By Jerry Adler, Newsweek
The Second Coming may be the most widely anticipated apocalypse ever, but it’s far from the only version of the end times. Environmentalists have their own eschatology—a vision of a world not consumed by holy fire but returned to ecological balance by the removal of the most disruptive species in history. That, of course, would be us, the 6 billion furiously metabolizing and reproducing human beings polluting its surface. There’s even a group trying to bring it about, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, whose Web site calls on people to stop having children altogether. And now the journalist Alan Weisman has produced, if not a bible, at least a Book of Revelation, “The World Without Us,” which conjures up a future something like ... well, like the area around Chernobyl, the Russian nuclear reactor that blew off a cloud of radioactive steam in 1986. In a radius of 30 kilometers, there are no human settlements—just forests that have begun reclaiming fields and towns, home to birds, deer, wild boar and moose.
Sound appealing? Well, it did to Weisman, too, when he began work on the book four years ago. And “four out of five” of the people he’s told about it, he estimates, thought the idea sounded wonderful. Since we’re headed inexorably toward an environmental crash anyway, why not get it over cleanly and allow the world to heal? Over time, though, Weisman’s attitude toward the rest of humanity softened, as he thought of some of the beautiful things human beings have accomplished, their architecture and poetry, and he eventually arrived at what he views as a compromise position: a worldwide, voluntary agreement to limit each human couple to one child. This, says Weisman—who is 60, and childless after the death of his only daughter—would stabilize the human population by the end of the century at about 1.6 billion, approximately where it was in 1900. And then, perhaps, more of the world could resemble ... Varosha, the beach resort in Cyprus in the no man’s land between the Greek and Turkish zones, where, Weisman writes, thickets of hibiscus, oleander and passion lilac grow wild and houses disappear under magenta mounds of bougainvillea.
Too bad there’s no one there to see it. Read the chilling story here.
By Steven Milloy, Junk Science on FOXNEWS.com
Sens. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) introduced this week their “Low Carbon Economy Act” (LCEA) intended to combat global warming. The bill ought to be called the “The Trillion Dollar Giveaway and Wealth Redistribution Act.”
The LCEA’s ostensible goals are to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 2006 levels by 2020; to 1990 levels by 2030; and by more than 60 percent from today’s levels by 2050. These goals are to be accomplished not by directly mandating reduced greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). Rather, the LCEA would compel larger GHG emitters – e.g., petroleum refineries, natural gas processing plants, liquid natural gas (LNG) facilities, oil and gas importers, and large coal-burning facilities – to pay for the right to emit GHGs.
The lack of a mandate to reduce GHGs emissions means that they could actually increase under the LCEA, as long as emitters are willing to pay to do so. The LCEA is 130 pages in length and quite complex. So while it will take considerably more time to do a thorough analysis, the bill does have one notable feature that screams for immediate attention – its giveaway of more than one trillion dollars to special interests in its first 10 years.
And incredible as it sounds, the bulk of these allowances – 76 percent for the first five years, declining to 47 percent by 2030 – will be given away at no charge to special interests including private industry, farmers and states. This global warming giveaway works out to a total of $1.34 trillion of free money – not adjusted for inflation – that would be handed out to global warming special interests from 2012-2030. After 2030, the annual amount of free money handed out is about $65 billion, increasing by 5 percent per year, exclusive of inflation.
But the great global warming giveaway is only part of the story.Allowances that aren’t given away – for example, 24 percent of allowances issued from 2012 to 2017 – will be auctioned by the government to GHG emitters ineligible for the giveaway. There can be no doubt that the purchasers of the auctioned allowances will simply pass along their higher costs to consumers in the form of higher prices for all goods and services that involve the energy use – in other words, just about everything.
Read more here.