Season's wolves

Myron howls over the annual Congressional ritual of planning to rape the final corner of Alaska of its oil for one more bloody American summer driving season, and sounds the same as he does every other year.

The oil men use technical measures in the legislature to grease it past the House of Representatives like a piece of pork (in the middle of the night as a rider on a budget bill). Then Myron Ebell comes on the TV and tells us that this was just routine tidying up at the end of the session before Christmas. He used the same voice to explain that smoking could cure cancer.

There are certainly mistakes in the above transcript. Ebell's third speech couldn't be by him; there was truth in it.

However, he ends with a great Ebellian outburst: "The whole thing is about a fundraising scam."

You see, people would only ever disagree with Exxon if they had been bribed and corrupted. No other explanation can be true.

It's just details. All of it. The real story behind these environmental battles is trust and mercy. The modern corporate world has made the political choice that there must be no promise which cannot be broken, and no cubic metre of the Earth which can be preserved from its rampage under any circumstance. It holds the power. It is God. It conquers all, and nothing hides from its light, or remains outside its sphere of destruction from where a finger could be pointed at its full-spectrum impoverishment. The forests shall be stripped into slagheaps and people will be given television sets for compensation. It is "unrealistic" that there be such a thing as public wilderness. Resistance is futile.

That's the message they want people to see.

Meanwhile, in a headline article which I've had to read because Myron is being a lazy, unproductive, good-for-nothing freeloader at the Competitive Enter-shaft Institute, Marlo Lewis growled about the proposed windfall tax on oil profits, trying to tell us that it's a legitimate return on investment qualified by the risk that oil might go out of fashion. He misrepresents the reader about (a) the clear difference between taxing profits and taxing income, and (b) the fact that oil is a finite resource that cannot be multiplied just because people are willing to pay more for it.

Mr Lewis goes on to say: "[E]very candid observer knows [this policy] is intended to penalize and stigmatize America's leading energy companies. Congress cannot single out U.S. oil companies for hostile treatment without increasing the already formidable political risks facing the industry and scaring off investors."

But, No-n-n-n-n-n-n-no-no. These profits are stigmatizing the industry bigtime, because people see a massive creaming off of the difference between a variably high market price against a more-or-less fixed cost of oil extraction. We, who have seen stock market bubbles and crashes, don't really believe in "investor confidence" as an aspect of long-term racial memory, to the extent that the "investors" in 5 years time are going to give a damn or even know what we do to the fat-cat "investors" in this age such that they could be tangibly "scared off" into putting their money somewhere else, like a hole in the ground.

They are too shielded from socio-political reality by this amazing PR machine, which includes the entire volume of lies that come out of the CEI.

Things have got to change.

What must happen is that the rich, the vastly wealthy oil companies, have got to come up with a way to seriously giving something back before we rise up and take it from them. They must make concessions for life on this planet to be bearable. The oil execs can, if they are not stupid, remain fabulously rich, as they are, but have got to know that pushing their dominance too far makes them like Marie-Antoinette. They will force the people to riot, and their heads will be on the block because they were too blind to see it coming, and too insensitive to realize people were hurting. It has not occured to them for one second that they had the power to put it right for essentially inconsequential costs to themselves in terms of their personal lifestyle and affluence.

It's foolish. It's unforgiveable. But these dumb-asses blindly resist all efforts to Get Real about the state of world by continuing to fund professional liars like Myron Ebell and his friends.

Exxon and the other corporate backers must immediately cease their funding of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and publically dissociate themselves from their message, before any sane consideration of the oil and environmental crises can begin.

An ugly man with an ugly face

Myron's self-satisfied bollocks appears in Human Idiots Online today.

As they say, Idiots will write what Idiots will read. The front page article in the same issue is by Oliver North, that well-known illegal arms supplier to Iran when they were fighting the American backed dictator of Iraq bringing to us his wise words about Iraqi Democracy. The ends always justify the means. So long as you forget what the means were... As well as the ends. (What the hell were they, anyway?) Just simply bask in the joy of celebrity.

Also nearby is an excellent article by Steven Milloy, who quite handily appears in the CEI list of tossers as an "Adjunct Analyst". (For those who don't know, the definition of Adjunct is an appendage.)

I love that article. It criticized companies like Fidelity Investments for capitulating to the interests of workers who had invested their own money in the form of pension funds into that company when they demanded it stopped supporting Bush's Social Security dismantlement plan. You see, not everyone with money has rights. According to the CEI the fact that these American citizens had handed over their money to the company as customers rather than shareholders meant they had no right to express a view about what was done with the power that went with it. Lesson to large investors: buy shares in the company which manages your investment at the same time as you hand over your money. Otherwise they will sense that their duty will be to screw you rigid.

But back to Myron's main postings from Montreal, whose events mean that he will be guarenteed "several years of full employment, lots of meetings in very nice places, staying in first class hotels". I don't think he has developed his arguments fully yet. I think he should be preaching that no one who breaths and emits carbon dioxide from their lungs into the atmosphere is allowed to criticise any country, corporation, or other person about their CO2 emissions without being called hypocritical. That's how it is in war, don't you know? If either side proposes a truce, they're just being hypocrites.

Maybe that's why America can't end the war in Iraq which it started and only it can stop. It has too much pride. It is too worried about being called a hypocrite by the likes of Myron and his friends. Only when people start to realize that being criticized by Myron Ebell is a sign of credibility, then we will be on the right track.

Montreal Morons

The CEI arrived on 6th December, eight days late into Montreal, and went off to bother an irrelevant corporate side event. The four who were travelling on a corporate expense account, like practically everyone else in the city, were: Marlo "don't tax the impoverished oil industry" Lewis, Richard "Daily Update" Morrison, Isaac "Eat DDT " Post, and our friend and intellectual patron Myron Ebell.

It's not obvious what good they are trying to do there, since not one of them knows an ounce of science, or benefits from the slightest curiosity in the study of economics, people, or the environment, beyond the constant expounding of crackpot oil-industry enriching policies that they have been paid to promote. It's predicted that an entire world's worth of cutting-edge scientific activity and new discoveries will have absolutely nothing to teach these level-headed gets that they don't know already and don't have plans to discredit if it doesn't agree with the Exxon's values. It like Creationists at an anthropology conference -- no use to anyone. Why don't they just clear off and suck an exhaust pipe?

To be fair, these fat-for-brains admitted that the conference was as lackluster as their "Dispatches from Montreal", and remained entirely below the level of rhetoric we maintain here at the Myron Ebell Climate. All they do is rest on their triumphs in the congressional legislature, a place with the collective wisdom of a bag of burning Phosphorus, and assert the impossibility of the American people burning less oil when, as we will find, it's as going to be as physically easy as dying in a car crash.

Anyone can break a machine by throwing sand into its delicate mechanisms. And anyone can break society by inserting lies into its consciousness. What these men do is pitiful. I will soon be posting up details of better jobs that they should go and get.


PS. I'm still struggling to get through the dire boring presentation by the United States made on 3pm at 30 November, and posted online. It's two and a half hours long, and wall-to-wall pain. First they ignore you, then they fight you, then they bore you, then the worms win.

Pork Denominations

The American delegation put a pig rectum in a wig on the stage to state their position at the climate change talks the other day. It sounded like it was flat out lying -- what's new? -- until someone pointed out that the key phrase is greenhouse gas intensity.

The Exxon defecation organ said:

"Look at the data. The United States has done better in the first three years of the Bush Administration in addressing greenhouse gas emissions than the EU15, EU25, the UK, France, Germany -- I mean, I can go down the laundry list for you. We are not taking a targets and timetables' approach." We have an "ambitious national goal to reduce the greenhouse gas intensity of the United States economy by 18% by 2012."

Faced with this level of success, you might ask why not simply join the Kyoto Convention and satisfy it's requirements rather than blast about the ineffectiveness of international legal frameworks that they are so much in favour of when it's to do with the WTO?

Well, because their targets are pigshit. Greenhouse Gas Intensity is defined as the total emissions of greenhouse gas divided by the country's GDP. Let's set aside the fact that the physical climate does not care how many dollars were made per tonne of CO2 anymore than someone who is hanged notices the cost per yard of the rope around their neck. Let's also ignore the fact that the grilling greaseburgers in a McDonalds for stuffing the mouths of fat people in cars contributes more to the GDP than keeping a home full of elderly people warm enough to survive through the winter. Let's instead listen to how huge the American GDP is, which is the denominator of the equation. Dr Harlan Watson PhD (solid state money) said:

Between 2000 and 2003, President Bush’s first three years in office, the United States managed to reduce its total greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 1 percent, while growing our economy by $1.23 trillion -- almost the size of the entire economy of China -- and increasing our population by about 8.6 million people, which is roughly the combined population of Ireland and Norway.

Like a puff of smoke, the entire Chinese manufacturing base with its billion point two people gets blown away by a mere three years of Bush Administration economic growth. Therefore they have a right to all their carbon emissions, according to the measure. Be prepared for the new measure of the Iraqi Conflict Intensity which will be the number of casualties divided by Exxon quarterly profits. This will show things are improving there, because the number of deaths per corporate buck will have surely gone down. Certainly a sacrifice worth all of us making.