Category: Miscellaneous

The Hanover and District Hospital in Ontario, Canada is planning to ban the sale of bottle water in favor of tap water available through drinking fountains and water dispensing machines, according to The Post (Hanover, Ontario). The move is part of the hospital’s “commitment to a green environment.”

Water fountains? Ick! In a hospital? OMG!

A November 2008 study by San Francisco Department of Health researchers and published in in Epidemiology and Infections observed that,

Interactive water fountains are established sources of gastrointestinal infections yet most health codes fail to regulate their design and operation.

A February 2006 study by University of Texas School of Public Health researchers and published in the Southern Medical Journal reported that,

… drinking water fountains can be an unexpected and unappreciated source of intake of metal and bacterial contaminants.

Then there’s the trend away from disinfecting drinking water with chlorine — a problem in Ontario not too long ago. As related on the American Chemistry Council web site:

Even where water treatment is widely practiced, constant vigilance is required to guard against waterborne disease outbreaks. Well-known pathogens such as E. coli are easily controlled with chlorination, but can cause deadly outbreaks given conditions of inadequate or no disinfection. A striking example occurred in May 2000 in the Canadian town of Walkerton, Ontario. Seven people died and more than 2,300 became ill after E. coli and other bacteria infected the town’s water supply. [Emphasis added] A report published by the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General concludes that, even after the well was contaminated, the Walkerton disaster could have been prevented if the required chlorine residuals had been maintained.

Steve Milloy’s new book Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them spotlights how green will make you life less safe and more inconvenient.

Take action:

Contact Katrina Wilson, President and CEO, Hanover and District Hospital at 519-364-2341 Ext. 206 or by e-mail at kwilson@hanoverhospital.on.ca.

We recently spotlighted a New York Times op-ed promoting urine recycling through a urine diversion toilet.

So check out this GreenOceanProject YouTube video of how a urine diversion toilet works.

Steve Milloy’s new book Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them to learn how the greens plan to reduce your standard of living to squatting over a hole.

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) said today that deferring potentially costly actions to combat climate change because of the global economic slump amounted to “a mutual suicide pact,” according to an Agence France Presse report.

Just last week, Kerry said that the most stringent CO2 regulation proposed so far wouldn’t work.

Who knows what Kerry will say next week?

Although it is unfortunate that billionaire T. Boone Pickens seems to have lost his mind since 2004, at least he had it long enough to help make sure that Kerry didn’t become president.

In an article discussing the possibility of the federal government taxing you by the mile driven rather than by the gallon of gas purchased, the New York Times reports on studies of the mileage tax where cars are

equipped with tracking devices to record where motorists have been.

Study author Jon Kuhl told the Times that,

“We’re looking at how you would bill people, at invasion of privacy issues, and, human nature being what it is, people will always be looking at ways to beat the system.”

The Times continued,

Privacy advocates and economists, though, wonder about the complexity — and the public’s reaction to tracking where and when people drive.

“You’d have to have a record where the car is at all times, and that certainly would frighten America,” said Mike Moffatt, an economist at the Ivy School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. “And it also seems like a much more expensive way to collect taxes.”

Steve Milloy’s new book, Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them describes how the greens are coming after your wheels.

Senate Foreign Relations committee Chairman Sen. John Kerry — a.k.a Mr. Teresa Heinz — said in a March 5 speech yesterday that, even with “the best” climate regulation proposed so far, including the cap-and-trade scheme outlined in President Obama’s budget proposal, atmospheric CO2 concentrations will nevertheless increase and cause “catastrophic and irreversible climate change,” according to Carbon Control News.

Kerry’s statement is based on a forthcoming analysis from the Heinz Center (Teresa Heinz, vice chair of the board of trustees), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Fidelity Investments.

“If you factor in the best of everything that is currently proposed — the best — and if you can presume that we do what is best,” CO2 emissions will still exceed 500 parts per million (ppm) by 2050,” Kerry said, while noting that 350 ppm was the CO2 concentration that policymakers should aim for.

“All the current plans take you to about 550 [ppm], but science has now said 550, 450 is not enough,” Kerry said. “We have to go back to 350.”

Bottom line: As spotlighted in Steve Milloy’s new book “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them,” the greens want to control your life and destroy your standard of living in return for nothing.

The Washington Post reported this morning of a Montgomery County, MD man who packed up his wife and twin 6-year-old girls and moved them to New Zealand — because of global warming.

The man told the Post,

I am not going to predict how the climate might change and how it might affect New Zealand… But quite honestly, I feel in 100 years, one of my daughters is still going to be alive and this planet is going to be a mess. If I didn’t have two daughters, I would not be doing this.

The Post further reported,

But he argued that people who do nothing in the face of risk are the ones who are being irrational: If even a fraction of the consequences of global climate change that scientists are forecasting come true, disasters such as Hurricane Katrina might become the norm, not the exception. In a world afflicted by overpopulation and environmental degradation, he asked, is the irrational person the one who acts or the one who says the future will look after itself?

The Post calls this “ecomigration.” Is that because “eco-insanity” is already taken?

… the blog, that is, as opposed to where we’ll be living if we let the environmentalists take over our lives.

Steve Milloy’s latest book Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them is being published by Regnery Publishing in March 2009.

This blog will keep you current on Green Hell-related news and doings, and recommend actions you can take to combat Big Green Brother. You’ll also be able to share your own tales of green woe and to comment on posts!

If we are going to avoid living in a green hell, we will need to save ourselves!

By Steve Milloy
January 15, 2009, FoxNews.com

Incoming White House energy-environment czar Carol Browner was recently discovered to be a commissioner in Socialist International. While that revelation has been ignored by the mainstream media and blithely dismissed by her supporters, you may soon be paying the cost of Browner’s political beliefs in your electricity bill.

Socialist International is precisely what it sounds like — a decidedly anti-capitalistic political cause. Founded in 1951, its organizing document rails against capitalism, asserting that it “has been incapable of satisfying the elementary needs of the world’s population … unable to function without devastating crises and mass unemployment … produced social insecurity and glaring contrasts between rich and poor … [and] resorted to imperialist expansion and colonial exploitation.…” Socialist International also asserts, “In some countries, powerful capitalist groups helped the barbarism of the past to raise its head again in the form of Fascism and Nazism.” So Socialist International at least partly blames Adolph Hitler on capitalism.

According to its own principles, Socialist International favors the nationalization of industry, is skeptical of the benefits of economic growth and wants to establish a more “equitable international economic order.” In true Marxist form, it asserts that, “The concentration of economic power in few private hands must be replaced by a different order in which each person is entitled — as citizen, consumer or wage-earner — to influence the direction and distribution of production, the shaping of the means of production, and the conditions of working life.”

There’s much more in Socialist International’s principles, but you get the idea.

So what does all this have to do with your electricity bill? In late-December, Carbon Control News reported that Browner was a “strong backer” of utility “decoupling,” which had emerged as a “key climate policy priority for Obama.”

What is utility decoupling? The profits of electric utility companies have traditionally depended on the amount of electricity sold; basically, the more power that is sold, the more profit that is earned. The productivity-profitability link is a logical and standard business principle that is easy to understand, easy to implement and that has worked for, well, millennia in myriad business ventures — but no more for electric utilities, if Browner has her way.

Browner wants to sever, or decouple, a utility’s profits from the amount of electricity it sells. More electricity means more coal and natural gas burning, which, according to green dogma, means more greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. So Browner believes that less electricity production is, at least, a partial answer to climate change. But less electricity would mean less profitability for electric utilities, a powerful Washington lobby that Browner can ill afford to antagonize.

To date, the electric utility industry has aided and abetted the climate alarmist cause, if not by actually lobbying for global warming regulation, then at least by its willingness to entertain such regulation as public policy worthy of serious consideration. But since endangering utility profits would likely galvanize the industry once and for all against emissions regulation, the green dilemma boils down to figuring out a way to reduce electricity sales while guaranteeing utility profits. Enter decoupling.

How would decoupling actually function in practice? There are several different schemes for decoupling, but their tedious complexity precludes elaboration here. But the schemes all essentially amount to the same thing — sticking it to ratepayers and taxpayers. This should come as no surprise, when you stop to think about it.

Decoupling involves government guaranteeing electric utilities steady or steadily increasing profits for selling less electricity. That means implementing one of three basic scenarios: (1) consumers paying more for less electricity; (2) electricity prices remaining steady and taxpayers being called upon to subsidize the difference between the profits from actual electricity sales and the profits guaranteed by government; or (3) some combination of the two. There are no other possibilities.

Decoupling advocates assert that the consumers can avoid higher electric bills through “voluntary conservation measures” — that is, you can lower your bill by using less power. It’s a specious assertion since consumers will still pay higher rates for the electricity they use. Moreover, “voluntary conservation” is not necessarily without cost. Compact fluorescent lightbulbs, insulation, weather stripping, solar panels and other electricity conservation efforts all can entail significant added costs that can take many years to pay for themselves.

Getting back to Browner, what could be more anti-capitalistic than to disassociate profits from sales? It’s often difficult enough to determine profits when they are tied to sales — ask any author or recording artist. Imagine the difficulty, arbitrariness and potential for gamesmanship, if not just plain fraud, involved with government-dictated profitability based on reducing productivity. In the case of electric utilities, already a most heavily regulated enterprise, even greater government regulation of the industry will be required, which, of course, is what a good socialist like Browner would want.

Perhaps what’s most troublesome about all this is the stealthiness. Less than a week after Browner was outed as a Socialist International muckety-muck, the group scrubbed its web site of her photo and evidence of her commission membership. And in the larger picture, it’s intellectually dishonest for advocates of socializing electric utilities to promote the euphemistic “decoupling” as if it were some novel solution rather than what it really is — a subversion of our capitalistic system.

You know, one might get the impression that there’s actually something wrong with, and embarrassing about, a key White House adviser advocating the undermining of a basic principle of our economic system.

Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and manages the Free Enterprise Action Fund. He is a junk science expert, and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

By Steven Milloy
January 08, 2009, FoxNews.com

President-elect Obama has reportedly chosen Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent and one of People magazine’s “sexiest men alive,” for the post of surgeon general. Those aren’t the only reasons that the surgeon general’s position ought to be abolished.

The original version of the surgeon general position was created in 1870 to administer what was then known as the Marine Hospital System (MHS), which cared for sick and injured merchant seaman. The MHS, including a uniformed “Commission Corps” of physicians, was converted in 1902 into the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service, and its mission was expanded to medical inspection and quarantine of arriving immigrants, such as those landing at Ellis Island in New York.

In 1912, the Service was renamed the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) as its mission was further expanded to conduct investigations into infectious diseases (such as tuberculosis, hookworm, malaria, and leprosy), sanitation, water supplies, and sewage disposal. Between 1930 and 1944, the Commission Corps officers were expanded to include engineers, dentists, research scientists, nurses, and other health care specialists.

But in 1968, the surgeon general position fell victim to President Lyndon Johnson’s reorganization of the then-Department of Health Education and Welfare (HEW, or what is known today as the Department of Health and Human Services). The Office of Surgeon General that administered the PHS was scrapped, and responsibility for the PHS was assigned to the assistant secretary for health, who reported directly to the secretary of HEW. A position of “surgeon general” was then created to merely “advise” the assistant secretary on professional medical matters.

After almost two decades of more bureaucratic reshuffling — during which time the surgeon general was made a direct adviser of the secretary of HEW followed by the combining of the positions of surgeon general and assistant secretary for health in 1977 and their separation again in 1981 — the Office of the Surgeon General was re-established in 1987 with largely nominal responsibility for managing the PHS Commissioned Corps personnel.

The surgeon general doesn’t actually command all of the Commission Corps officers. Most of them work in other federal agencies — like the EPA, Coast Guard and Bureau of Prisons — and report directly to the various line managers in those agencies who may or may not be in the PHS.

Although C. Everett Koop attempted to revitalize the Corps in the late 1980s, the superfluous nature of the surgeon general position became glaringly obvious during the tenure of Jocelyn Elders, President Bill Clinton’s first surgeon general. Besides taking controversial positions on drug legalization and the distribution of contraceptives in schools, in early December 1994, Elders spoke in support of the teaching of masturbation. She was promptly fired by Clinton. The position of surgeon general remained vacant for three years, until Clinton nominated David Satcher.

At the time of Satcher’s nomination, the Cato Institute’s Dr. Michael Gough and I observed in a Wall Street Journal column, “We have not had a surgeon general for three years. Has anyone noticed? Is anyone’s health at risk?”

The answer, of course, was that no one’s health was at risk and, in fact, the U.S. public health had never been better. Life expectancy was at an all-time high. Death rates from cancer, heart disease and AIDS were falling. This trend continues today, no thanks to whatever it is that the surgeon general does. And, by the way, what exactly has the current surgeon general been doing?

Judging by 23 of the 32 press releases issued from his office during 2008, Acting Surgeon General Steven Galson has spent a great deal of time traveling coast-to-coast promoting the “Healthy Youth for a Healthy Future” project, which “focuses on recognizing and showcasing those communities throughout the nation that are addressing childhood overweight and obesity prevention by helping kids stay active, encouraging healthy eating habits, and promoting healthy choices.”

So let’s look at a few examples of Surgeon General Galson in action:

In Harrisonburg, Pa., Galson presented, “… the Healthy Youth for a Healthy Future Champion Award to the Girls Golf Program, a partnership between the Ladies Professional Golf Association, the United States Golf Association, James Madison University, and Mulligan’s Golf Center.” The media release continued: “This program is helping local girls and women stay physically active, gain self-confidence, and develop lasting friendships, while fostering an enjoyment for the game of golf.”

At Disney World, Galson honored the Walt Disney Company for removing trans fats from the foods on its menu and for making sure that the use of the Disney name and its characters is limited to kid-focused products that meet specific guidelines that limit calories, fat, saturated fat and sugar.”

In New Mexico, Galson honored a wellness center that “will help students stay fit and healthy using new tools such as exer-gaming and interactive stationary bicycles.”

So over the last 96 years, the Surgeon General has gone from working on genuine public health problems (infectious disease, clean water and sanitation) to advocating golf, Mickey Mouse-less food and beverage containers and video exercise games as public health measures.

It may very well be that Gupta’s celebrity — apparently his unique qualification to hold office — makes him the ideal nominee to continue the Office of Surgeon General’s downward trajectory into obscurity and oblivion. On the other hand, if Gupta were really serious about advising Americans on health matters, he would stay at CNN where he could reach more people on any given day than he could by traveling the country handing out dubious prizes that amount to little more than corporate public relations.

Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and manages the Free Enterprise Action Fund. He is a junk science expert, and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.