Wings Over the Pyre

Current Mood: predatory
Current Music: Weird Al - Ode to a Superhero

There are certain people you should simply avoid pissing off. The secretary. The janitor. Your doctor. People whose ability to put a big ol' dirty boot into your delicate rectal passage exceeds your ability for meaningful reprisal.

Likewise, folks selling oil in an exchange, apparently. Or so suggests events in London, according to the Times:

Kyoto protest beaten back by inflamed petrol traders
By Laura Peek and Liz Chong

When 35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) yesterday they had planned the operation in great detail.

What they were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement.

“We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,” one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. “I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.”

Another said: “I took on a Texan Swat team at Esso last year and they were angels compared with this lot.” Behind him, on the balcony of the pub opposite the IPE, a bleary-eyed trader, pint in hand, yelled: “Sod off, Swampy.”

Greenpeace had hoped to paralyse oil trading at the exchange in the City near Tower Bridge on the day that the Kyoto Protocol came into force. “The Kyoto Protocol has modest aims to improve the climate and we need huge aims,” a spokesman said.

So, let me get this right ... they charged in with the idea of disrupting a perfectly legitimate business, deliberately with destruction on their mind, then look disturbingly surprised when the young bucks making big money on the trading floor get inflamed and charge the poor pathetic "protesters," kicking their pasty white asses from the trading floor all the way back out into the street like some perverse comedy? What could possibly engender such hostility?

“They grabbed us and started kicking and punching. Then when we were on the floor they tried to push huge filing cabinets on top of us to crush us.” When a trader left the building shortly before 2pm, using a security swipe card, a protester dropped some coins on the floor and, as he bent down to pick them up, put his boot in the door to keep it open.

Two minutes later, three Greenpeace vans pulled up and another 30 protesters leapt out and were let in by the others.

They made their way to the trading floor, blowing whistles and sounding fog horns, encountering little resistance from security guards. Rape alarms were tied to helium balloons to float to the ceiling and create noise out of reach. The IPE conducts “open outcry” trading where deals are shouted across the pit. By making so much noise, the protesters hoped to paralyse trading.

But they were set upon by traders, most of whom were under the age of 25. “They were kicking and punching men and women indiscriminately,” a photographer said. “It was really ugly, but Greenpeace did not fight back.”

So, boy, what you're saying is that you broke into a secure installation with an orchestrated, violent action, and subsequently engaged in activity that even those who might agree with your spit-soddened wretched philosophy would refer to as terrorist? That pretty much sum it up? Because the alternative to referring to it as terrorist activity is active, willful criminal trespass and warcraft.

And you have the nerve to say "Greenpeace did not fight back?" So, you're hardcore enough to barge into their place of business and release screamers to the ceiling, but you're just too soft-hearted to throw a retaliatory punch? Why is it I make my roll to disbelieve, here?

It becomes more and more readily obvious, even to the most disinterested observer, that such events are beginning to receive the attention from the populace that they deserve. In short, a good, solid ass-kicking. When such behaviours could just as quickly end in grenades being lobbed onto the trading floor as a foghorn, in the wake of the 9/11 flights, its clear there's only one rational response to such things: turn on the aggressors and rip them limb from limb, until they learn that behaving in such a way is not acceptable.

In the US, the government provides the right to peaceful assembly. Unfortunately, the protesters of today seem to think that the "peaceful" part of that only applies to the people they protest against, not to themselves, and as a result push past the barriers that exist to protect all involved in an ever more ridiculous effort. The government has difficulty pushing back against their insanity because anything they do is portrayed in the worst possible light, even if performed for the most righteous reasons, by a media hierarchy devoted to leading with the bleed.

That's fine. I vaguely recall something being "of the people, by the people, for the people" around here. So, people, let's do this thing up right.

• Crazy blocking your way to the family planning clinic, spitting and screaming in your face? I find a 10lb metal monkey wrench swung to impact the off-hand temple will back them up smartly, and cow the other spinally inhibited members of their entourage.
• Moonbats lying in the road, blocking your path to the city hall, where you have legitimate business as a citizen? Back up to get a good run at it, then drive right over their conveniently bound and outstretched legs, cackling in the pleasure of being Evolution's Scythe.
• Bunch of wastes of flesh putting big metal spikes in trees that you're trying to log and which your company'll spend millions replanting after in good stewardship? Set up some low-light cameras, catch the useless bastards in the process, and conveniently arrange for them to be chained to an old, retiring chipper "in protest" while you feed in the spiked trees they intended to kill you and your men, instead.

See, there's a lesson to be found here, and its in one of my central life axioms:

Life is simply not painful enough, anymore.

We'll just have to resort to Pavlovian training regimens to try and bring the weak-minded among us to their senses. Once acting like a useless ass is sufficiently painful, we'll only have to dispose of the worst examples of the Homo sapien stupidity fetishists, the rest having learned by observation that, as John Wayne said, "Life is hard. Its harder if you're stupid."

Let's work together to make life harder for the stupid.

Baggage claim,
originally uploaded by Alexander "Squid" Williams.

Well, its started.

The Great Packing for this cycle. Or at least the first pretense of it. I fly out of the country Sunday morning for Prince George, BC once more, for a week of sun, fun, and medical school thorassic exploration. Fun! Feel pity for Heather, who'll be forced to put up with me until the 1st, when I fly back into this country, and probably get held up in Toronto until I miss my plane. Again.

In a rare fit of brilliance, I'm pointedly not taking my laptop, which shouldn't be much of an issue if I can figure out how to move my pics off the camera to Heather's system. I'll figure something out. I always do.

Have I mentioned that I really hate 12 hour multi-transfer flights? I think I'll carry some scary books to read while others boggle at my madness.

Current Mood: grumpy
Current Music: Alex Bach - Wannabe

OK, so its not every day that I get to stumble on a right-wing conservative Canadian blog, but that appears to be exactly what I've found today! Yay! And they're deciding to butcher deep into two of my favourite topics, "global warming" and Kyoto.

So, a warm, warm round of applause for Right Thinking People:

So what will implementing Kyoto mean domestically? Well, a 6% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (Canada’s Kyoto target) is about 240 megatonnes per year. (Other estimates put it more than twice that, at 570 megatonnes per year). That’s a lot. Convincing Canadians to reduce consumption, for example consumption of gasoline, will not be easy. According to CSG Network’s Carbon Calculator, if you drive 20,000 km per year and get reasonable fuel efficiency, you will be responsible for putting about 2000 kg of carbon into the atmosphere annually. That’s two tonnes. In order to save as little as 240 million tonnes of carbon, 120 million Canadians would have to stop driving entirely. Since there are only about 30 million Canadians, and they don’t all drive 4 cars each, we’d have to include the buses we use to get to work, the trucks that bring food into our cities, the trains that bring resources and manufactured goods to market, and the planes we take for business or vacation purposes.

Speaking of air travel, according to the calculator, every trip you take to Europe and back puts as much carbon into the atmosphere as if you drove your car for three months. And if you’re a Canadian and you heat your home with oil, you’re adding another 800 kg of carbon per year.

So look at it this way. If everyone in Canada stopped driving their cars, stopped using airplanes, and stopped heating their homes, we would be halfway to our Kyoto target. Stopping all use of trucks, buses and trains would get us a little closer, of course.

How else could we get there? Well, how about by putting out forest fires? According to scientific studies by the U.S. Geological Survey, forests in the U.S. account for somewhere between ¼ and ½ of America’s “carbon sinks”:

According to David Schimel, senior researcher at the NCAR, estimates revealed "the Hayman and Missionary Ridge Fires released 5 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere." That, says Schimel, "is equal to all the CO2 released by cars and trucks in Colorado during the entire year.”

That’s an interesting figure. The Hayman and Missionary Ridge fires burned 200,000 acres in Colorado, and released 5 million tonnes of carbon compounds into the atmosphere. In 2003, according to the Ministry of Natural Resources, there were 8218 forest fires in Canada, resulting in 1.8 million hectares of forests burned (less than one-half of one percent of the country’s 402 million hectares of forest). 1.8 million hectares is 4.45 million acres; so if the forests in the US and Canada are similar (and there is no reason to expect that they are not), then in 2003, forest fires alone released more than 100 megatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere in Canada.

If we could stop forest fires, we would be halfway to our Kyoto goal. More to the point, if we could stop just one Missionary Ridge-sized fire every year, 2,500,000 Canadians could still drive their cars. Stopping all forest fires in Canada would be equal to 50,000,000 cars not being driven (although there is nowhere near half that many cars in Canada – see Note 2). The problem is that we have now decided that “fire is a natural disturbance in forest ecosystems and is a process that should be managed” – so we won’t stop them.

In other words, one part of the government – Natural Resources Canada – is telling us that it is normal and natural that more than 8000 forest fires are putting 100 million tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere every year, while another part – Environment Canada – is telling us that we are all doomed because Canadian drivers are contributing 35 million tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere every year.(2)

As I have noted elsewhere, inconsistency in policy is often indistinguishable from insanity.

Believe it or not, this is just a small excerpt from a much longer and more involved piece with quite the erudite linkage to articles I've cited previously myself, but bears reading in its complete form for a real appreciation of its depth.

But let's talk about this. This particular bit goes into two of the most damning things about both the "global warming" contingent and the Kyoto Protocol. Firstly, the functioning of the natural world is a lot more epic and a lot more meaningful than the great majority of human activity on this planet. Secondly, the KP is an international agreement which, if engaged as written, will more than hamstring any agreeing national entity, it'll cripple them. Who isn't crippled? Economies who don't actually have an active industrial base (and there's a reason such hell-holes are termed "third world") and those who didn't sign up -- among whom are one of the real powers on the planet, the US. Note that China is a signatory ... but we'll come back to that.

Who signed up? The usual suspects. Small countries without much industrial base to be impacted and the EU, who seem to have dragged Canada along for the ride (and to whom the full impact of Annex I is starting to set in).

Why would a larger industrial power sign on to something so obviously self-destructive? Well, consider the source, the UN. From Wikipedia:

The Kyoto Protocol is an amendment to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international treaty on global warming. It also reaffirms sections of the UNFCCC. Countries which ratify this protocol commit to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases, or engage in emissions trading if they maintain or increase emissions of these gases, which have been linked to global warming.

If the Kyoto Protocol is fully implemented and successful, it is predicted to reduce the average global temperature by, given the widest range of estimates, between 0.02°C and 0.28°C by the year 2050. (source: Nature, October 2003)

The formal name of the proposed agreement, which reaffirms sections of the UNFCCC, is the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. [1] (http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1997/global.warming/stories/treaty/) It was negotiated in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, opened for signature on March 16, 1998, and closed on March 15, 1999. The agreement came into force on February 16, 2005 following its official ratification by Russia on November 18, 2004.

As rational, outside observers, we know very well how the EU and UN operate. No, no, not the child-rape factory in the Congo, I mean in international law, and a careful examination of the Protocol itself will demonstrate the core point: there is no real impact of signing on, nodding in the right places, then doing nothing. There is no enforcement.

A treaty with no teeth is just the sort of thing the UN and EU have embraced. Its a weasel's methodology, of course. Had the US signed on, we could have tried to reduce to the insane Annex I levels in good faith (thus crippling our industry and killing our markets, much to the EU's glee), or do nothing and hand the bastards in the Hague one more whip to beat us with. As stated in Wargames:

Sometimes the only winning move is not to play.

Kyoto is a no-win three-card-monte game on a truly epic scale.

Oh, and to close, there's this little bit from Wikipedia to finish up:

Some argue that the protocol does not go far enough to curb greenhouse emissions (Niue, The Cook Islands, and Nauru added notes to this effect when signing the protocol [16] (http://unfccc.int/resource/kpstats.pdf)), and the standards it sets would be ineffective at curbing or slowing climate change. In addition, there have been recent scientific challenges to the idea of carbon credits, planting "Kyoto forests" or plantations to reduce total carbon dioxide output. Recent evidence shows that this may in fact increase carbon dioxide emissions for the first 10 years, due to the growth pattern of young forests and the effect it has on soil-trapped carbon dioxide. Several industrial countries have made carbon credits an important part of their strategies for reducing their net greenhouse gas outputs, further calling into question the effectiveness of the protocols.

This is the sort of thing pseudo-science leads to. Ignorance of basic science promoted as righteousness.