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.