As PC As I Wanna Be

As I read this childish cartoon, a few questions go through my thick cranium:
1. Who cares about polar bears? All they are are pigment challenged Grizzlies. Plus they seem to exist well enough on that island in Lost.
2. So what if Antarctica melts? In real estate they call that undeveloped potential.
3. Finally, living in the Midwest, I have to drive some distance to get to the beach. If the ocean's edge moves a a couple hundred miles closer to my hose, think of the money I'll save driving t the beach and the fewer carbon emissions my mini-van will emit.
So in the end, I guess I'm more environmentalist that the boorish Al Gore. And far more reasonable!

Of course we are starting to find out this is the real cause of global warming.

Following the news about the IPCC report comes an incredible study entitled "Livestock's long shadow" by the LEAD (Livestock, Environment and Development) Initiative, which is supported by the World Bank, the EU, various government ministries and departments in Europe and the US, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN.

Let me get right to the heart of the issue, quoting from their report:


The livestock sector is...responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2 equivalent. This is a higher share than transport.

The emphasis on the last sentence is mine. What this says is that between deforestation to create pastures, the emissions of greenhouse gasses in the process of making cow feed, and mostly from good old fashioned cow farts, cows are responsible for more of the pollution that people fear is causing global warming than cars, airplanes, trains, ships, snowmobiles, and motorized rickshaws combined.

While this does seem like quite a funny bit of news, it is yet another reason that we must be incredibly skeptical of dangerous and expensive policy suggestions like the Kyoto Protocols, which aim to possibly alter climate change by a fraction of a degree over decades at the cost of billions of dollars of economic output. And, if "economic output" sounds a bit theoretical to you, think of it as the likelihood that your and your children will be able to find a job.

I'll never look at a cow the same way again. Maybe the world needs to spend a billion dollars on very large corks....

But at least we have one politician who has the sense and courage to stand up against so much hype based on junk science. He is the often-derided Senator James Inhofe (R-OK). Inhofe's reaction to the story is summarized nicely by this quote (by him): "We are all skeptics now. It appears that the UN is now acknowledging what an increasing number of scientists who study the climate have come to realize: Predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming are simply unsustainable."