Environment: October 2007 Archives

Just in time for Halloween comes this photo taken by a hunter's camera last month, set up on a tree with an automatic trigger in Pennsylvania. The hunter was aiming to photograph deer, but snapped this thing instead. Sasquatch groupies claim it's a teenage Bigfoot. Game officials claim it's a bear with a bad case of mange. I think it's the first filmmaker who disappeared in "The Blair Witch Project" -- with a bad case of mange.

This is NASA satellite imagery of us taken Monday afternoon.

Not, as I swore I'd heard all day, the "Buckwheat Fire" that's burning by Agua Dulce.

Wookin' pa nub...

No pristine-yet-parched hillsides in your backyard to go up in flames.

Typically, we pay more for products that are smoked, whether it's deli meats or liquors that boast of "smokey" accents. By this standard, then, I must be living in the lap of luxury. A hearty smokey aroma lingers in my nostrils. A soft blanket of ash covers my home and car. For much of the afternoon yesterday, our clear blue sky turned dark gray, with the fiery orange sun barely able to poke through. And last night I even dreamed of cigarettes and house fires, my subconscious thoughts clearly being directed by the elements.

Godspeed to the brave firefighters working to put out the latest inferno. And God bless the victims and potential victims.

Meanwhile, these wild fires have got me thinking ...

I might need to take up smoking -- just so I can suck in some cleaner air.

With the abundance of firsthand smoke displacing any dangers of the second-hand variety, do you think L.A.'s ban on smoking in parks is still in effect?

With all these emissions, SoCal's carbon footprint must be as big as the one from Al Gore's beach house! (rim shot)

Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week! Just trying to add some levity ...

OK, I'll go back to my day job now.

OK, since Mariel and I apparently can't let go of this Nobel Peace Prize debate, maybe we can both agree on this much:

It's a good thing Tookie Williams didn't win it!

Have a good weekend everyone!

This is funny. Both Mariel and Paul Krugman think that conservatives “can’t get over” Al Gore. Yes, you read that right.

Countless liberals around the world swoon at Gore’s rock concerts. They buy his books and go to his movies in droves. They shower him with awards. They achingly pine for his return to presidential politics. They make excuses for his hypocrisy, winking at his embarrassingly massive, environmentally unfriendly mansion and his preference for private jets over commercial airlines. They ignore his tendency toward exaggeration. They even make silly, exaggerated comments of their own, calling him things like “the man who saved the world.” And they lash out angrily at anyone who dares to say a less than fawning word about their hero.

But it’s conservatives who “can’t get over” the man.

Um, sure.

The evidence for this is that after years of liberals’ publicly heralding Gore as their secular messiah — culminating in the media frenzy over his winning the Nobel Prize, the likes of which few if any other winners have ever received — some conservatives had the gall to ask: Isn’t this all a little over the top?

Funnier still, Mariel and Krugman think conservatives object to the Gore worship because we haven’t gotten over the election of 2000.

Right.

Sundry liberals have spent the last seven years taking every opportunity they can find to utter phrases like “selected not elected,” “Gore won the popular vote” and “next time he wins.”

But it’s conservatives who can’t get over election 2000. I get it. (This is what's known as "projection.")

And funniest of all, Mariel and Krugman think the real reason people like me supposedly hate Gore is because we know he’d be unstoppable if he got into the 2008 race. Even though his poll numbers have been falling even among Democrats. (I, for one, consider Hillary Clinton a far more formidable Democratic candidate than the man who, despite being in the incumbent party during a time of peace and prosperity, couldn’t carry his own home state. And, for the record, I fear a Giuliani presidency even more.)

Look, I don’t hate Al Gore. In a world with the likes of Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, there are people far more worthy of the opprobrium. Nor have I ever been a climate-change “denier.” But I’m not so blinded by devotion to the man that I fail to recognize his excesses or even his humanity (or his unfitness for a Nobel Peace Prize). And looking askance at the irrational infatuation too many have with him doesn’t make me the one who "can't get over" him. (BTW, I'm not the one who brought this issue up a week after it had died.)

Trust me, I got over Gore -- a long, long time ago.

Seems I'm not the only person to have the same thoughts about the Republicans not being able to get over Al Gore, as I wrote about in a post last Friday. The NYT's Paul Krugman, it seems, wrote about the very same thing in his Monday column, and comes up with a very good name for it: The Gore Derangement Syndrome. Here's an excerpt.

What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

Incidentally, I expanded my Friday, Oct. 12 post into a column that is now posted on Pajamas Media. I'm sure there will be lots of Gore-haters commenting there, still not able to get over it.

Or "whining," as someone here put it. Al-Jazeera examines today whether Gore's global warming stuff qualifies for a peace prize:

"Dr Alan Hunter, a lecturer in peace studies in the UK, said he felt 'the link between climate change and peace is really very tenuously made'.

'I don't think anyone has carefully demonstrated the link between climate change and war,' he said.

'There are long term predictions that it will lead to resource scarcity and resource scarcity could lead to conflict, such as fighting over water in parts of Africa, but I think that's accepted as being a few decades away.'

He told Al Jazeera awarding Gore the peace prize was a 'surprising decision'.

Jan Oberg, a former secretary-general of the Danish Peace Foundation, also questioned Gore's suitability for receiving the award.

Oberg described giving the prize to the former vice president as 'a great misjudgment'."

And as far as being branded a conservative by Mariel, I think it's just easier to post my results from the World's Smallest Political Quiz, thus demonstrating there are many places between right and left (I'm the red dot):

Mariel makes as elegant a case as I've seen for why Al Gore deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, but I still don't buy it.

Think about it this way: Would we ever give Gore the Nobel Prize for Physics, crown him Miss America, or name him Super Bowl MVP? No, because he's not a physicist, a beauty queen, or a football player. And he's not a peacemaker, either.

That's not a slam on Gore. You can be a great human being without having ever brought peace to some war-torn corner of the world. But the Nobel Peace Prize isn't supposed to be awarded for being a great human being, it's for making a real contribution toward peace. Bridget has provided a handful of names of people who would make a better choice for the Nobel Peace Prize, and there are no doubt many more.

Mariel argues that climate change can lead to war, therefor Gore is kind of a peacemaker. But even if you accept that a) climate change will be as severe as she suggests; b) left unchecked, it will lead to war; and c) Gore's work will somehow prompt major reductions in carbon emissions that dramatically decrease climate change and thus prevent war(s) from happening -- three huge assumptions -- it's quite a stretch to then declare Gore a preemptive peacemaker.

By that logic, why not make the inventors of desalination technology Peace Prize winners? By making potable water less scarce, they might prevent wars, too, no? Or, for that matter, why not the genetic engineers who have created drought- and pest-resistant crops that (were they not too often resisted by environmental extremists) could do far more than Gore's movie to stave off famines and the wars that spring from them?

Because those people aren't politically prominent. And that's what the Nobel Peace Prize -- whose recent recipients include not only the terrorist Yasser Arafat, but also Jimmy Carter, and (3 times!) the U.N. -- is about, politics. A bunch of Swedish liberals hand out an award to someone they like because they agree with him or her politically. Hey, it's their award, and their choice, good for them.

But that doesn't mean the rest of us have to take it seriously, or pretend that Al Gore is any more an appropriate choice for the world's most prominent peace prize than he is for the Cy Young.

There's many people wondering what Al Gore has done to win the Nobel Peace Prize. I mean, he didn't stop a war or anything, though he might have prevented one if he had become the president after winning the popular vote in the 2000 election.

But if you define peace as the cessation of violence that results in the saving of many, maybe millions or billions of lives, namely ours, then it makes perfect sense. It's not only about saving lives through famine and disease caused by warmer temperatures, it's about saving lives through war. Yes, war. What starts war? Usually land grabs or fights over boundaries preempted by need for more resources? And what prompts that? Famines and disease many times.

In fact, considering his legendary wonky boringness with a politician's annoying habit of taking credit for anything he was involved in (they all do it, not just Gore), he's done something rather amazing. He turned the tide of public opinion from viewing climate change as some alarmists' fringy hippie thing, thanks to the corporate-apologist corps of conservatives have been shouting for years. He prevailed and so did reason and science. Climate change kills people, and that's not junk science. Remember the dinosaurs? Catastrophic climate change not such a good thing for their 200-million-year domination of the planet.

Yes, the hawkish global warming deniers who still are mad that Gore got the popular vote in 2000 can whine all they want. But he's the man. He deserved it. And maybe next time he wins, he'll get to be president.

He's even, if indirectly, managed to change the president's mind. That's quite a feat.

Here's Will Ferrell in a funny SNL clip.

OK, I understand that for legions of die-hard greens, "An Inconvenient Truth" is their "Passion of the Christ," a triumphant cinematic rendering of the sacred mysteries they hold most dear. And I know that even though a judge in England has ruled that schools' showing the film must tell kids about nine of the documented falsehoods it contains, the movie still carries great cachet as an environmentalist call to arms. I get all that.

What I don't get is why in the world -- even if all the accolades about him are true -- Al Gore could possibly be considered Nobel Peace Prize material. Reducing carbon emissions, it seems, is rather different from getting warring factions to lay down their arms, helping to end ancient and bitter hatreds, or enabling nations to live together in harmony -- you know, making peace. And isn't that what the Nobel Peace Prize is supposed to be all about?

Then again, seeing that past winners include Yasser Arafat, maybe not.

MSN auto columnist Tom Wilson says that the Hummer H2 is far past its 15 minutes and, in fact, is so passe it verges on uncool to have one. He doesn't use any facts or stats to show if anyone shares this opinion, though.

Hummer H2 It had its fling with polite society, a soiree combined from the macho family resemblance to the military-derived Hummer H1 and the housebroken underpinnings of a Chevy Suburban. Hot when it first landed, thanks to the shift in the environmental winds, the H2 is now the redneck's parade float.

Ouch.

I've always hate the cars because a) uuuuuugly; b) at more than $50k a pop they are no more than just status symbols and C) have you ever tried to see around on on the freeway?

But don't tell the brits. Turns out Hummers just went on sale for the first time in the UK on Monday. Heehee. Silly Englanders! Right-side Hummers?

Too many celebrities are getting DUI's to make it big news anymore. But the DUI arrest of another actor who was arraigned yesterday (Soap star Kirsten Storms) is notable because she was popped after she was pulled over for throwing a lit cigarette out of the window of her Mercedes while cruising down the 101 in Sherman Oaks.

As a daily 101 commuter I see lit cigarettes being tossed from cars every single day, a result I supposed of the fact that newer model cars don't come with ashtrays. Besides being disgusting (ever taken a look at the side of highway in that wooded strip between the freeway where the 101 and 405 intersect? It's littered with thousands, maybe millions of old butts), it's dangerous and illegal. And, in Storms case, it was indicative of even more law-breaking activity.

So keep your butts to yourself.