Looks like an excellent read. I'm buying it.Making the world a better place — by using more fossil fuels
Wrapping our minds around climate change
The sustainability myth
Parts ... make for damn good reading. ... [b]ut the good bits are not enough to salvage This Changes Everything, a 560-page call-to-arms in which Ms. Klein proposes to overthrow four centuries of Enlightenment-driven human achievement.Klein's advocacy of "radical bottom-up popular revolution against governments and corporations, free markets and capitalism" is a recipe for the collapse of the system that made possible unprecedented human advances. Along with that collapse would surely come political and economic chaos and the death, by starvation and war, of billions. Klein, like most of the radical eco-left, is a foolish, dangerous demagogue.
... A major Klein target is Richard Branson, the media-darling head of Virgin Group ...
Other green billionaries skewered are Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and T. Boone Pickens, each of whom has a history of cozying up to the climate issue while their feet remained firmly planted in the fossil fuel world.
... her best putdowns are directed at the “pro-business environmentalists,” a Who’s Who of green activists who parade through a chapter sub-titled “The Disastrous Merger of Big Business and Big Green.”
The book’s real objective is to blame the looming climate threat on the greatest intellectual, philosophical, scientific and economic transformation in history.
The logic behind the climate mass revolt advocated by Ms. Klein suffers from a rootless dislocation from history, philosophy and science. It may also be totally dislocated from the world’s human beings, who remain, after many millennia, ever keen to improve their lives on Earth through continued and increasing dominance of nature.
... the [United Nations] has very specific land use policies they would like to see implemented in every village, town, city, county, province and nation. The specific plan is called United Nations Agenda 21 Sustainable Development, which has its basis in Communitarianism. Most Canadians have heard of sustainable development, but are largely unaware of the U.N. initiative Agenda 21. A non-governmental organization headquartered in Toronto called the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives, ICLEI, is tasked with carrying out the goals of Agenda 21 worldwide.Take the poll at the bottom of Gallant's report.
In a nutshell, the plan calls for government to eventually take control of all land use removing decision making from the hands of private property owners. It is assumed people are not good stewards of their land and “the government” will do a better job if it is in total control. Individual rights in general are to give way to the needs of communities as determined by the governing body.
Socialism’s die-hard true believers;
Biting the (invisible) hand that feeds us; and
Book review here - looks like a great read!
... the conservative temperament was born, as a defence of tradition against the tendency of Enlightenment rationalism to take things apart without knowing how to put them back together again, much less improve them. [It occurs to me that another example of modern hyper-rational hubris at work can be found in the scientific claims of climate alarmism.]Heath's idea's were a constant theme in Friedrich Hayek's writing. His book should be a good read.
... Elizabeth Kolbert — a staff writer at The New Yorker whose new book 'The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History' is likely to be one of the most-talked-about non-fiction books of the year.
... A mass extinction that’s already underway and likely to be the most devastating since an asteroid struck the Earth and brought an end to dinosaurs. The difference this time is that we, humanity, are the asteroid....
... it is not just climate change: We are cutting down the rain forests, acidifying the oceans, moving species around the world at breakneck speed and pumping out more carbon dioxide than the atmosphere can handle. ... [Actually, most of that is about climate change.]
...it’s difficult to be sanguine in the face of the evidence she presents.
On the left running for the NDP stands journalist Linda McQuaig, co-author of The Trouble With Billionaries, a book that plays to ancient leftist theories of alienation ... She prescribes tax rates of up to 70% and radical confiscation of the assets of the wealthy ...
Ms. McQuaig came out swinging Monday with a direct video challenge to her opponent, Liberal candidate Chrystia Freeland. “Hi Chrystia. It’s Linda McQuaig!” says Ms. McQuaig in her best innocent-friendly trap-setting manner. “You’ve written a book on income inequality and I’ve written a book on income inequality.” But they are very different books, she says, with very different policy prescriptions. So let’s have a debate, one on one, “any time, anywhere.”
Ms. Freeland’s book is Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. The premise is false—everyone else has not fallen. ... To say that Plutocrats is “very different” from Ms. McQuaig’s The Trouble with Billionaires is somewhat misleading. ... Both books are identical in their foundations, political tracts that popularize class warfare ... her analysis is no less Marxist in its origins. She frequently quotes Karl Marx, the granddaddy of state socialism. Marx, she says, understood the dangers of a capitalist class ...
... The poor voters of Toronto Centre are about to get a heavy dose of such crypto-Marxist revivalism. ...
In his brilliant new book, The Age of Global Warming, British writer Rupert Darwall notes a phenomenon known as “climate change derangement syndrome.” The phenomenon was on prominent display this week when NDP leader Tom Mulcair went to Washington. ...
... Had resistance to innovation and change been more significant in the last two centuries, real income, life expectancy and food consumption would undoubtedly be much lower than they currently are, while infant mortality, food prices and hours worked, among other things, would have been much higher. Stagnation is fundamentally incompatible with any meaningful notion of sustainable development.
... we contend that modern practices are but the latest in a long line of innovations, the ultimate goal of which has always been to increase the accessibility, quality, reliability and affordability of humanity’s food supply. And if we may be so blunt, how many activists still use locally manufactured electric typewriters and copper-wired rotary-dial phones to spread their message and set up “grassroots” links between food consumers and producers.
... We have attempted to look beyond the anti-corporate, romantic and protectionist underpinnings of locavorism and to illustrate the rationale behind improvements in food production, processing and transportation technologies, along with the benefits of an ever broader division of agricultural labor.
... The available historical evidence tells us that locavorism, far from being a step forward, can only deliver the world our ancestors gladly escaped from and which subsistence farmers mired in similar circumstances around the world would also escape if given opportunities to trade. It would not only mean lower standards of living and shorter life expectancy, but also increased environmental damage and social turmoil.An excellent read.
... Piers wasn't a host interested in his guest's new book, he was a bitter partisan who had a series of pro-Obama talking points to get out ...
...what was most ironic was watching the CNN host prove many of the book's central themes true. The Left isn't interested in honest debate. Instead they engage in all kinds of passive-aggressive rhetorical tricks to win the moment ...
... What happened last night is a symptom of CNN's bigger problem, and that's that they hide behind a dishonest shield of objectivity that only serves to insult the intelligence of the Left and Right.
... [leftism] causes otherwise decent and kind people ... to say and/or do cruel and sometimes evil things.
...a major new scholarly book, "Pathological Altruism" (Oxford University Press), explores this phenomenon of people wanting to do good things yet ending up doing bad. It applies to The New York Times ... columnist Thomas L. Friedman, who has a deep altruistic urge to bring peace to the Middle East. But because he sees the world through the liberal/left prism, he says morally reprehensible things ...
... Leftism poisons everything it influences -- from journalism to the arts to universities to religion to government to male-female relations. And ultimately leftism poisons character. This does not mean that everyone with left-wing views becomes a bad person [or] that everyone with conservative views is a good person....
... But it does mean that leftism leads to pathologic altruism, ... Just as Mahatma Gandhi's hatred of violence led him to tell the Jews of Europe not to resist Hitler, so too has leftism led decent people who would weep at Israel's destruction to mouth the very same lies about Israel as those who seek its annihilation.Ok, that sort of fits with the idea that much, if not most, of what passes for "altruism" is narcissistic do-goodism, mainly a trait of the left. Perhaps that (plus the malign sentiments and consequences) is what makes it "pathological" (and leftist).
"The Magna Carta: A Brief History of" by Geoffrey Hindley sets the scene with descriptions of British society circa 1200, the system of governance (mainly feudal tyranny) and the main players (the king and the barony) leading to Magna Carta in which the King John I recognized, in writing, the natural rights of the barons (and all freemen) and limitations on the royal prerogative.
"The Lion and the Throne" by Catherine Drinker Bowen. Magna Carta being just the documented beginning, there was inevitable push-back by subsequent monarchs. This book picks up the story 400 years later and covers the life and times of Edward Coke during the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I. Along with his perilous run-ins with the monarchy (once imprisoned on charges of treason) fighting to keep hard won liberties, Coke is famous for the 1628 Petition of Right (reaffirming and updating rights recognized by the Magna Carta) and for his meticulous documentation of case-law (he was the most cited source for another 200 years). It’s a fascinating story including tales of Francis Bacon (a Coke rival and foe), Walter Raleigh (beheaded) and Guy Fawkes (his gunpowder plot, trial and gruesome execution).Both books together drive home the significance of the monumental, centuries long effort to achieve the liberties we enjoy today. It’s history that should be a mandatory part of high school curriculum - but probably isn't. My recollection of my own high school ‘education’ on this subject is that it consisted of a few short sentences about Magna Carta from a text on British history; and, the answer to the exam question, if there were one, would have been the name of the event and its date.
"Climate change is one of the most important environmental issues of our time, requiring urgent action on the part of all governments and citizens."
