publicity for
>a new work Global Warming and Other Eco-myths, produced by the
>Competitive Enterprise Institute, an organisation reputedly funded by
>multinational corporations. Outside Washington, it can be far nastier.
>"I've never threatened anyone in my life," a conservation activist in
>Montana complained to the Guardian. "I do know, though, that I have
>gotten very ugly threats left on my telephone answering machine over
>the past year, and twice had to scour my sidewalk in front of the
>building to erase the dead body chalk outlines."
>
>Out in the west, words such as enviro-whackos are popularised by
>rightwing radio hosts such as the ex-Watergate conspirator Gordon
>Liddy, who passes on to his millions of listeners the message that
>global warming is a lie. "I commute in a three-quarter-tonne capacity
>Chevrolet Silverado HD," he swanked in his latest book. "Four-wheel
>drive, off-road equipped, extended curb pickup truck, powered by a
>300hp, overhead valve, turbo supercharged diesel engine with
>520lb-feet of torque... It has lights all over it so everyone can see
>me coming and get out of the way. If someone in a little
>government-mandated car hits me, it is all over - for him." Fuel
>economy in American vehicles hit a 22-year low in 2002.
>
>In this country, green-minded people can't even trust the good guys.
>The Nature Conservancy, the US's largest environmental group with a
>million members - with a role not unlike Britain's National Trust -
>was the subject of an exhaustive exposé in the Washington Post in May,
>accusing it of sanctioning deals to build "opulent houses on fragile
>grasslands" and drilling for gas under the last breeding ground of the
>Attwater's Prairie Chicken, whose numbers have dwindled to just
>dozens.
>
>On April 22, 1970 more than 20 million people attended the first-ever
>Earth Day. In New York, Fifth Avenue was closed to traffic and 100,000
>people attended an ecology fair in Central Park. The Republican
>governor of New York wore a Save the Earth button, and Senator John
>Tower, another Republican, told an audience of Texan oilmen: "Recent
>efforts on the part of the private sector show promise for pollution
>abatement and control. Such efforts are in our own best interests..."
>
>So what happened next? The problem for the green movement was not what
>went wrong, but what went right. Ehrlich's book, The Population Bomb,
>said: "In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines - hundreds of
>millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash
>programmes embarked on now." The famine never came. And after the oil
>crisis came and went, and Americans began to tire of the gloom-filled,
>eco-oriented presidency of Jimmy Carter, they turned instead to Ronald
>Reagan, who proposed simple solutions of tax cuts and deregulation
>and, lo, the world got more cheerful. With doomsday postponed
>indefinitely, the politics of the Reagan years have lingered.
>
>Some activists remain bitter about the Clinton White House, which was
>only patchily interested in green issues. "It left a bad taste in the
>mouth of the environmental community," says Tim Wirth, a former
>senator and one-time Clinton official. "They trimmed their sails over
>and over again. The old House speaker, Tip O'Neill, had a very
>important political aphorism: 'Yer dance with the person who brung
>yer.' They never did." This bitterness was one of the factors that led
>to the hefty third-party vote for Ralph Nader in 2000, which proved
>disastrous for Al Gore, the inhibited environmentalist.
>
>In the three years since then, Bush has danced like a dervish with the
>folks who brung him. Yet, even now, no one dare say out loud that they
>are against environmentalism: the political wisdom is that the subject
>can be a voting issue among the suburban moms, ferrying the kids
>around to baseball practice in their own Chevrolet Silverados.
>Instead, the big corporations and their political allies have -
>brilliantly - manipulated the forces that the eco-warriors themselves
>unleashed and turned them back on their creators. "In the 80s they
>took all the techniques of citizen advocacy groups and
>professionalised them," explains Phil Clapp. "That's when you saw the
>proliferation of lobbyists in Washington. The environmental community
>never retooled to meet the challenge. They had developed the
>techniques, but were still doing them in a PTA bake-sale kind of way."
>
>Thus every new measure passed to favour business interests and ease up
>on pollution regulations is presented in an eco-friendly,
>sugar-coated, summer's morning kind of way, such as Clear Skies, the
>weakening of the Clean Air Act. The House of Representatives has just
>passed the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, presented by the president
>as an anti-forest fire measure. Opponents say it is simply a gift to
>the timber industry that will make it extremely difficult to stop the
>felling of old-growth trees. Another technique is to announce, with
>great fanfare, initiatives that everyone can applaud, such as a recent
>one for hydrogen-based cars. We can expect more of these as November
>2004 draws closer. When they are scaled back, or delayed, or dropped,
>there is less publicity. It is a habit that runs in the family.
>Governor Jeb Bush's grand scheme to save the Florida Everglades was
>much applauded; the delay from 2006 to 2016 was little noticed.
>
>Even now the White House does not win all its battles. In the Senate,
>where a small group of greenish New England Republicans has a
>potential blocking veto, there are moves to compromise on the forests
>bill. The New England Republicans were largely responsible for Bush's
>inability to push through his plan to allow oil drilling in the
>Alaskan wildlife reserve. Occasionally, there is good news: some of
>the small dams that have impeded the life-cycle of Pacific salmon and
>steelhead trout are being demolished; there are reports of a new
>alliance between the old enemies, ranchers and greenies, in New
>Mexico; renewable energy is under discussion. But some of their
>policies are already having their effect. Carol Browner, Clinton's
>head of the EPA, claims the Bush administration has set back the
>campaign to cut industrial pollution in ways that will last for
>decades.
>
>"This administration has sent a signal to the polluting community,
>'You can get away with bad habits'," says Browner. "State governments
>in the north-east were much tougher, so the north-eastern power
>stations upgraded their emissions standards in the 90s whereas the
>mid-west guys, who are their competitors, didn't. Now they're not
>enforcing the law."
>
>"So what they're saying to the companies is: 'Don't go early, don't
>comply with the law first. The rules might change.' Even a company
>that wants to do the right thing has to look at its bottom line. If
>they get into a situation like this, they think: 'We spent $1bn to
>meet the requirements and our competitors didn't. Yeah, great. We're
>not going to do that again.'"
>
>Under Bush, the lack of interest at every level has at last come into
>balance. The US is equally unconcerned globally, federally, statewide
>and locally. The environmentalists' macro-gloom has been off-beam
>before, of course. Perhaps global warming is a myth; perhaps the CEI
>is right and there will be a blue revolution in water use to
>complement the green revolution. There is probably just as much as
>chance that the next big surprise will be a thrilling one - the
>arrival of nuclear cold fusion to solve the energy dilemma, say - as a
>disaster. Maybe biotechnology, pesticides, natural gas and American
>ingenuity and optimism will indeed see everything right. It does seem
>like a curiously reckless gamble for the US to be taking, though,
>staking the future of the planet on the spin of nature's roulette
>wheel.
>
>But it is only a bigger version of the bet being taken by the
>home-buyers of North Carolina. In a country supposedly distrustful of
>government, the Outer Bankers have remarkable faith in their leaders'
>ability to see them seem right. Post-Isabel, a group of residents
>there wrote a letter demanding government action so they can protect
>their livelihoods and families "without the fear of every hurricane or
>nor'easter cutting us off from the rest of the world". Quite. Who
>would imagine that in the 21st century the most powerful empire the
>world has ever known could still be threatened by enemies as
>pathetically old-fashioned as wind and tide?
>
>Orrin Pilkey thinks it quite possible that sea levels might rise to
>the point where the Outer Banks will be a minor detail. "We're not
>going to be worried about North Carolina. We're going to be worrying
>about Manhattan." Still, macro-catastrophe may never happen. The
>micro-catastrophe, however, already has: the US is an aesthetic
>disaster area.
>
>If you fly from Washington to Boston, there are now almost no open
>spaces below. This is increasingly true in a big U covering both
>coasts and the sunbelt. In the south-west, the main growth area,
>bungalows spread for miles over what a decade ago was virgin desert.
>The population of Arizona increased 40% in the 1990s, that of
>next-door Nevada 66%. That's, as Natalie Merchant sang, "...the sprawl
>that keeps crawling its way, 'bout a thousand miles a day", which is
>not much of an exaggeration.
>
>Every day 5,000 new houses go up in America. Many of these fit the
>American appetite for size, however small the plot: "McMansions", as
>they are known. The very word suburb is now old-hat. The reality of
>life for many people now is the "exurb", which can be dozens of miles
>from the city on which it depends. In places such as California,
>exurban life is the only affordable option for most young couples and
>recent migrants.
>
>These communities are rarely gated but often walled, creating a vague
>illusion of security and ensuring that the residents have to drive to
>a shop, even if there happens to be one 50 yards away. Naturally, they
>have to drive everywhere else. In August it was announced that the
>number of cars in the US (1.9 per household) now actually exceeded the
>number of drivers (1.75).
>
>In many places - especially those growing the fastest - developers
>have to deal only with the little councils in the towns they are
>taking over. There are often minimal requirements to provide any kind
>of infrastructure, such as sewage or schools, to service these new
>communities. The rules for building houses in the computer game Sim
>City are stricter than those that apply in most areas of the Sun Belt.
>Too late, some parts of the country have concluded that this is
>untenable. The buzz-phrase is "smart growth", which means no more than
>the kind of forethought before building that has been routine in
>Europe for half a century. Even the Environmental Protection Agency is
>not above being helpful: its policies for making use of brownfield
>sites have seen people moving, improbably, back into the centre of
>cities such as Pittsburgh.
>
>But where it matters, no one is talking strategy. "In the really
>fast-growing states, the pace of development is such that they can
>build huge numbers of houses without anyone considering what it means
>for the infrastructure," says Marya Morris of the American Planning
>Association. In California, more than perhaps any other state, there
>is a debate. But while people talk, developers act: a city catering
>for up to 70,000 people will soon arise at the foot of the Tehachapi
>Mountains. According to the Los Angeles Times, it would effectively
>close the gap between Los Angeles and Bakersfield, theoretically 111
>miles away. "Southern California is coming over the hill," said one
>resident.
>
>Americans still have a presumption of infinite space. But I have made
>a curious and mildly embarrassing discovery. In states such as
>Maryland and Ohio, the pattern of settlement in supposedly rural areas
>is such that it can actually be quite difficult to find a discreet
>spot away from housing to stop the car and have a pee. Amid the
>wide-open spaces of Texas, it can be worse: the gap between Dallas and
>Waco is a 100-mile strip mall. The concepts of townscape and landscape
>seem non-existent: there is land that has been developed and land that
>hasn't - yet.
>
>And yet. Time and again, around the US, one is struck by the stunning
>beauty of the landscape, not in the obvious places, but in corners
>that few Americans will have heard of: amazing rivers such as the
>Pearl in Louisiana, or the Choptank in Maryland or the Lost River in
>West Virginia; the Chocolate Mountains and the San Diego back country
>in California; the bits that are left of the Outer Banks...
>
>And equally one is struck by the sheer horrendousness of what man has
>done in the century or so since he seriously got to work over here. In
>the context of ages, the white man is merely a hotel guest in this
>continent: he has smashed the furniture and smeared excrement on the
>walls. He appears to be looking forward to his next night's stay with
>relish.
>
>Of course, there are still huge tracts of untouched and largely
>unpopulated land: in the Great Plains, where people are leaving, in
>the mountains, deserts and Arctic tundra. But last spring, in another
>of Washington's Friday night announcements, the Department of the
>Interior announced - no, whispered - that it was removing more than
>200m acres that it owned from "further wilderness study", enabling
>those areas to be opened for mining, drilling, logging or
>road-building. That's an area three times the size of Britain. The New
>York Times did write a trenchant editorial; otherwise the response was
>minimal.
>
>Not long ago I went for a walk in the Vallecito Mountains in
>California. After a while, I got myself into a position where the
>contours of the land blotted out everything and, after the noise of a
>plane had died away, there was no sight or sound at all that was not
>produced by nature. This lasted about a minute. Then, from somewhere,
>a motorcycle roared into earshot.
>
>Sure, there are still places in this vast country where it is possible
>to escape, but they get harder and harder to find except for the fit,
>the adventurous and those unencumbered by children or jobs. Most
>Americans don't live that way. And nowhere now is entirely safe from
>being ravaged, sometimes in ways that prejudice the future of the
>whole planet. Al-Qaida and the Iraqi bombers have no need to bother.
>America is destroying itself.
>
>Special report
>United States
>Climate change
>
>http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1069883,00.html

Global warming is an affront to God, as those who are supposed to
be stewards of the earth merely destroy it instead.

Only a truly hate-filled person hates even the planet he 'lives' upon.