We all know of the global warming meetings that were canceled because of the snow storms, or the Algore meetings on global warming issue around a large table made just for this meeting from rain forest trees. Or even the recent group of global warming idiots who went to the artic to prove global warming and were snowed in and starving because of the amount of snowfall and snow storms that hit them.



Here's a story to warm the cockles:

Seems a group of idiots decide to show the world how they can sail to the artic to prove the global warming myth, using a carbon free sailing vessel.



Well they would have sunk, but lucky for them an oil container ship was near by and was able to save them.




How much would you have paid to have been a fly on the wall of their sinking ship as they starting packing their belongings to transfer them onto the oil container ship to bail their stupid butts out?


And note the name of the ship!

Double

ok, ok let me guess the name without looking.

Exxon Valdez right ? What do I win.

A Poker VT hat and mouse pad

bwahhhh, nice.

Next on the long long long list:

Must stop this raping of the planet!

lmao. Sadly, an amazingly, there are many irrational enviro wackjobs who have completely lost their minds and feel a greater need to protect the Earth over the human race.


I love this video...even though it scares me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElJFYwRtrH4

That's like this video from Leno to end woman's suffrage.

Well next the environmentalist idiots are starting to realize that there is no zero sum game.

For a long time there was pressure on grocery stores to stop using paper bags, killed too many trees.

So the grocery stores invented plastic bags.

GASP

Plastic is bad for the environment also.

So some eco-deep-thinker came up with the reusable cloth bags










Ooops

Next we have the wonderful green technology again forgetting that the earth doesn't give you a pass just because you are trying to save it.

Troy Michigan: A green community center was the shining example of green technology and solar power



Oh and the reason the pipes burst?



Of course the associate dean claims that people forgot to turn the power back on....when they turned it off for the winter.
Of the building that hadn't opened yet, and needed power to keep the pipes from freezing in the winter.

Heck it was only $900,000.00. relax

The global warmists have yet another embarrassment on their hands.




Hit the link for all the details, but the bottom line is that the expedition to help the environment actually had a carbon footprint four times bigger than the Russian oil exploration team. Oh, and the Russians actually got something out of their trip, too.

I can do this alllll day

everything posted here is right. environmentalism is irrational and evil.

but if you want the best example of environmentalism getting what it preaches, look no further than the grizzly man. think civilization is evil? think technology is evil? think the natural world is the ideal? want to live with the damn bears? well, you get eaten by a damn bear.

the movie 'into the wild' is another good example of the height of this irrationality.

although we need to consider the basic health of the planet we live on, environmentalism has taken it way too far. the thing the other posters in this thread wont tell you is that it holds us back in the same way religion does, because environmentalism is the newest world religion. if only they could develop principles consistently through all aspects of their life, but contradiction is a way a life for 99% of people.

We can talk about polluting or not polluting all we want, the planet will have the last laugh, it'll be around for a long, long, long time after we are gone. And the only thing we'll leave behind is a little bit of plastic, maybe.

that study was done by a plastic bag company. hmmm. next you will be linking to a study about the how oil cures cancer brought to you by Exxon.

neither of those men had anything to do with the environmentalism movement, regardless of how badly you'd like for that to be true.

I agree with you on Christopher McCandless... but Timothy Treadwell was. Unless you're saying that neither was in some sort of political group... which would be true.

I mean, I consider park rangers to be a pretty great example of rational environmentalism in action. park rangers HATED treadwell for misleading the public and habituating bears to humans.

maybe I'm wrong.

I guess then you have an acceptable level of fecal matter for your bags that carry the food for your family.


Me..I don't have an acceptable level.




And for the record. I think we are all totally for protecting the environment, stopping pollution, being smart about usage, game wardens controlling hunting based on animal numbers etc.

In fact, I would say you can figure that we are aligned with most hunters in regards to the wildernes and what's acceptable to do to it.

And no one wants pollution in our streams oceans or parks.

We just don't want to sit around crying about the trees that were cut down to make baseball bats, especially since we can grow new ones.

I do not consider myself an environmentalist, but the bolded is not necessarily true. At least, there are ways of cutting down trees that make it more or less likely that you can sustain a similar environment. Forested areas have a certain ratio of old to new trees that is pretty important to the ecosystem. If you just cut down all the old big trees, recreating the forest is not as simple as planting new trees.

It's certainly possible to do irreparable damage.

The biggest way to do irreparable damage to the environment is to give it to the government. Something like 90% of the superfund sites were government land; the biggest polluter in the country is the government; the number of trees on private land has increased in the last 100 years while the number of trees on government land has decreased.

It seems like pure folly the way the enviro-wackos keep turning to the worst steward for answers.

It's possible to blow up the world.

Some study was done not too long ago that showed that there are more trees in our forests today than there were during the civil war.

Because of replanting efforts, fire fighting skills and lumber industry realizing that if they clear cut and leave, they will have to haul their trees from farther and farther locations, which drives costs up.

And like I said, I am along side the people like the game warden and park rangers who make decisions on things like what should be cut, what can be cut, and what can't be cut.

Or else we can go into the question of how did the first forests survive with only 100% new trees?????

The environment is stupid and I hate it and anybody who likes it.







Really though, it's all well and good (and hilarious) to make fun of idiot hippie environmentalists who don't know the first thing about the actual science of what they're blabbing about, but protecting the environment is also extraordinarily important.

Certainly they didn't just pop up from a bulldozed plot of land... the environment increased in complexity for billions of years before there were forests.. the first forests grew about 4 billion years into the earth's history. (or however that squeezes into 6,000 years)

"Number of trees" sounds like a rather crude metric for amount of pollution done.

Anyways, I wasn't proposing a solution, although it seems to me that a totally free market will exploit the land as much as is beneficial to the particular individuals profiting from it.

I agree with you in your definition of environmentalism... but I don't think that the far majority of 'environmentalists' would say that Park Rangers working for the federal government are on their side.

Historically, the point where people start being willing to pay for "environment" (more trees, clean air, clean water) is when their per capita income is around $4700 (that's from about 10 years ago, so it may be $6K or so by now). The point is that you don't protect the environment by doing things that harm the economy -- as is the usual solution, kicked into high gear under Obama -- but instead you protect the environment my making people rich enough to care about such things. And history is quite clear on how to make people rich.

It's a question of priorities really. The "point at which people become willing to pay for environment" is not necessarily the point which benefits the environment most.

I also don't concede that wealth correlates with environmental harmony. I'd have to see some data on that. On the surface that doesn't seem to be true across nations.

I'm sure no will will disagree with this statement in principle.

I mean, my point is, treadwell was about as ignorant and insignificant as it gets. the ONLY reason he has any notoriety is because he committed suicide via bears. watch the documentary on him... it's retarded to hold him up as an example of what's wrong with environmentalism because he represents nothing.

If you try to force people to pay for environmental concerns before they are ready, you will get unintended consequences -- see the cap and trade discussion for an obvious example. If you tell someone "you can't have the things you care about because we want you to pay for things other people want", the result will always be worse than letting them be.

It seems intuitively obvious that wealth corresponds with environmental concerns. If you are poor, you scrape and fight any way you can for food, shelter and warmth. You don't really care if it's a sustainable practice or if a few innocent animals die in the process. As you get richer, the destruction of your world starts to bug you, so you take actions to care for it. For example, I am currently letting about 5 acres of extremely arable land return to forest. I could be renting it to the local farmers or using it to grow stuff and sell, but I'd rather have a forest in my back yard.

It just turns out that you can put numbers on the various concerns. When you reach income level X, you care about Y. When you reach 2X, you care about Z.

But what do those EarthFirst people crying over dead trees represent? ****ing lunatics?

you're asking the wrong dude. I was just pointing out that mr. troll was constructing a massive straw man.

my personal opinion is that it doesn't really matter who is right or how hard their organizations campaign. inertia is going to win this battle until the coastal cities are all underwater, etc. etc.

I sure hope they're wrong about it all.

No, that doesn't seem intuitively obvious to me at all. The people running huge chemical plants are not scraping and fighting for food. People often become wealthy at the expense of the environment, and if what you are doing is making you rich, you tend to keep doing it. Also, the more wealthy you become, the more power you have to destroy. The poor guy living in a tent is not really in a position to ruin the Mississippi. Environmental destruction is generally the result of the pursuit of individual wealth.

The people who run the plants live in the community too. The people who make the argument you give here act like the employees and bosses at the plant are aliens who beam in from space and then go to live comfortably on their home planet. The truth is, people care about how nice their place of residence is in direct relation to how much they can afford to care, and that includes the people who work in and run the factories.

Another factor is that pollution is basically a bad choice for use of resources. It is almost always an inefficiency that will be cured over time via competition.

And yes, I know all this isn't always true. There is such a thing as a negative externality, and we need to find ways to deal with it, but if the makes people poorer, it will do more harm than good.

But overall, wealth = cleaner environment. The US has more trees now than when it was poor. The air is way, way cleaner than it was in the 70s. The water is cleaner. Lake Eerie used to occasionally start on fire it was so polluted. In the meantime, in Africa, people burn manure to heat their homes, leading to massive pollution and premature death. Yes, we have that big scary polluting power plant, but guess what -- we can heat and light 10,000 homes with less pollution than they can heat and sometimes light 100 homes. A lot of what enviro-people see is the effects of the efficiencies of consolidating our production. If you have one plant serving tens or hundreds of thousands of people, yes, it will produce more pollution than any particular individual. But it's obvious it won't produce as much as if each person had to generate their own heat source.

Again, I won't ignore things like intentionally dumping toxic waste, but you can make those a crime without destroying the economy.

If any of this were true, there would not be pollution.

You'll be happy to know that they are wrong. If they were right the coastal cities would have been under water in the early 1990s as they predicted.

in honor of this thread I am now watching deliverance.

Really? Do you create zero pollution in your own life? Of do you not care about the environment? You seem to think the two are mutally exclusive.

Huh? My point is that there has been egregious pollution in our lifetimes, and if what you say about it regulating itself were true, we would not have seen that.

I personally live in a self-contained sustainable biodome, but I don't expect everybody to do that.

or frozen over as they were predicting in the 1970s. I am well aware of their garbage track record.

To a lesser (by a lot) extent, some of you may know and care (or not) that we currently have a garbage strike in Toronto, going on 3 weeks now.

Well, some of the citizens living near Christie Pits, a fairly central downtown Bloor park, took exception to the rink area being used as a public drop off point and were giving anyone dropping off their garbage a hard time. Do you think they had an alternative in mind? If they did, I didn't hear a peep about it. They just cared about their own little corner of the universe and everything was cool as long as the dumping happened elsewhere...

I am working with a guy who is near Toronto right now and he was telling me about some of the smells and problems with the trash getting piled up near the river.

Man I am glad I live in a country that knows how to keep it's corrupt unions in line by paying them whatever they ask.

That'd probably be people dumping down by the Don River, both legally and illegally. The City is treating and covering legal dump sites, but it's difficult to control. Also, the union is trying to blockade people from dumping at legal sites as a pressure tactic.

Not a lot of fun...The streets are in horrible shape for biking, among other things, although my neighbourhood is still selling fairly fresh (I live downtown west near High Park, so we're near the lake).

My biggest bitch with environmentalists is their opposition to genetically modified foods. GM foods in the United States require the most rigorous testing of any food product in the world, prior to being grown on farms. Greenpeace has consistently opposed the release of GM foods because they do not understand genetics or the tests that these crops undergo. Greenpeace is responsible for hundreds of thousands of people starving to death in Nigeria, because of their lobbying the Nigerian government to not accept the feed offered them by the greatest man who has ever lived: Norman Borlaug. They took the seed later, after thousands of their citizens had succumbed to starvation.

Fuck Greenpeace.

Then there's the DDT outlawed to save the integrity of the bird's eggshells that has resulted in over 60 million people dying of malaria.

Largest act of murder ever committed in human history, brough to you by the 'people who care'.

If you eat genetically modified food, doesn't it stand to reason that you and your progeny will become genetically modified? I mean, have there really been long term studies done of the potential effects of consumption of GM foods? I'm not saying they are good or bad, just asking a question that should be asked.

Look at it this way: Many products have been developed to use that have turned out to be, in the long term, bad for the environment (ie: styrofoam, various types of plastics, nuclear waste, PCB's, etc...) While some of these things have been useful and even beneficial, some of the disposal methods are found wanting, thus fucking things up. Isn't it conceivable that there might be something "wrong" with GM foods at, say, the cellular level? It's possible that some of the modification aspects may have a leaching property that causes, for example, deterioration of our immune system.

Just sayin'

LOL, this is so misinformed that I thought you were being sarcastic at first, until I read the rest of the post.

Please tell me you were joking.

Maybe it's naive and uninformed, but at least I'm asking rather than taking an opinion and running with it or accepting what people tell me without asking.

What exactly is your position on GM foods and what do you know about them?