Facing the abyss

The Financial Times elicited a comment from Myron Ebell yesterday in a short article about the choice between carbon taxes and carbon trading as painless economic mechanisms for saving future generations from dire consequences for life on this planet. And if you don't think these mechanisms are painless, try authoritarianism. A bullet in your head feels a lot hotter than paying a tax into public funds, no matter what these wing-nuts say.

While we, at the Climate, are all for social justice, there are more important matters, such as survival. Carbon taxes are undoubtedly fairer, more efficient, and more likely to get the job done than carbon trading, which is likely to be a massive corrupt unloading of public wealth into the hands of the super-rich on the scale of Enron and the banking industry. However, if that's what it takes to buy these unimaginably greedy bastards out, then that's what's got to happen. What we worry about is that they take the money and still insist on feeding some of it back into the political system in ways which destroy all hope.

In the public mind, Myron Ebell and his friends have already laid down the lies for public taxation to be unpopular -- even when it applies only to the richest 0.01%. So, sticking with his strategy of doing whatever it takes to turn this planet into a hell-hole, he says:

"We are fairly confident that we can defeat a carbon tax in the US. Cap-and-trade is going to be harder to defeat if the Democrats gain more House and Senate seats in the next election and win the White House so, again, I would much rather fight a carbon tax than a cap-and-trade. I hope that the debate here moves towards a tax."

For Myron it's all a game. On one side there's life, and on his side it's death. But then death always wins in the end, so we shouldn't be completely sad.

The Climate has been quiet owing to the fact that Myron Ebell's internet footprint has unaccountably disappeared. If this goes on, I'll have to delve back into the archives of his activities. Where we are now is in part due to the irreparable damage he has done over the past ten years. I'm one who believes that if you kill someone, you are a murderer for the rest of your life. You can't duck your perpetual guilt by going quiet. Justice -- a concept which is unfamiliar in political circles -- doesn't work like that.

Add to that, the cancerous growth that is Myron's home, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, continues to live on. The new generation of plastic grass-heads who call themselves Bureaucrash have attempted a street protest, and wound up looking pretty shifty all told. Don't think you can get on anyone's good side by getting involved in some unrelated cases. Your primary work today -- that which you are paid to do -- is to attack the Law of the sea treaty. By doing so you have provided compelling evidence that it is a good thing. It's like sighting the Grim Reaper; you know someone's going to die when He shows on the scene. Whenever you spot the CEI, you can tell that there is an issue which is overwhelmingly in the public interest, and someone has paid them a lot of money to fight against it.

Fortunately, their efforts have been pretty transparent and inept, partly because these youths haven't come to terms with the fact that in this business you have to lie. It's no use telling the real reasons, no matter how much you believe them in your rotting hearts, because the majority of the people in the world don't work from the assumption that the United States already owns the planet. You might enjoy his rhetoric, but when Thomas Friedman says "Suck On This", the rest of us feel like he has pushed the barrel of a large-bore shotgun into our mouth.

The CEI nodes are outraged that the treaty involves equal access to the sea bed through a system of regulation and tariffs, and that it stipulates the sharing of technology and information. How horrific is that? Well, it means that when Chinese oil companies drill in the vicinity of Florida (there are independent nations round there since not every Government has been successfully overthrown by the CIA), you do not want them to have access to the best technology possible which could avoid the possibility of an oil spill.

Myron and friends love oil spills and pollution. It gives them something to lie about. If it's done by another country, that proves that the work should have been done by an American company. And if it's done by an American one, that just shows they weren't making enough money to afford safety.

Damn, their intellectual lives make me sick. As an antidote, here's John Edwards speaking about Global Warming policy:

"That's more evidence than any politician should ever need. And yet two weeks from now, America will send a delegate to the United Nations conference in Bali with no ideas and no solution. It is embarrassing for the United States of America to be in that position."

Here's Dennis Kucinich beginning with:

"It's great to be at a presidential forum that's not sponsored by the coal industry as the last one was."

Unfortunately the sickness that is American political system is going to deliver us another hell-rider like Clinton, a woman of very little brain but with probably equal confidence in her intellectual ability as George Bush ever had. It suits the elite to impose on us dumb asses who are easily mislead by their bad ideas and can stand in the nexus of lies and power as another signpost on the way to the eventual human extinction. Those lies are deliberately thought up and passed off. Cord Blomquist and Myron Ebell -- at least your mothers loved you.

The kids are all right

Well, their understandings of the world are, although not necessarily their future.

One day they will begin to ask "How did it get like this?" The answer to that question will be Myron Ebell, his life's work, his financial backers, and his continual, fluid, systematic lying into the stenographic media who are the real villains in this whole sorry saga at the dog-end of the human species.

Myron doesn't care about the future because if you earn money you are by definition right, and he will be dead by 2050 before any of this can matter to him personally.

At least that's what he thinks. While he is alive, young people have the power to make his crimes come back to haunt him. I have a vision of one last public appearance by Myron Ebell where he confesses to all he's done and the facts of the case. This should be in a court hearing during testimony where the final ruling abolishes the Exxon Corporation -- a gigantic pulsating malignant cancer at the heart of our energy and political economy that has got to be removed if there is any hope of healing. The tumour speaks and says it is not doing any harm, even while its roots strangle organs and ooze poison into the bloodstream through every pore. You got to dig it out to see just how bad it is.

It's probably too late, but that's no reason not to want to see justice be done, the guilty named, and reality restored.