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Why I’ll get arrested to stop the burning of coal : Comments
By Bill McKibben, published 27/2/2009The only hope of making the kind of change required is to really stick in people’s minds a simple idea: coal is bad.
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Further to Peter the Believer, its clear that the general public knows little science. Do they realise Carbon is the basis of virtually all life on Earth? No, I imagine they think its a poison produced by coal fired power stations.
Posted by Atman, Saturday, 28 February 2009 9:54:20 PM
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If our leaders would simply realize that instead of sending all that iron to China, they would divert some to rectifying an iron deficiency in the warm tropical waters of the great oceans, them the ocean would simply love to suck enormous quantities of carbon from the air, and turn it into food.
To reach its full potential as a carbon sink, the ocean needs phosphates and sunlight and iron. The one missing is iron. Fill an eighty thousand tonne freighter with iron sulfate, equip it with a pump and mixing bowl, and send it out to fertilize the oceans, and it would generate enough carbon credits, to be a huge profit making machine. I am told NZ has had to pay a Carbon Penalty to the UN. If it simply paid the same amount to irrigate the nearby Pacific with iron, purchased from Australia naturally, every tonne of carbon generated could be offset, by the massive amounts of carbon sequestered in an algal bloom. That carbon would then simply be put into the food chain, recycled and turn itself into huge tonnages of fish, or is that fush, and be used to feed hungry millions. Carbon is not a menace, it is a boon. My chemistry teacher would be proud of me, because he must have been smart. He taught me to look at all the options, not just the obvious ones. In his book, the State of Fear, the late Michael Crighton, looked at the jingoism associated with climate change, and concluded it was lawyer generated, fallacious, misguided and could not stand a jury trial with a totally unbiased panel of judges. Right in the middle of the book, over about two pages, he concluded that authorities had to generate something for the general population to be fearful of to retain control. If the Federal Court of Australia would dump its Judges, and file a suit to test carbon sequestration, and comply with s 79 Constitution, and empanel the type of Special Jury, available in New South Wales until 1970, we may get to the truth Posted by Peter the Believer, Sunday, 1 March 2009 6:52:48 AM
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Well, if your protests are successful, you won't have to worry about being arrested any more, because there will be no police force.
There will be no police force because there will be no taxpayers' money to fund them. There will be no taxpayers' money because nobody will be earning an income. Nobody will be earning an income because no industry can operate without energy. Welcome back to the Stone Age! I have a better suggestion for reducing emissions -- anyone who is stupid enough to think the answer is this simple could just stop breathing. Posted by Jon J, Sunday, 1 March 2009 12:03:52 PM
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"On March 2, environmentalist Bill McKibben will join demonstrators who plan to march on a coal-fired power plant in Washington DC."
No doubt Bill will also be waving a placard supporting nuclear generated power plants... the only realistic alternative to coal-powered stations at present. And he will also be calling on his fellow Americans to financially support the Chinese whose future standard of living will be seriously curtailed if investment in coal-fired power stations is curtailed. How dare they aspire to a Western standard of living. Posted by blairbar, Sunday, 1 March 2009 1:44:28 PM
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Until 1970, in New South Wales there was a way to get twelve highly educated individuals, drawn from a panel of about 3,600 to calmly review and decide upon weighty matters such as global warming. They had the power to overrule any Act of Parliament they considered bad government. In such a forum, blokes like this protester could have their say, and the miners could have theirs, and the newspapers and media would have had to stop publishing inflammatory stories until such time as they had examined the evidence.
Given the results of experiments conducted in the Southern Ocean, and data showing that there is more carbon in the sea than on the land and in the atmosphere combined, then if it becomes necessary, there is no need to stop burning coal, but the oceans could be seeded with iron, and encouraged to work a little harder at what it seems they do best; take carbon from the atmosphere. When the Liberals abolished a whole raft of legislation in 1970, to establish a lawyers republic in New South Wales along the lines of the Soviet Union, they paved the way for minority groups to unduly influence governments, in order to have them accommodate their extremist views. The Liberals were stopped by S 80 Constitution, from totally dismantling the Commonwealth, but they made a pretty good fist of it anyway. Instead of stealing carbon from farmers to offset coal production, as the Liberals did for the past eleven and a half years, by prohibiting land clearing, the government would have had to find another way to strut the international stage claiming green credentials. Now we have signed Kyoto the need is even greater. The federal Liberals formed an unholy alliance with Labor States, and for money, had them steal carbon from farmers on their behalf without compensation. They are directly responsible for the holocaust in Victoria. If farmers and householders had been permitted to clear carbon residues and trees from around their houses, many more would have survived. The federal Liberals have called the tune: let them now pay the piper Posted by Peter the Believer, Monday, 2 March 2009 5:20:30 AM
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I would be more impressed by climate hysterics, like Bill McKibben, and their assertions that atmospheric CO2 levels above 350ppm are potentially disastrous, if they could show a valid refutation of the geological evidence extending over the last 600million years, showing that CO2 levels up to 20 times current levels have not led to the climate disasters they so lovingly espouse.
Over this time scale, CO2 levels have been below 400ppm for only two relatively short periods, the mid-Carboniferous/Lower Permian and the Late Tertiary, including the present. See: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html for a reconstruction of CO2 levels (after Berner), and temperatures (after Scotese) covering the whole of this period. Why they think Earth will suddenly go south on a trivial, by historical standards, rise in CO2 defies comprehension, other that a willful disregard of hard evidence to the contrary. Posted by A is A, Monday, 2 March 2009 12:27:16 PM
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