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Speaker: There's a word for that ...

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  • Russell Brown,

    Here's a good one for the wingnuts to rant and rationalise away. After Glenn Beck et al have spent a year depicting ACORN as a hive of organised crime -- and getting tons of compliant media coverage -- an independent report finds no criminal conduct at all.

    Oh, and it turns out that the "incriminating" undercover videos that had the wingnuts in a frenzy were extensively doctored before release.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 22850 posts Report Reply

  • Kumara Republic,

    This little gem from the author of the Dog & Lemon Guide sums up the wider mentality quite nicely:

    The problem for the West is that the West’s economy is based on energy wastage. Therefore, most of the current energy strategies are aimed at continuing this wastage using different technologies. That’s a bit like promoting chastity in a brothel.

    For example, there was a friend who was visiting a family in Las Vegas. While our friend talked with the wife, the wife was taking the family washing out of the machine and putting it in the clothes drier.

    For those who don’t know it, Las Vegas is in the middle of the desert and it was 35° Celsius outside. The wife could have thrown the whole load of washing out onto a deckchair and it would have been dry in ten minutes. But that’s not the American way.

    There is a deeply ingrained American attitude that says that the reward for all your hard work is the right to squander precious energy: a fourwheel drive Hummer, a fifty-room house, air conditioning in every room, a mega-sized clothes drier. If you run your clothes drier in mid-summer, the power company makes more money, the drier manufacturer makes more money, the shop who sold it makes more money, the housewife gets to put her feet up and watch her mega-sized flatscreen tv. However, when you have hundreds of millions of people living this way, you end up with the current global energy crisis. What’s worsening this global energy crisis is that China and India are now following America’s example.

    The southernmost capital … • Since Nov 2006 • 5446 posts Report Reply

  • BenWilson,

    Witness the vicious responses to Giovanni's blog post about Richard Gage and the 9/11 truthers.

    To be fair, the negative responses in the blog are pretty mild, unless Gio deleted a bunch that I missed. But he did speak of receiving personally targeted hate mail, which sounded quite nasty.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 10657 posts Report Reply

  • Rich Lock,

    @DeepRed, I've also heard it put like this:

    By the curious standard of the GDP, the nation's economic hero is a terminal cancer patient that is going through a costly divorce. The happiest event is an earthquake or a hurricane. All these add to GDP, because they cause money to change hands.

    full article here

    back in the mother countr… • Since Feb 2007 • 2728 posts Report Reply

  • Lucy Stewart,

    I'm not surprised Australian politics steers away from sustainability. Most of their economy is founded on mining. It's like expecting the oil rich nations of the Middle East to advocate cutting back on oil consumption.

    And it's not just minerals; read the chapter in Jared Diamond's "Collapse" on Australia's farming sector and be very, very depressed. They're killing whole swathes of the continent slowly.

    he actually tried to argue that Snopes was founded to 'make money' and so it therefore had a 'secret agenda' to be pro-liberal. Or something.

    I thought liberals were against anyone making money? We are, right?

    On Checkpoint this evening, I heard it being theorised that Tuvalu was now suffering from island-sweeping storm surges because tectonic activity was making it sink, rather than because sea levels were rising. Now that's some impressive circumlocution of the problem.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 2105 posts Report Reply

  • giovanni tiso,

    To be fair, the negative responses in the blog are pretty mild, unless Gio deleted a bunch that I missed. But he did speak of receiving personally targeted hate mail, which sounded quite nasty.

    I didn't have to delete anything from the blog, all the gutter stuff was sent via email whereas the Truthers who chose to make their views known on the blog were perfectly civil. Which is interesting if you think about it.

    Wellington • Since Jun 2007 • 7473 posts Report Reply

  • Max Call,

    i think this sums up a lot of the issues quite nicely

    http://www.storyofstuff.com/

    Fruit Bowl of New Zealand… • Since Jun 2007 • 153 posts Report Reply

  • John,

    Thats really tragic, said RB
    Yep! sure is . our very own Tasman Glacier is a classic demonstration of the effect of global warming. I remember
    looking at it from the Ball Hut about 1937 and there was no lake and the snout was just a little way down from the moraine. Now there is a lake, called Lake Tasman , complete with Icebergs and growing in size every year.

    Auckland • Since Dec 2007 • 21 posts Report Reply

  • Max Call,

    Fruit Bowl of New Zealand… • Since Jun 2007 • 153 posts Report Reply

  • Max Call,

    whoops - edit fail

    sorry for multiple short postings - just wanted to say that the story of stuff clip has been fantastic for showing my Year 9 and 10 Social Science classes. It has provoked much interest, discussion and questioning.

    The 'cap and trade' clip is a recent addition to the website and was not there a few weeks ago.

    Fruit Bowl of New Zealand… • Since Jun 2007 • 153 posts Report Reply

  • Peter Ashby,

    You missed out that the baby boomers had free university education for a greater number than for their forebears. They then, once they had achieved positions of power decided that such 'luxuries' could not be afforded for the younger generation. I am lucky that I, just, managed my tertiary education before loans and big fees came in. Despite that I think it iniquitous that the previous generation had the benefits of expanded university places yet still expected not to pay for it and indeed agitated for a bigger grant yet have pulled that ladder up after them and closed the trapdoor.

    Now they have decided that our average income is too large to make our children eligible for any help, so we have to scrimp and defer our retirements to help them, lest they starve or have to work too much to study.

    Bastards.

    Dundee, Scotland • Since May 2007 • 425 posts Report Reply

  • Sacha,

    David Thomson's Selfish Generations tackled intergenerational behaviour in public policy.

    Brian Easton is a bit scathing about Thomson's work and as usefully detailed as you'd expect. I must find time to re-read that whole article.

    Ak • Since May 2008 • 19745 posts Report Reply

  • Andrew C,

    @Alan P

    Can anyone suggest some good web links with (fairly) un-deniable authority, to which people can be pointed?

    For an easily approchable site try Tim Lambert|Deltoid, he helps pick apart deniers claims. He has been covering global warming for a very long time, you might want to read through the archives to find out about any specific claims you are interested in debunking. For the hard core stuff most of the gold is in the comments.

    Undeniable authority doesn't exist for climate change deniers.

    However I think we all need to have some sympathy for the general public being confused. For example see here. If you read that, it wouldn't take much arm twisting to start thinking something fishy could be going on. Or in other words, trying to actually get off your arse and understand this stuff by looking at data and adjustments and stuff, rather than just accepting what others are saying, can fairly easily lead to confusion and scepticism.

    Auckland • Since May 2008 • 169 posts Report Reply

  • buzzy,

    This is why the coal industry continues to hold such an influence in Australia and leads to things like the Hazelwood Power Station getting a 25 year extension on their operating license. Though closing and replacing Hazelwood (and others like it) with something less environmentally hideous would seem to be the blindingly obvious thing to do, these stations (and their associated mines) tend to be located in areas where there are bugger-all other employment opportunities.

    NZ's just as bad. We continue to run coal and gas fired power plants because of the naive belief that nuclear energy = bad. While I can understand "No Nukes" in the dirty-bomb sense of the word, extending that to power is just outright silly.

    Wellington • Since Apr 2009 • 20 posts Report Reply

  • dyan campbell,

    Can anyone suggest some good web links with (fairly) un-deniable authority, to which people can be pointed?

    This is from the David Suzuki Foundation - the whole website is quite interesting.

    Climate Change Science Skeptics

    auckland • Since Dec 2006 • 595 posts Report Reply

  • Stephen Judd,

    buzzy: the Electricity Commission claims, and I have no reason to doubt them, that we don't do nuclear here because we don't have big enough demand, it's too expensive, and even one station would be too big a proportion of the national generation capacity for it to be safe to take offline.

    Most of the conservation-minded people I know have changed their minds about nuclear power because they think the danger of climate change outweighs the risk. See, they can be rational too.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report Reply

  • Andrew C,

    NZ's just as bad. We continue to run coal and gas fired power plants because of the naive belief that nuclear energy = bad. While I can understand "No Nukes" in the dirty-bomb sense of the word, extending that to power is just outright silly.

    Unfortunately nukes are bad for a whole lot of other reasons. Their waste is horrid to get rid of, expensive to secure (the process of making nuke power leaves a waste which is handy for making nuke bombs), made out of not very environmentally friendly materials, and, most importantly, nuke is expensive to build. Like f*$%ing expensive to build.

    It takes so long to build and costs so much to build a nuke plant that almost zero private co's have ever risked their capital for the long wait until payback. In most cases nuke station builds have been subsidised by governments, or used other methods of socialising the costs.

    NZ aren't the only ones being "silly", nuke stations are simply not built any more, and havnt been for ages, including by countries without any anti-nuke dogma.

    Auckland • Since May 2008 • 169 posts Report Reply

  • Kyle Matthews,

    On Checkpoint this evening, I heard it being theorised that Tuvalu was now suffering from island-sweeping storm surges because tectonic activity was making it sink, rather than because sea levels were rising. Now that's some impressive circumlocution of the problem.

    Ah, it's not the sea-level rise, the world is sinking!

    We continue to run coal and gas fired power plants because of the naive belief that nuclear energy = bad.

    There are umpteen reasons why NZ doesn't have nuclear power. Public opinion is one of them. Lack of expertise, scale, nuclear waste, cost, and NZ actually having enough renewable power to run the damn country are the other ones.

    Since Nov 2006 • 6243 posts Report Reply

  • Rich Lock,

    nuke stations are simply not built any more, and havnt been for ages, including by countries without any anti-nuke dogma.

    Apart from the UK, where louder and louder noises have been made by the govt about building a whole bunch of new nuke power plants.

    This is in spite of small matters like the cost, and the fact that the people in charge of the ones they already have, have shown they couldn't correctly dispose of a used chip wrapper, let alone horrendously toxic and dangerous waste. Which not coincidentally has led to entrenched public opposition to the new ones. Not that the govt appears to give a stuff.

    And no-one has yet mentioned that if the world builds a whole bunch of reactors to solve the pollution and energy crisis, we will quite rapidly use up all of the available uranium and end up back where we started. Except with the added bonus of several thousand tonnes of nuclear waste to dispose of, as well as an energy crisis.

    back in the mother countr… • Since Feb 2007 • 2728 posts Report Reply

  • Kumara Republic,

    There are umpteen reasons why NZ doesn't have nuclear power. Public opinion is one of them. Lack of expertise, scale, nuclear waste, cost, and NZ actually having enough renewable power to run the damn country are the other ones.

    Agreed. IMO the environmentalists won't put the brakes on nuclear energy, the bean-counters will. To build one in NZ would make Think Big look like petty cash.

    The southernmost capital … • Since Nov 2006 • 5446 posts Report Reply

  • Lucy Stewart,

    Ah, it's not the sea-level rise, the world is sinking!

    If Roland Emmerich tells us so, it must be right, right?

    Lack of expertise, scale, nuclear waste, cost, and NZ actually having enough renewable power to run the damn country are the other ones.

    Does that mean we can start actually building wind farms rather than refusing to because it's too ugly? I know wind is not a consistent source, but at the least it would allow us to run those coal and gas plants less.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 2105 posts Report Reply

  • giovanni tiso,

    If Roland Emmerich tells us so, it must be right, right?

    The neutrinos are causing... a physical reaction!

    Wellington • Since Jun 2007 • 7473 posts Report Reply

  • Andrew C,

    Does that mean we can start actually building wind farms rather than refusing to because it's too ugly? I know wind is not a consistent source, but at the least it would allow us to run those coal and gas plants less.

    Don't forget hydro, Project Aqua was scuttled too.

    Auckland • Since May 2008 • 169 posts Report Reply

  • Kyle Matthews,

    Does that mean we can start actually building wind farms rather than refusing to because it's too ugly?

    Facebook groups will fix that: Put a windfarm in my backyard if you like, because I'm not an idiot.

    Since Nov 2006 • 6243 posts Report Reply

  • George Darroch,

    A good proportion of the current Government express either very significant doubt or outright hostility to the the things that are unequivocally proven in the science.

    I would name Nick Smith, the PM John Key, Bill English, Gerry Brownlee in the first category. As far as I can tell, they believe that climate change is real, but that the problem is not so significant that radical and immediate action to avert consequences is necessary. The entire ACT party falls into the second category.

    The rest of Parliament is middling, with the obvious exception of the Greens - although if they weren't so selective about which other areas of science they accepted they'd have a great deal more credibility on this issue.

    WLG • Since Nov 2006 • 2264 posts Report Reply

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