What it Means to be Green

There are a few stories floating around about what it means to be green. In San Francisco, an office building with no A/C and elevators that only stop every 3rd floor. In Chicago, your sink on top of your toilet and worms in the basement. (Somehow the front page Home and Garden story from the Sunday Trib print edition "The eco-centrics" can't be found online. I linked to the related story.)

Now I'm all for rain barrels, and gardens on the roof, if that works in your urban landscape, but let's look at whether all this is really necessary. I'm a conservative, I like conservation, but we need to cut through the alarmism and junk science. We may have some global warming, but it may well be a short-term natural cycle, and if it's man-made, who was influencing the cycles that have been documented pre-man?

So please, don't tax us for breathing.

And take a little time to watch "The Great Global Warming Swindle".

Previous posts: Global Warming Swindle, Gore's Racket, The Goracle's Carbon Footprint.

UPDATE: Rogers Park Bench has a couple of interesting posts to add to the debate on the subject, here and here.

UPDATE: WSJ on the Big Corn Con, with this salient point, in addition to the evils of tariffs:

The folks to blame are the corn-ethanol lobby, led by Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, who sounds like Senator Cornpone but is craftier than a highwayman. He's blocking repeal of the tariff because repeal would mostly benefit sugar-based ethanol, while his voters and campaign contributors make ethanol from corn. Corn is less efficient as an ethanol feed stock because as a starch it first has to be turned into sugar before it can be turned into fuel.

We could import sugar much more cheaply from Brazil to make ethanol.

UPDATE: NY Times opens the door to disagreement with the Goracle! (They must be worried they are losing credibility on the issue. Introducing nuance) But we'll give you the best quotes:

I don’t want to pick on Al Gore,” Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.”

Then they bury the good stuff at the end:

“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.”

In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change.

Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”

Getting personal, he mocked Mr. Gore’s assertion that scientists agreed on global warming except those industry had corrupted. “I’ve never been paid a nickel by an oil company,” Dr. Easterbrook told the group. “And I’m not a Republican.”

Heh:)