Day: March 31, 2009

Click here to listen to Bill LuMaye’s interview (WPTF 680 AM, Raleigh, NC) today with Steve Milloy about Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them.

Now the greens want to regulate rocket launches lest they damage the ozone layer.

Here’s the first few paragraphs from the University of Colorado media release:

The global market for rocket launches may require more stringent regulation in order to prevent significant damage to Earth’s stratospheric ozone layer in the decades to come, according to a new study by researchers in California and Colorado.

Future ozone losses from unregulated rocket launches will eventually exceed ozone losses due to chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which stimulated the 1987 Montreal Protocol banning ozone-depleting chemicals, said Martin Ross, chief study author from The Aerospace Corporation in Los Angeles. The study, which includes the University of Colorado at Boulder and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, provides a market analysis for estimating future ozone layer depletion based on the expected growth of the space industry and known impacts of rocket launches.

“As the rocket launch market grows, so will ozone-destroying rocket emissions,” said Professor Darin Toohey of CU-Boulder’s atmospheric and oceanic sciences department. “If left unregulated, rocket launches by the year 2050 could result in more ozone destruction than was ever realized by CFCs.”

My first reaction was, “Oh my, we’re going to be trapped forever on the same planet with the greens!”

But on second thought, since no one really understands the continual fluctuations in stratospheric ozone to start with, nor do they understand (simple chemistry aside) the impact of CFCs on the ozone layer, and since there’s no evidence that any harm was ever caused to anyone or to the environment by whatever spotty thinning may have occurred during the 1980s and 1990s, this new study seems to be nothing more than yet another green anti-technology moment.

Besides, private rocket launches can’t be evil — Google is for them.

President Obama announced on March 27 that he would nominate Cathy Zoi to become Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the Department of Energy.

Zoi is a Gore-bot of the first order.

In January 2007, she became the Alliance for Climate Protection’s founding CEO. The Alliance is Al Gore’s non-profit front for advancing his personal wealth-building agenda. He is a foudning partner in the UK-based investment company, Generation Investment Management, and a partner with the U.S. based ventuire capital firm of Kleiner Perkins.

Beyond buffalo-ing America about global warming, Zoi’s has a passion for smart-metering — that is, enabling local utilities to ration your electricity.

Zoi was the chief of staff in the White House Office on Environmental Policy in the Clinton-Gore administration, where she managed the team working on environmental and energy issues (1993-95). She was also a manager at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency where she pioneered the Energy Star Program.

In a March 30 op-ed in Roll Call, Zoi wrote,

We stand at the verge of a major opportunity for leadership that can take our economy in a new direction…

I guess that means what wealth doesn’t go down the toilet will go into Al Gore’s pockets.