Bjørn Lomborg has a new column in USA Today.
This morning in USA TODAY, Lomborg argues that in virtually every developed country the air is more breathable and the water is more drinkable than it was in 1970. Deforestation has turned to reforestation and ever-more people have access to clean water and sanitation.
This Earth Day, we need a dose of realism about real environmental challenges — such as the air and water pollution that make life so miserable for billions — and the real opportunities that exist for environmental innovation, to make our planet a better place.
He writes:
Year after year, we are treated to a message of environmental doom and gloom and admonitions on Earth Day. On the back of this sentiment in wealthy countries, governments have invested billions of dollars in inefficient, feel-good policies such as subsidizing solar panels and electric cars.
But there are far better ways to improve environmental prospects for humanity and our planet. On Earth Day, we need more fracking, more wealth, smarter investments and fewer inefficient subsidies.
Full story: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/04/22/earth-days-good-news-column/2101327/
Another way is to show your ride:
David Burge (Iowahawk) writes on his FB page:
Rejoice, carbonators! It’s time for the 8th Annual Iowahawk Earth Week Cruise In!
8th Annual Iowahawk Earth Week Cruise-In – 7 days of peace, love, and carbon-belching horsepower straight from the garages of Iowahawk readers.
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2013/04/the-2013-iowahawk-earth-week-cruise-in.html
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If you can stomach the “science” here is the schlockumentary “Thin Ice”:
http://thiniceclimate.org/watch-the-film
I’m watching it piecemeal, and just came to the part where they “show” how whenever C02 goes up, so does the temperature, and vice-versa. So, it’s top-notch Gorescience.
And let’s not forget that Earth Day co-founder Ira Einhorn is spending life in prison for murdering his girlfriend and then composting her remains. While watching a wildlife camera earlier today there were many at the chatroom part proudly exclaiming, “Happy Earth Day!”. I doubt any one of those folks know about Einhorn and perhaps would just shrug their shoulders anyway.
They used to say that the Houston Ship Channel was too thick to drink, too thin to plow! But it never caught fire like the river in Cleveland!
In 1970 the Charles River in Boston had an “F” rating. Due to paint factories on the Cambridge side, it changed its hue from day to day. Now it is one of the cleanest big-city rivers in the nation, with a “B+” rating, and is clean enough to swim in.
The real environmentalists worked long and hard and did a very good job. However environmentalism has been hijacked by political fruit cakes.
Real environmentalists brought the population of whooping cranes back from 21 to over 200, but now the population is in decline, likely due to “eco-friendly” wind turbines. (Google “wind turbines whooping cranes,” and you will learn more than you like about the subject.) (I wrote my view here http://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/for-the-birds/ )
Maybe we could get a movement going to have “Earth Day” renamed “Julian Simon Day”.
Jeez, I hope you’re kidding. I raced one of those in a Vintage Team Challenge race and – man, was it one nasty handful! The power band was all in the last 1,100 rpm. Keeping that thing on the boil was butt clenchingly …. exciting. Combine that peaky and powerful hit with skinny non-race compound rubber with brakes that sorta-kinda work and you’ve got two or six scary events per lap. Never want to ride one again.
We did, however, finish very well. But, boy, was I glad when that race was over.
@Caleb –
Ditto for California condors – several have been killed by the wind turbines at Tehachapi.
As for Earth Day – I find it profundly signficant that April 20 is the birthday of two of the world’s most murderous socialist tyrants – Valdimir Ulyanov, aka Lenin, and Adolf Hitler. That would seem to comport with green politics.
History has repeatedly demonstrated that environmental concerns are mostly to almost entirely generated by those whose economic status is middle class or above. The pernicious programs pursued and promoted by the purveyors of anti-carbon catastrophism which aim to keep the billions of humans who still spend their complete lives in grinding poverty from ever being able to advance beyond that state are therefore the ultimate anti-environment agenda.
Despite their efforts, the world has made profound progress in expanding economic opportunity, to the point where it is now several years since we passed, for the first time in all of human history, the moment where more than half of all living humans could be considered “middle class”.
http://www.economist.com/node/13063298?story_id=13063298
This was accomplished not by any program of “wealth redistribution”, but by nations like China, India, Brasil, and others, whose top down command and control economic systems had kept their populations eternally poor, allowing just a few inroads of market economics to operate in their realms. The only place in the world where this looming tide of progress has been successfully thwarted on a large scale is Africa, which some will of course argue is proof of the power of “white supremacy”, but which I would argue is a clear demonstration of the evil that results from leaving the economy of an entire continent in the hands of the worldwide antipoverty bureaucracy.
The sad fact of modern environmental zealotry, is that it is completely dedicated to programs that make them “feel good” about themselves with no consideration allowed for the mounting evidence that those programs are much more damaging to human and environmental prospects than any of the supposed evils they claim to be battling. To celebrate Earth Day I offer this blast from the past from Penn and Teller about recycling. As with all of P&T’s efforts the contents are mildly offensive.
Note to Anthony:
I don’t suppose you’ve been invited to speak at the climate change segment of Chico State’s Earth Day/Hitler’s Birthday celebrations?
If I weren’t handicapped and unable to go on my own, I’d be there picketing.
What Lomborg fails to understand is that Warmists don’t want to “improve environmental prospects for humanity” their aim is to “improve environmental prospects for….our planet.”
I will celebrate Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday by turning all the exterior lights on at my farm from dark until I go to bed! I think they rather tipped their watermelon hands when they declared Lenin’s birthday as “Earth Day”. I think they are all envious of the number of people Lenin’s system of government managed to remove from the planet.
One of the best ways to celebrate Earth day is to pump out the nasty, noxious plant poison called co2. It has had the paradoxical effect of greening the planet. Someone needs funding to research this strange phenomena. 🙂
Another BFTP from the original Earth Day
http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/joncgabriel/the-13-worst-predictions-made-on-earth-day-1970
Folks here should, as I do, most appreciate number 13
“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Kenneth Watt
I forgot to include a HT to http://americandigest.org/ for the link to the above
Happy Watermelon Day. So why is Earth Day April 22…..hhmmmm first celebrated in 1970….. hhhmmm. 100 years earlier was… wait for it….the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, (April 22nd 1870) the Father on modern communism. Watermelons are only good for eating
@Owen –
Don’t forget it’s also Hitler’s birthday.
Mike Haseler says “we probably have a lot to be grateful to the past greens …. although modern greens have lost their way”
Very true. Past Green concerns were based on real problems. The campaign against fossil fuels is based on a non-problem. It’s very hard to argue against a Green because they are in the grip of noble cause arguments. But it’s also very difficult for genuine Greens to see that this time they’re pursuing a non-problem, because of the corruption in climate science.
Rabid greenies are a disaster in any language, but in the case of CAGW the real culprits are the scientists, both those who pump unsupported hypotheses at our expense and those who stay quiet while the scientific process gets corrupted.
[Note, I draw a distinction between Green and greenie]
Tom J says:
April 22, 2013 at 8:18 am
‘Another way is to show your ride:
Seriously serendiptitious; my friend just sent me a “found” picture of me on my 1972 Kawasaki S2 350cc 2-stroke, just coming down from a launch wheelie, probably in 1973. I am off to Iowahawk.
What greater demonstration of watermelonhood than to realize that today is Lenin’s birthday.
One can fly the red and green flag.
Jim Arndt says April 22, 2013 at 1:32 pm
Imagine this in a Star Treck episode:
Watermelons are only good for eating
Are you advocating cannibalism, Jim?
Nows your chance to watch for free the new Climate Change propaganda documentary. See how it rates along side. An Inconvenient Truth, Age of Stupid, etc.
http://thiniceclimate.org/
This just in from the electric car revolution front
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/04/22/fisker-spent-600k-for-every-car-it-sold-skids-toward-bankruptcy/
$600K for each $100K car, such a brilliant plan. Of course US taxpayers supplied a goodly portion of it, but hey, what could possibly go wrong?
A while back I was riding on my scooter and I came across an over sized SUV with a bumper sticker that read, “Go Green, Go Solar”. Well, IF you really wanted to “Go Green”, you wouldn’t be driving an over sized SUV silly.
The only reason for an improving environment is use of fossil fuels, cheap, available energy 24/7 not wind power occasionally at the weather’s whim.
Here is something earth day related that I found funny:
http://imgur.com/Sw5eh45