Category: Miscellaneous

A cardboard box with foil and a plastic cover, positioned as a “solar-power cooker” (see YouTube video below) won the $75,000 first prize in the Hewlett-Packard-sponsored Financial Times Climate Change Challenge. The contest goal was “to find and publicize the most innovative and scalable solution to the effects of climate change.”

The apparent idea behind the so-called “Kyoto Box” is to reduce the burning of wood for cooking. The plan of inventor Jon Bohmer is to have Kyoto Boxes distributed to poor Africans courtesy of corporations that would earn carbon credits for distributing the boxes. Each box would earn Bohmer an estimated $26-40 annually.

Some thoughts:

• How do you cook when the sun goes down? Or are Africans supposed to be tucked away in their beds by then wrapped in that other 21st century western “technology” offered by the greens — i.e., mosquito netting?
• Why doesn’t HP sponsor a contest to figure out development projects that would enable poor Africans to obtain the money they need to obtain electricity, water & sewer, etc.?
• Isn’t the Kyoto Box, at best, like putting a band-aid on a cancer lesion?
• Isn’t it interesting how the purpose of the contest is to avert climate change rather than to help poor Africans lead a better life? if you’re a poor African, do you really care about atmospheric carbon dioxide and mean global temperatures 100 years from now?
• How much climate change could possibly be caused by poor Africans cooking on wood fires in the first place?
• Doesn’t it seem like the only true beneficiaries are Bohmer (who will profit obscenely by assembling some cardboard, plastic and foil) and the corporations who can earn carbon credits (while continuing to emit greenhouse gases) and score PR points.

Though many plan to profit by exploiting poor Africans, here’s the real math behind Bohmer’s cardboard cooker:

Kyoto Box = Moral bankruptcy + Intellectual bankruptcy

Click here for the story…

Weep, chuckle, or whatever below…

Check out today’s FoxNews.com column from Steve Milloy… then pick up a copy of his new book Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them at Amazon.com and other fine book sellers.

NBC Universal announced today that it saved $2 million in 2008 by going green — that is, reducing power use and reducing bottled water consumption by executives.

So how much water do NBC execs drink? And how do we know that NBC’s power savings aren’t more appropriately attributed to 2008’s poor business climate.

Of course, NBC Universal had 2008 revenues of almost $17 billion — so the alleged savings, if they’re even true, hardly qualify for significant digit status.

A more effective cost-saving strategy for NBC’s parent company, the global warming-lobbying General Electric, saved $12 million by forcing its disastrous-for-shareholders CEO Jeff Immelt to waive his 2008 bonus.

From an article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle entitled, “Not enough green for green living,”

… “So how much do [the eco-friendly windows] cost?” I asked, while Barry gave me an overview of the various windows that she sells, often at trade shows on green building.

“A lot,” Barry said in her lilting South African accent, demonstrating how one particular brand of window makes a complete seal when closed.

“OK, how much?”

“Well, like this big sliding glass door costs $8,000,” she said, slowly sliding a massive glass and wood door shut. One can buy a cheap door in similar dimensions at Home Depot for $500.” I raised my eyebrow.

“The wood is Forest Stewardship Council certified,” she added. “It was made to last 200 years!”

The world’s cheapest car has been launched, reports the BBC.

Want to know why the greens hate the Nano?

Find out in Steve Milloy’s new book Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, now available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Borders and other fine book stores.

Steve Milloy’s new book Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them was published today by Regnery Publishing.

Green Hell is available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Borders and other fine book stores.

Get a free chapter at www.GreenHellBook.com!

From the Inside Flap:

Big Brother Has Turned Green

The environmental movement has cultivated a warm and fuzzy public image, but behind the smiley-face rhetoric of “sustainability” and “conservation” lies a dark agenda. The Greens aim to regulate your behavior, downsize your lifestyle, and invade the most intimate aspects of your personal life.
In this stunning exposé, Steve Milloy unveils the authoritarian impulse underlying the Green crusade. Whether they’re demanding that you turn down your thermostat, stop driving your car, or engage in some other senseless act of self-denial, the Greens are envisioning a grim future for you marked by endless privation.

Steamrolling nearly all opposition with its apocalyptic predictions of environmental doom, the Green movement has gained influence throughout American society–from schools and local planning boards to the biggest corporations in the country. And their plans are much more ambitious than you think, says Milloy. What the Greens really seek, with increasing success, is to dictate the very parameters of your daily life–where you can live, what transportation you can use, what you can eat, and even how many children you can have.

Citing the tactics and goals of Green groups as explained by their own activists and leaders, Green Hell demonstrates:

• How Green pressure campaigns threaten the safety of your home and your car, and public health overall
• Why the election of President Obama portends a giant leap forward for coercive Green policies
• Why Greens obstruct the use of all forms of energy–even the renewable sources they tout to the public
• How wealthy Green elites stand to profit fabulously from the restrictions and regulations they seek to impose on the rest of us
  * How Green pressure campaigns are hamstringing the military and endangering our national security
• Why big business is not only knuckling under to the Greens, but is aggressively promoting the green agenda to the detriment of its own stockholders
• What you can do to help stop the great Green machine

A one-of-a-kind, comprehensive takedown of the entire environmental movement, Green Hell will open your eyes to a looming threat to our economy, our civil liberties, and the entire American way of life.

From the Back Cover:

Praise for Green Hell

“Green Hell explains why Americans can’t afford to fall for Al Gore’s `the debate is over’ line on global warming. While we’re all for the environment, Green Hell explains why we need to oppose the environmentalists.” —Fred Barnes, Executive Editor, the Weekly Standard

“Green Hell is the `inconvenient truth’ on extremist, growth-killing environmentalism. A must-read for those interested in keeping America free and prosperous.” —Steve Forbes, President and Chief Executive Officer of Forbes

“Regardless of whether you believe global warming is a fraud, the fact is that the current depression, the past spike in oil prices, and the coming technology of electric cars are all going to solve whatever problem exists. Liberals want to use climate change as an excuse to take over the economy and regulate everything and this book exposes their plans.” —Dick Morris, FOX News commentator and former political consultant to Bill Clinton

“This book describes why the world can’t afford to fall for global warming alarmism and environmental hysteria. Steve Milloy shows how to avoid the environmentalists’ vision of our future.” —VACLAV KLAUS, President of the European Union and President of the Czech Republic

“Free market capitalism is still the best path to prosperity. Green Hell is a must-read for anyone who wants to keep America on that path and away from Soviet-style command-and-control environmentalism.”
—Larry Kudlow, Host, CNBC’s The Kudlow Report

Green Hell is available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Borders and other fine book stores.

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A terrific letter-to-the-editor in the Mar. 20 Wall Street Journal:

In response to Ford CEO Alan Mulally’s call for higher gas taxes (which you report in “Tax My Products, Please,” Review & Outlook, March 17), I would like to say that Americans don’t want smaller vehicles. We have great distances to travel, mountains and plains to cross in all seasons of the year. We tow our boats and other contrivances. We haul our children around and travel with them over the continent. Our businessmen drive long distances since they can no longer own corporate jets. What we want is a more efficient internal combustion engine, not a smaller car.

And do not tell us it cannot be done. It can be done, because efficient engines can be created today with off-the-shelf parts bought from General Motors, Ford or Chrysler.

A friend of mine has converted a GMC Vortec V8 gasoline engine for his 2.5 ton pickup truck and the engine delivers more than 30 mpg. Why can’t we buy this type of vehicle at the dealer? Why does individual ingenuity have to point the way to corporations that have the money, skill and engineering brainpower to deliver a more efficient engine? Why do we have to pay more at the pump?

The suggestion that consumers should pay more in gasoline taxes is a cop-out on the part of the auto makers, politicians and everyone else who supports it. This is not Europe. This is the United States of America, a vast country with amazing distances and varieties of geography and climate.

We do not want higher gas prices. We want more efficient engines to power our vehicles. We want the Big Three to use their brains to create something new, not deliver a rehash of junk from a bunch of whiners.

Bernard P. Giroux
Fall River, Mass.

Take action

GreenHellBlog.com would like to spotlight your snappy correspondence with the media. E-mail appropriate links/info to Steve Milloy at Junkman@JunkScience.com.

The Obama-smitten mainstream media lapped up First Lady Michelle Obama’s announcement that she and 5th graders from a local elementary school were going to plant and maintain a vegetable garden at the White House. The New York Times reported,

While the organic garden will provide food for the first family’s meals and formal dinners, its most important role, Mrs. Obama said, will be to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables at a time when obesity and diabetes have become a national concern.

While we’re all for teaching kids about gardening, Michelle Obama’s garden is more about raising green ideologues than green vegetables:

• “Locally grown” food is a green euphemism for their fight against imports and exports of food. The Greens don’t want you eating Chilean grapes in the winter or French wine anytime, for example.
• Organic food, of course, is a symbol of the green movement. The sad truth is that organic food is actually harder on the environment than conventionally grown food, requiring more land, water and labor.

The Times acknowledged the garden’s politics as such, reporting that,

The question had taken on political and environmental symbolism, with the Obamas lobbied for months by advocates who believe that growing more food locally, and organically, can lead to more healthful eating and reduce reliance on huge industrial farms that use more oil for transportation and chemicals for fertilizer.

What will Michelle Obama grow? According to the Times:

The Obamas will feed their love of Mexican food with cilantro, tomatillos and hot peppers. Lettuces will include red romaine, green oak leaf, butterhead, red leaf and galactic. There will be spinach, chard, collards and black kale. For desserts, there will be a patch of berries. And herbs will include some more unusual varieties, like anise hyssop and Thai basil. A White House carpenter, Charlie Brandts, who is a beekeeper, will tend two hives for honey.

Wouldn’t you like your own taxpayer-paid beekeeper?

What’s the lesson for the 5th graders? That they, too, can grow up to be elitist and get glowing PR for hornswoggling children and federal employees into growing fancy vegetables to promote your anti-people political views and to feed your exotic palate?

The Times also noted,

But the first lady emphasized that she did not want people to feel guilty if they did not have the time for a garden: there are still many changes they can make.

“You can begin in your own cupboard,” she said, “by eliminating processed food, trying to cook a meal a little more often, trying to incorporate more fruits and vegetables.”

Aside from the nutritional value offered by a great deal of processed foods, what about all the people who work in or whose jobs depend on the processed foods industry?

Let them eat home-grown berries when they’re put out of work?

Finally, there’s Alice Waters, the San Franciso-based “slow food” advocate and Obama fundraiser. Waters likened the White House garden to the World War II “victory gardens,” telling the Associated Press that,

“To have this sort of ‘victory’ garden, this message goes out that everyone can grow a garden and have free food.”

Free food?

Anyone who has gardened knows first -and that home-grown vegetables can hardly be considered as “free.” Between the water, seeds, fertilzer/compost, pest control, labor and worry, gardening is hardly “free.”

But then again, if you’re the first lady and White House employees and children are doing all the work, and taxpayers are picking up all the costs, maybe there really is such a thing as a free veggies.

March 22 is the green-contrived World Water Day. It should be re-labeled World No-Water Day since the greens are really only interested in controlling (read “reducing”) water use — even though water is the most abundant substance on Earth.

Instead of figuring out ways of producing more freshwater (like through desalination and water exporting), the greens are interested in “water management,” as described, for example, in this media release from German researchers. “Water management” is a euphemism for global dehydration.

Steve Milloy’s new book Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them discusses how the greens are working toward a thirstier world.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Naomi Schaeffer Riley opines today about how the largely white-and-rich greens are trying to make themselves less so.

But, as Riley points out with our help, the greens really represent a threat to African Americans:

… It may be mere condescension to assume that racial minorities don’t understand what’s at stake in [the environmental debate] — that it is the outreach effort that is failing and not the message itself. It could well be that minorities understand all too well. “Environmentalism doesn’t appeal to minorities,” says Steven Milloy, the publisher of JunkScience.com, because “it doesn’t bring them anything.” He explains: “Environmentalists scare companies from building plants where people could use the jobs, and the plants go overseas instead.” In the late ’90s, for instance, the greens managed to run the Shintech company out of Convent, La., where it had planned to build a chemical plant that would have created more than 150 jobs. Though three-quarters of the black residents near the site wanted the facility, the company eventually backed out, tired of the harassment from the Clinton administration’s EPA.

Driving jobs away, particularly in today’s economy, is much more harmful to the health of racial minorities than any presumed “environmental” threat. As Mr. Milloy explains: “People who have jobs have health insurance and a higher standard of living.” As for what we might call “heat justice”: People with jobs also have more air-conditioning units, which can presumably prevent heat-related deaths.

As for the claim about asthma, Mr. Milloy notes that childhood asthma rates have climbed in the past three decades as our air has become considerably cleaner. Moreover, he notes that asthma is not triggered by chemical fumes, but by allergens, which are not produced by industrial plants.

Steve Milloy’s new book Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them spotlights how the greens are a menace to everyone — no matter what your skin color.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that,

Many state and city governments reeling from financial woes are about to get whacked again, this time by an unforeseen increase in their pension bill thanks to market declines.

In an effort to stave off tax increases, New Jersey lawmakers on Monday will consider a bill that would allow municipalities to defer payment of half their annual pension bill, due April 1, for one year. Those towns, counties and schools that opt to defer would face a higher pension bill for years to come.

Market hits are bad enough, but did you know that not only were many state pension funds already underfunded before the financial crisis, but many state pension fund administrators are working to make things worse by lobbying for global warming regulation.

For more on this story check out our report, Pensions in Peril: Are State Officials Risking Public Employee Retirement Benefits by Playing Global Warming Politics?

Take action:

1. Read Pensions in Peril; and

2. If you are a current or retired public employee who is a beneficiary of a state or local pension fund system, contact your state and local representatives and request that the system administrators explain why they are either lobbying for or not lobbying against global warming regulation.