Keep telling those lies

Listening to Myron is like listening to the moon talk. It's a voice in your head that keeps telling you to kill everyone you meet, and it gets real angry when you don't do what it says. So we hear:

"President Bush seems desperate to find someone to blame for continuing high demand for gasoline, which is the result of high economic growth and continuing supply problems," said Myron Ebell. Instead, [he] called on Bush to get back on message and blame an obstructionist minority in Congress for blocking legislation that would increase domestic energy production, including opening a portion of the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas production.

"I don't know why the president would try to de-legitimize or demonize energy use," he barfed.

So, what do we have here? If Ebell or anyone in the Crappititive Ignorance Institute cared about the kind of economic theories they are so usually excited about, they would be gleefully informing us about how demand was declining, and alternative sources of energy were being sought as the price of petroleum rose. They'd say, "Look how the system works. You have nothing to fear from the market because it all comes right in the end."

But they don't.

That's because Myron Ebell speaks from the dark pumping heart of Exxon, with the single-minded attitude of a back-street drug pusher in a greasy coat. He knows his boss can raise the price at any time. He knows you are addicted to the substance and can get it from nowhere else. Your thirst for oil is not because you are growing bigger and stronger, it's because you are dying. Do not go to the drug rehabilitation clinic to get help. Stay out here in the grime where there is no future and you live only for the day.

Myron has always been like Mickey Mouse. Newspaper reporters should refer to him as such.

Meanwhile, I missed this letter by Myron, where he gave us his prescription for Iraq, by saying: "The petro-states in the Middle East have been able to maintain their authoritarian rule because they own all the oil. If the Iraqi provisional government had begun reconstruction efforts by announcing that the country's oil fields would be privatized and that each Iraqi citizen would be given a share in the enterprises and the profits, Iraq might be on its way to becoming a successful society now."

But the oil companies didn't stick to that idea, so now Iraq is in a civil war. If only they had followed Myron's plan, everyone would be better off. Maybe Iraq could become an advanced democracy, like America, where the oil companies own the government and pay the press to lie to the people about the state of play.

My guess is that this is a fantasy scenario outside of the homeland. Myron over-estimates himself. It takes three generations to educate the citizens of a nation to become as stupid as Americans are as to the nature of government. Iraqis know a little to much of what the game is about. Governments lie, kill, steal, and ultimately do not care what happens to people or the planet. They are like forces of nature, like volcanoes. You can move out of their way, you can harness their energy if you are very careful and responsive, but you cannot trust them to be nice.

PS. Myron seems to have lost the urge to write about climate change at the moment, so it's been left to his mates down the hall to lamely fisk a recent report by Time Magazine, with the usual citations from their short list of non-scientific sources. We hope it's because journalists have struck him off their lists of "experts". But why not just black-list the whole CEI? Without the oxygen of publicity, this tumour would die off in a matter of months, and we would all feel good about it.

Post-Peak Myron

In an otherwise reasonable article, Christian news 24/7 let themselves down as usual by copying some outright lies spoken by Myron Ebell. The rule is, if Myron Ebell is the other side of the story, then there is no other side of the story.

We are all going to die. Christians, of all people, are supposed to be able to handle this, what with their biblical floods and stuff. If they thought that global warming and its consequences was an act of God, they could handle it. However, because it comes about through the action of natural forces whose initial conditions we have an effect on, it can't possibly be malignant. I saw a warp factor 9 oxymoron in another article which I don't every want to see anywhere else: "Climatologist Pat Michaels of the CATO Institute". It's not possible to be a scientist and work for a Right wing lie tank in the same lifetime.

Today's topic for Myron is peak oil. Myron said: "At some point, oil production will peak. I think that is a long ways away... In the early 1930s, the Department of Interior estimated that we'd run out of oil by 1940. So there's a long history of predicting these things, and most of the predictions turn out not to be true."

As Myron well knows, this "long history" ended in 1956 with Hubbert's publication, and subsequent US government data which confirmed it over the last 50 years, although now this data is being systematically deleted.

Fine. You can tell something's true because Myron doesn't want to talk about it. A good reporter would have asked Myron whether he was talking about the same planet as ours. An honest reporter would not have gone on to quote Myron's following statement: "There is plenty of oil in the ground right here in America, but environmental protection laws prevent us from drilling for it... There are political obstacles to oil production in many places in the world -- most seriously in the United States."

Every word is, as usual, a lie.

Of course, although the assertion that the petroleum industry appears to have owned the US government lock, stock and barrel for the last eighty years is about as self-evident as the statement that God does not appear to exist, it's not something we want to remind anyone of, is it.

Myron Ebell: A man who has dedicated his life to making the world a worse place to live in for all his four children.

De-prioritizing Myron

As usual, the presence of Myron Ebell as a source in an article is a reliable guarantor of total all-time shiteness. So it is with Jennifer "Liberals dominate televised media" Biddison's printed output as "Right-wing Conspiracy Manager" of the Heritage Foundation's spinoff, Townhall.com. This is exactly the sort of place where Myron Ebell belongs with the crazies.

Today's oxymoronic Conservative campaign is the attempted routing of the Endangered Species Act. No one is sure why it is important to them to accelerate the mass extinctions that have been taking place since the emergence of Homo Sapiens, but perhaps it is a logical extension of their natural racism. Only animals and plants (and different pigmented humans for that matter) that are slaves to them deserve to live. You see, some species, such Sus scrofa domesticus have gone out and found a job and a purpose in life (and death), so they will never be extinct. The rest are just freeloaders standing in the way of economic progress and the eventual attainment of the perfect economic life where we all live in capsules with a TV at one end and suck yeast through our noses.

According to these nutters, everything the ESA has done has always been bad. Jennifer Biddison claimed in her article that the northern spotted owl caused the closing of 288 sawmills in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and California losing 31,438 jobs directly and 63,000 indirectly in 1989. Unusually for her, she's exaggerated some questionable government statistics by only a factor of two (p15):

Implementation... is estimated to reduce employment in the Pacific Northwest timber industry by about 18900 jobs, compared to employment that would have been expected in 1995 [three years later] with no protection of the spotted owl. Jobs in related sectors will be reduced by 13200. Lost or reduced wages are estimated to be about $1.4 billion [3 days of Iraq war spending] during the coming 2 decades.

Know when to simplify. When manufacturing relocates to Mexico to take advantage of lower wages, workers who lose out have to retrain and get jobs as corporate executives -- or as nannies and housemaids for corporate executives. But when the corporations are forced to halt work a few years before an irreplaceable resource runs out, that's a different matter. Employment is pretty complicated:

Comparing the years 1980 and 1989, the volume of logs cut on the national forests in Oregon increased by 908 million board feet, and the overall volume of logs cut (all ownerships) in the entire state increased by 1.718 billion board feet. Overall, that is a 25 percent increase, and 38 percent on the national forests.

But during that same period, jobs in lumber and wood products dropped by 2600. With 25 percent more trees cut down, we got 2600 fewer jobs. For a 38 percent increase in national forest tree cutting, we got 3.7 percent fewer jobs.

You see, corporations don't want there to be any jobs. Jobs are worse than pollution to them, because at least pollution doesn't cost them any money. We should discount any positive statement they make about jobs, and check whether they are in fact making a veiled threat.

In contrast, clear-cutting it really simple. The permanent consequences are known, inexcusable, and unpopular. The only positive benefit would have been a few bucks in some rich guy's pocket back in 1992, which by now he would have spent on fast cars, expensive women, elite schooling for his kids so they become psychopaths worth bribing the Republican party for their jobs in government where they could wraught the greatest social and environmental damage possible.

The system is self-sustaining like a house fire. And so we come to Myron, with his angle on the case. He lamented:

"The American people would prefer to see the cost of public good fall on the backs of a few landowners rather than on their own backs."

Nearly right, but so very wrong in a dangerous way. Logging companies do not make first growth forests, they were there already. Not being permitted to strip them costs nothing at all. That's why it is so damn profitable to log them: there was no investment.

But Myron wants to confuse you. He wants you to believe that if you saw a thousand dollars hanging from a tree on your way through the park, and no matter how hard you tried you couldn't jump high enough to reach it, then you have just lost a thousand dollars. Indeed, in this situation you might feel like you had lost a thousand dollars, but where was the money yesterday? You didn't have it. So how could you lose it? But he thinks you should get compensated for this loss by the government. And we know where that leads: the government issuing chainsaws to thugs to chop down every tree in the viscinity in case there's another pile of money hanging from the upper branches. That's fine. He wants the world to be a wasteland. Then it will reflect the picture of his heart.

We should all be very, very clear where these policies lead. If you like these policies, then you must like the outcome. And if you know no one else approves of the outcome, and your name is Myron Ebell you will lie about the outcome in order to cheat in the political game.