… hypocrisy.
Found this video at one of my favorite stops on the net: Bottom Line, Up Front.
From the folks at Americans for Prosperity:
At first I laughed, but after awhile I was so annoyed at the hypocrisy I no longer found it humorous.
Originally published in 2006, republished in 2007.. and now here we are in 2008 and it still may not be too late, but it sure as heck would have been better if we had addressed this two years ago. Reprinted here in it’s entirety: How to Break the Oil Habit
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The following was originally posted July 2006. I decided to repost it (with some minor updates) because I believe we need to stop talking about freeing ourselves from our addiction to oil and start to actually do something about it. Also, since it was only the 3rd article I posted, odds are I’m the only one who read it 
Although the price of oil has come down since this was written, the key points remain the same:
The bottom line for those not planning to read the entire article:
—— July 23, 2006 ——
How many of you believe the price of fuel is too high, probably going higher, will ultimately wreck our economy and we need prices lowered, stabilized and affordable? … Raise your hands.
How many of you believe oil is a limited resource, that we need to encourage conservation, we need to identify alternatives to our dependency on mid-east oil and until we find a way to break the shackles of oil dependency, our future will continue to be threatened by nut cases who line their pockets and grow their weapons stockpiles with buckets of money shipped overseas in empty crude oil containers courtesy of you and me? Raise your hands.
Did you raise your hand both times? I wonder how typical that is of Americans. We want fuel to be cheap and “affordable” so we can use as much as we want, yet we know that we also need to conserve this limited resource and find alternatives. Trouble is, as long as fuel is affordable, there is no incentive to conserve and little incentive to find alternatives. As with any addict, we won’t stop consuming until the supply is gone or the cost is so high we can’t pay for the fix.
How much does a gallon of gasoline have to cost for us to change our driving habits. Gas hits $5 a gallon, are you still driving down to the shore or out to the country every weekend? Would $8 a gallon convince you to walk to the corner store instead of drive? $10 and maybe it’s not worth driving 15 miles to see if you can get this new lawn mower at another store for a few dollars less?
What about commuting? There will always be jobs where commuting is required (hard to work construction from the comfort of your family room); but do we all have to commute, or do we all think we have to commute? Until 6 years ago, I commuted to work, 100 miles round trip, every weekday. That’s 500 miles/week; assuming four weeks for vacations, holidays, other days off, that’s 24,000 miles per year. My car got 30 miles to the gallon, which is better than average, which means I was using about 800 gallons of gas a year just to drive to work!
Assuming there are just 1 million people in a similar situation who could be working from home. (not out of the question considering our current population is about 300 million according to the US Census and 14 million of us commute 45 minutes or more one way to work), that would be a yearly reduction of 800 million gallons of gasoline!!!!
According to the Energy Information Administration, in 2004 47% of the cost of a gallon of gasoline was to pay for the crude oil. Assuming a gallon of gas costs $3.00, those 800 million gallons means more than $1.1 BILLION dollars going to the crude oil producers like Iran!! Every year. From those 1 million of us who might want to consider not commuting and setting up a home office.
$1.1 Billion dollars that could be spent here in the USA instead of on rockets for Hezbollah who then fires them into Israel while trying to distract us from the nuclear games Iran is playing.
So demand continues to rise, prices continue to rise, the amount of real dollars shipped overseas to crude oil producers continues to rise, and available supplies continue to drop. Even if raising crude oil prices causes a drop in consumption, the profit margin for the producers likely offsets the decrease in volume since the bulk of the price hike goes into their pockets. What we need to do is reduce demand by raising prices in such a way that the crude oil producers do not benefit.
I can’t believe I am saying this, because I am almost ALWAYS opposed to new or increased taxes, but….
We need a (hand shaking as I type) Homeland Security and Energy Evolution Tax.
Look, the price of gas is going to go up until the demand comes down, and a lot of the money will go to weapons for terrorists. In simplistic terms, if raising prices reduces demand, and if demand outruns supply, the prices are going to go up until demand and supply meet a state of equilibrium, period. Inserting a tax into the equation drives down demand without increasing the flow of money to the crude oil producers.
Demand goes down, less money flows to terrorist nations, and we perhaps buy some time to develop alternative energy sources.
So where does that revenue go? Two places, and only two places. First, 50% goes to sponsor research for domestic sources of energy that require no dependence on foreign resources. The other 50%, directly to Homeland Security and Defense.
Are we at war? Well duh! So why are you whining about a tax to support the war effort and to eliminate one potential cause (if not the root cause) of the war? (Come on, some of you are whining and you know it) If we weren’t dependent on foreign oil maybe our decision making when attacked wouldn’t be so complicated… bad guys go boom!
I propose that for the next five years, a new federal tax on gasoline (not diesel.. just gasoline) be phased in, increasing from 25 cents a gallon the first year to $1.25 in year five and continuing until the end of the war AND the identification of a viable alternative to oil for 50% - 75% of our energy needs.
Painful… sure. So is paying more for gasoline when OPEC raises the price of crude oil… but we get nothing out of it when they raise the price. If we ever expect to kick the oil habit and fund the war on terror… we need to be willing to make some sacrifices. This doesn’t even come close to what our country sacrificed in World War II. Time to suck it up people!
Sometimes I feel like I’ve stepped into a strange warped version of our world, kind of like Alice in her Adventures in Wonderland.
The Queen says everyone must stop using so much fuel and energy while flying in a private jet to spread the message (OK, Al Gore is not a queen… but work with me here).
He then wins a Nobel Peace Prize for … um … what exactly did he win the award for again? Be right back…
Here we go…
From CNN: … the Nobel committee announced he would share the award with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for their work to raise awareness about global warming.
Oops… guess I should have known that. So much for raising awareness…
If only the Nobel Peace Prize was actually still a credible award.
1994 Yasser Arafat, head of the PLO and a sponsor of terrorism, shared the award with Shimon Peres and Yitzak Rabin.
2001 the award went to the United Nations and its corrupt head, Kofi Annan.
The very next year, the arguably the worst president in US history, whose policies and “leadership” set the stage for the current situations in Iran and Iraq as well as providing early evidence to Islamic extremists that the US no longer had the will to defend ourselves, Jimmy Carter received the award for his “untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts”… otherwise known as opening up the US checkbook to buy peace in the mideast:
Several BILLION dollars … annually… to both Israel and Egypt. Heck, I’ll stop arguing for that kind of green too. Since you and I are paying for this every year without fail, maybe we should get a turn or two with the Nobel Peace Prize on our mantel.
But I digress.
So Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize for spreading a message. Apparently there was no requirement that the message actually be credible, as long as it was spread.
From The Sydney Morning Herald: One of the world’s foremost meteorologists has called the theory that helped Al Gore share the Nobel Peace Prize “ridiculous” and the product of “people who don’t understand how the atmosphere works”.
Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.
His comments came on the same day that the Nobel committee honoured Mr Gore for his work in support of the link between humans and global warming.
“We’re brainwashing our children,” said Dr Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. “They’re going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It’s ridiculous.”
Whoa now.. hold on there partner. What gives you the right to question Al Gore? What makes you think that you, a long-time professor and world renowned meteorologist, knows more about the cause of global warming than Al Gore, a man so knowledgeable about so many things, a man who once stood before busts of Washington and Jefferson and asked “Who are these people?” Don’t believe me, hear it for yourself here or visit the full site here.
So what has all this raised awareness accomplished? Let’s just say that, if we really are the cause of global warming, we’re in real trouble with role models who fly in private jets and ease there conscience by buying “carbon offsets”, who sponsor rock concerts to raise awareness that use more electricity in one day than my town uses in a year (OK.. I’m guessing … and they all had to get to and from the concert with all there gear somehow), and by talking endlessly on the subject (CO2… remember, the more they talk the more CO2 comes out of their mouths… that’s a greenhouse gas. All this awareness raising is also raising the temperature of the Earth. Please, for everyone’s sake, do us all a favor and stop talking.)
Which brings us to painting the roses green.
NBC went green this weekend, or so I’ve heard. I didn’t watch anything on NBC this weekend, but apparently they did clever things like painting the peacock green… sounds like they are bucking for a Nobel Peace Prize to me.
But I’m as concerned with the future of our home planet as the next guy, so I plan to do my part to help reduce my Co2 footprint. Next weekend I plan to paint my five cars, my lawnmower, my snow blower and maybe a few of the neighbors cars, green. Although this won’t actually reduce the amount of CO and CO2 I create through use of these evil implements of man, I will have done my part to raise awareness and can rest peacefully knowing I am in the company of great men like Al Gore.
The fact that the Earth has warmed and cooled throughout its history is a matter of record. It is a fact, not open to debate, and really not something that will help us to predict if it will be warmer or cooler next year, 5 years from now, 50 years from now, etc….
What it does tell us is that, at some point in the future, the Earth will get warmer, or cooler, and then reverse the trend again in a cycle that has been going on for more than 800,000 years.
So, should we panic? Do we need to change how we live our lives to save us from global warming? That depends on if you believe that anything we are doing during our brief stay on this planet is actually accelerating the journey towards a warmer planet or perhaps delaying the next ice age.
Seems to me there might be some benefit in delaying the next ice age, but then again, it seems unlikely a glacier will be flowing down my street within my lifetime.
The article from 2000 that I read has some interesting points that got me thinking. The writer’s intent, I believe, was to focus on an acceleration towards warming over the last 150 years due to industrialization. What was interesting is a theory, based upon some historical data, that any warming will be followed by an ice age. The thinking, at least back in 2000, was that the melting of the polar caps would increase the water in the oceans, interrupting the currents that influence the global climate by circulating warm water from the equator to the poles, and essentially causing rapid cooling north and south of the equator (rapid being measured in hundreds of years).
So essentially, the Earth has a built in thermostat or regulator… which tells me that this is all going to happen no matter what you and I do. Perhaps we can slow or accelerate the process to some degree based upon our behaviors, but ultimately the Earth will warm until it reaches a point where the controlling influence of the oceans will kick in and drive the temperatures back down, glaciers will migrate towards the equator until the warming starts again… repeat as necessary…
So… should we reduce emissions, have cleaner air and water, treat the Earth as if it’s the only planet we have, at the moment, that can support life? Absolutely.
Will anything we do stop global warming? No.
More reading: Scientific American 2004, National geographic News 2007
Form the National geographic Article:
In today’s online journal Science, the team showed that the coldest period occurred around 20,000 years ago, during the last glacial maximum, when the ice sheets were at their peak.
It was about 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) colder than today.
Meanwhile, the warmest period was during the last interglacial period, which is an interval of warmer global average temperature that separates ice ages. At that time, around 130,000 years ago, it was a balmy 4.5 degrees Celsius (8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than today.
Amazing that they are drilling down to ice that formed nearly a million years ago… ice that is still there… and is providing a fascinating glimpse into the history of this planet of ours… pretty damn phenomenal.
