Tide turns on the green-mongers
Miranda Devine hopes that Tide turns on the green-mongers and that
While breaking the jaws of Greenpeace protesters is not to be recommended, the story does illustrate that the good-natured, hear-them-out tolerance most of the world has afforded green hysterics for the past 30 years may be running out. After all, the dissent-crushing intolerance of the green movement is legendary.
Oh how, history is constantly being rewritten by the Ministry of Truth. All of those people killed, injured, jailed, fined, ignored, and bankrupted by the corporations over the decades by ...the good-natured, hear-them-out tolerance...
must be shaking their heads at Ms Devine (except for the dead ones).
Ms Devine then writes
Another sign green-mongering is wearing thin is the bestseller success of Michael Crichton's latest thriller State Of Fear, a novel in which the bad guys are extreme greens who plot to create artificial environmental catastrophes, like a tsunami, to bolster support for their crusade.
Instead of tackling the corporations and governments for creating ecological catastrophes, like deserts, salination, soil erosion, dust bowls, depleted fish stocks, polluted rivers, Ms Devine posits a fictional world in which the Greenies are the bad guys - just like in the corporate media of which novels are a part. She says that because there is a market for such ideas, then such ideas must be valid. She ignores the fact the corporate media controls which ideas are presented to the public.
What's more, [Bjorn Lomborg] said the cost of one year's compliance with Kyoto "could give clean drinking water and sanitation to every human being on Earth".
No mention is made of the enormous amounts of money that is spent on the military worldwide of which one day's spending could achieve the same thing. So, the impression is that the Greenies are responsible for all the poverty in the world by diverting funds from the poor instead of the military which protects the corporations.
Ms Devine has well and truly earnt the pay of her corporate masters today in the Liberal Media.
6 comments:
Devine is really over the top, isn't she, Douglas. I don't read her column anymore: she gets me angry and life's too short.
I think she and Gerard Henderson would be much happier at The UnAustralian.
... just dropping in because the keywords led me from the other side of the world.
I found a page that I like, that might answer that column. It associated with the Skeptical Inquirer magazine, and is called "Abuses of Skepticism" and reads in part:
"If it's unwise to take a knee jerk skeptical position about something many smart scientists think will happen (life extension), it's even crazier to deny something that the overwhelming majority of scientists think is already happening. Granted, I fully understand that a small minority of scientists, like Richard Lindzen, still deny that humans are causing climate change through the burning of fossil fuels. These scientists should certainly carry on being skeptical, at least so long as they believe in their own conclusions. But the rest of us ought to recognize that climate science has become increasingly robust over the past decade, and that the scientific community has increasingly spoken with one voice on this issue, even if some uncertainty remains about the extent of the problem.
Let's go over a few facts in order to show that this is so. In early 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body comprised of over 2,500 scientists that's the world's leading authority on global warming, released its third major assessment of the issue. The IPCC concluded that humans are responsible for global warming and that this poses serious future risks. Now, for obvious reasons, this report posed a problem for the Bush administration, which quickly sought a review of the IPCC's findings by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Given the IPCC's lengthy and thorough process, this seemed a rather redundant effort to many. Sure enough, the NAS panel quickly confirmed the IPCC findings, adding still more force to the weight of scientific consensus.
Given this, anyone wishing to challenge the heavily reviewed conclusions of the IPCC and NAS has to overcome a rather staggering burden of proof. That's not to say it can't be done. But for the moment, it hasn't, which means that adopting a skeptical stance towards climate change in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus can hardly be considered the most defensible position. Instead, I would hazard, it amounts to an abuse of skepticism."
Ms Devine can be on target at times (subtle pun here for Australian readers) but most of the time, she is more suited to the likes of the Daily Telegraph (both Aus. and UK) or NY Post (US) than the Australian.
Mr Henderson is the far more dangerous writer of the two as his arguments are well thought out and researched.
I do not think Ms Devine is being sceptical for just being sceptical. She is promoting a line that within the time-horizon of Capitalism (which appears to be about 20 years) makes sense - why waste money on something that is not going to affect you.
Climate change is going to affect the workers and farmers far more than the Capitalists. Sure, the Capitalists may have less snow to ski upon, but the workers and faremers will lose their homes, their livelihoods, and, sometimes, their lives.
I asked in another blog ... how many Americans would eat more donuts if there was just a chance that it would make their grandchildren fat?
We're bad enough at our own short-term self-destructive tendencies, etc.
Thank you for your comment. I will have to mull over the connection between individual behaviour and societal behaviour.
I have opened a new thread called Short-Sightedness of Capitalism.
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