In The News
Green Bigotry and Natural Gas
Friday October 14, 2005
In Case You Missed It…
Kyoto? Mamma Mia!
Friday October 7, 2005
By ANTONIO MARTINO October 7, 2005; Page A16 Mr. Martino is Italy’s defense minister. ROME -- The devastating hurricanes that hit the U.S. recently offered “eco-doomsayers” -- who like to blame human activities, preferably of the industrial kind, for all sorts of natural disasters -- yet another chance to lash out at the Bush administration. America’s “failure” to ratify the Kyoto Protocol -- regularly held responsible for extreme weather conditions around the globe -- was quickly found guilty of the destruction brought about by Katrina and Rita. As usual, the eco-doomsayers care very little for the small fact that their sweeping accusations have absolutely no basis in modern science. First of all, it is not true that President George W. Bush is alone in opposing the Kyoto agreements that his predecessor Bill Clinton signed. … Second, there is no scientifically sound link between rising global temperatures and an increase in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. Nor are the events of the recent weeks unprecedented: As Max Mayfield, Director of the National Hurricane Center, pointed out, a comparable series of hurricanes of similar intensity has already been observed in 1915. Third, and most important, while a scientific consensus about the true nature of climate change is still lacking, we know for certain that the impact of Kyoto on the average global temperature will be negligible at best. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts that without the ratification of Kyoto, the average global temperature will rise about one degree Celsius by 2050. The same panel predicts that after the implementation of Kyoto, the temperature will still rise 0.94 degrees. In other words, the benefits from Kyoto amount to about 0.06 degrees in half a century. Remarkably, this is even the most optimistic estimate: S. Fred Singer -- the climatologist who developed the method for measuring the ozone layer -- reckons that it may be as small as 0.02 degrees. This is a difference so minuscule that our available instruments wouldn’t even be able to notice it! … Those countries, such as Italy, that for decades steered clear of building new power plants and gave up on nuclear power -- the cleanest, safest and cheapest energy source available today -- will need to face up to a harsh reality: Compliance with the Kyoto Protocol will punish even the existing energy-producing capacity by capping emissions. The cost of energy in Italy, already higher than the European average, let alone that in the U.S., will go up even more. Given the country’s lack of competitiveness, that can only be described as a self-inflicted wound. Perhaps the problems of our times are manmade, after all. But rather than being caused by those “neocons” in Washington, they stem from the noble intentions of environmentalists so bent on “saving nature” that in the process they wage an unremitting war against mankind and its endeavors. Click here for the full text of the op-ed (subscription required).
In Case You Missed It…Blair takes heat for global-warming remarks
Monday October 3, 2005
Blair takes heat for global-warming remarks
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“Emergency State”
Tuesday September 27, 2005
In Case You Missed It...
Builders offer rewards to catch ecoterrorists
Friday September 23, 2005
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Builders offer rewards to catch ecoterrorists September 21, 2005 By Tracy Johnson They’ve used crude incendiary devices made from milk jugs to torch new homes and construction sites in Western Washington, signing their work “ELF.” Now the Seattle FBI has made catching so-called ecoterrorists such as the Earth Liberation Front a top priority, and a powerful state builders’ group is throwing in cash to help. On Tuesday, the Building Industry Association of Washington announced a reward of up to $100,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of activists who damage homes and construction sites in Washington and claim to be part of ELF. “It’s only a matter of time before someone is hurt or killed by ELF terrorists,” association president Lyle Fox said. … ELF “has emerged as a serious terrorist threat,” said FBI Special Agent in Charge Laura Laughlin, and “arson, which has resulted in millions of dollars in damage, is the crime of choice.” … The FBI and other agencies have arrested 19 people in connection with crimes of environmental- or animal-rights-activism since early 2004.
Hurricane Blame Game
Tuesday September 20, 2005
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT...BIG BOARD CAVES IN (Christopher Byron, New York Post, 9/19/05)
Monday September 19, 2005
In Case You Missed It…
THE NEW YORK POST
BIG BOARD CAVES IN
By CHRISTOPHER BYRON
September 19, 2005
DID I miss something, or weren’t we sup posed to have gotten out of the terrorist-appeasement business?
The question arises because of some disturbing recent developments at the New York Stock Exchange, where President Catherine Kinney has been field-testing a new approach to institutional leadership that is strange to say the least: Talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk . . . and don’t explain why.
We’ll get more deeply into Kinney’s perplexing behavior. But for the moment it is enough to know that her actions have abruptly catapulted the NYSE into one of the strangest — and scariest — situations in its 213-year history.
Specifically, rumors were flying up and down the trading floor last week that Kinney herself had succumbed to a campaign of threats and intimidation from an international animal-rights fringe group called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC). Rumors had it that without seeking the approval of the board of directors, Kinney had ordered the Big Board to dump its planned listing of a New Jersey company that performs drug testing on animals.
The exchange clearly knew what it was letting itself in for when it agreed, early this summer, to consider Life Sciences Research Inc. for a listing. SHAC has for years been conducting a well-publicized international terrorist campaign to drive Life Sciences out of business.
SHAC had already been linked in press reports to an assault on Life Sciences’ CEO in Britain four years ago, when three hooded men leaped from the bushes in front of his house as he was returning home one evening and beat him nearly to death with pickax handles. SHAC insists it was not involved. …
In recent weeks, the SHAC Web site has been listing the direct-dial office phone numbers and e-mail addresses of dozens of the NYSE’s top officials.
For the NYSE to have agreed to list Life Sciences shares for trading on the Big Board may have been gutsy, but it was certainly unnecessary. And it was plainly idiotic, having issued a press release announcing that trading would begin on Sept. 7, to invite the company’s top officials for a celebratory breakfast, only to inform them, mere minutes before the opening bell, that there’d been a change of plans and the listing would be “postponed” indefinitely.
According to Life Sciences’ Chief Financial Officer Richard Michelson, who attended the traditional breakfast, the bombshell news of the exchange’s about-face was delivered to the group by Kinney herself, who cleared her throat, looked at the Life Sciences brass seated around here and declared, “Well, there’s no way to sugarcoat this, but the listing will not be taking place today. It is being postponed.”
Once her stunned listeners were able to gather their thoughts, they began asking her to explain why. Had the Big Board found some skeleton in the company’s closet? Some financial irregularity? Anything?
No, explained Kinney. It was nothing like that.
Well, what then?
“[Kinney] just wouldn’t say,” Michelson said. “She kept questioning us about SHAC and the animal-rights people,” he said. “But she simply wouldn’t say why the NYSE had changed its mind.” …
TWO days later, I contacted a member of the board of directors who agreed to speak if not identified by name. The member said no one on the board was informed, adding, “Security is the biggest hot-button issue imaginable at the exchange, and I cannot believe something of this magnitude would have happened without the board being briefed.”
At week’s end a wall of silence had descended around the exchange, with officials refusing to answer questions of any sort regarding the Life Sciences matter, from The Post or indeed any other media outlet.
The stonewalling even extended to the NYSE’s seeming defiance of a U.S. Senate Committee, which early last week opened its own probe of the Big Board’s behavior. Sources in Washington said the committee had been unable to get the exchange to even return phone calls.
This is certainly not the sort of behavior one would have expected from an institution that had been at the forefront of post-9/11 calls for Americans to show defiance of terrorists by going about their business unintimidated and unafraid.
Yet with the exchange suddenly in the crosshairs of a terrorist group, “going about one’s business” seems to be the last thing on the minds of the Big Board’s top brass. And as history teaches clearly enough, trying to appease lunatics simply brings on the need for more — and greater — appeasement to come.
Why the modern world has spawned a guerrilla movement of people who think that puppies are entitled to the same rights as people is beyond our purposes here — though the truth of the matter may be no more complicated than unraveling the politics of a generation of people raised on singing mice, sexless dogs, and all the other anthropomorphized creatures that sprang from the mind of Walt Disney.
How many children watched Bambi’s father be gunned down by that despicable lower life form known as a Man, and grew up to believe that rats, cats and monkeys all ought to come within the embrace of the equal protection clause of the Constitution is anyone’s guess. But beyond the world of animal rights loom even wackier belief systems — like the fair treatment for trees movement and the brown shirts of eco-terrorism.
These are the people Kinney and her bunch will hear from next: Delist Weyerhaeuser and Georgia Pacific or we’ll blow up your house!
How foolhardy and shortsighted to have let this all happen. And ultimately how sad, for by seeming to appease SHAC — and not even attempting to spin the facts more favorably afterward — Kinney and Co. have hung a great big “Kick Me” sign around their necks and invited every wacko group on earth to come to the corner of Broad and Wall for a free kick.
Click here for the full text of the op-ed.