email I received this morning
> April 26, 2008, 9:00 a.m.
>
> Chickenfeedhawks
> Global warm-mongering.
>
> By Mark Steyn
>
>
>
> Last week, Time magazine featured on its cover the iconic photograph
> of the U.S. Marine Corps raising the flag on Iwo Jima. But with one
> difference: The flag has been replaced by a tree. The managing editor
> of Time, Rick Stengel, was very pleased with the lads in graphics for
> cooking up this cute image and was all over the TV sofas talking up
> this ingenious visual shorthand for what he regards as the greatest
> challenge facing mankind: "How To Win The War On Global Warming."
>
> Where to begin? For the last ten years, we have, in fact, been not
> warming but slightly cooling, which is why the eco-warriors have
> adopted the all-purpose bogeyman of "climate change." But let’s take
> it that the editors of Time are referring not to the century we live
> in but the previous one, when there was a measurable rise of
> temperature of approximately one degree. That’s the "war": one
> degree.
>
> If the tree-raising is Iwo Jima, a one-degree increase isn’t exactly
> Pearl Harbor. But General Stengel wants us to engage in preemptive
> war. The editors of Time would be the first to deplore such
> saber-rattling applied to, say, Iran’s nuclear program, but it has
> become the habit of progressive opinion to appropriate the language
> of war for everything but actual war.
>
> So let’s cut to the tree. In my corner of New Hampshire, we have more
> trees than we did a hundred or two hundred years ago. My town is over
> 90 percent forested. Any more trees and I’d have to hack my way
> through the undergrowth to get to my copy of Time magazine on the
> coffee table. Likewise Vermont, where not so long ago in St Albans I
> found myself stuck behind a Hillary supporter driving a Granolamobile
> bearing the bumper sticker "TO SAVE A TREE REMOVE A BUSH." Very
> funny. And even funnier when you consider that on that stretch of
> Route Seven there’s nothing to see north, south, east, or west but
> maple, hemlock, birch, pine, you name it. It’s on every measure other
> than tree cover that Vermont’s kaput.
>
> So where exactly do Time magazine’s generals want to plant their
> tree? Presumably, as in Iwo Jima, on foreign soil. It’s all these
> third-world types monkeying around with their rain forests who
> decline to share the sophisticated Euro-American reverence for the
> tree. In the Time iconography, the tree is Old Glory and it’s a flag
> of eco-colonialism.
>
> And which obscure island has it been planted on? In Haiti, the Prime
> Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was removed from office on April 12.
> Insofar as history will recall him at all, he may have the
> distinction of being the first head of government to fall victim to
> "global warming" — or, at any rate, the "war on global warming" that
> Time magazine is gung-ho for. At least five people have been killed
> in food riots in Port-au-Prince. Prices have risen 40 percent since
> last summer and, as Deroy Murdock reported, some citizens are now
> subsisting on biscuits made from salt, vegetable oil and (mmmm) dirt.
> Dirt cookies: Nutritious, tasty, and affordable? Well, one out of
> three ain’t bad.
>
> Unlike "global warming," food rioting is a planet-wide phenomenon,
> from Indonesia to Pakistan to Ivory Coast to the tortilla rampages in
> Mexico and even pasta protests in Italy.
>
> So what happened?
>
> Well, Western governments listened to the eco-warriors, and
> introduced some of the "wartime measures" they’ve been urging. The EU
> decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from
> "biofuels" by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The U.S. added to
> its 51 cents-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a five-fold
> increase in "biofuels" production by 2022.
>
> The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the
> free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a
> subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S.
> grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value
> as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve
> suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it’s not "you"
> who’s got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands
> you claim to care so much about.
>
> Heigh-ho. In the greater scheme of things, a few dead natives keeled
> over with distended bellies is a small price to pay for saving the
> planet, right? Except that turning food into fuel does nothing for
> the planet in the first place. That tree the U.S. Marines are raising
> on Iwo Jima was most likely cut down to make way for an
> ethanol-producing corn field: Researchers at Princeton calculate that
> to date the "carbon debt" created by the biofuels arboricide will
> take 167 years to reverse.
>
> The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The
> first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing
> countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel
> good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway
> places have to starve to death. On April 15, the Independent, the
> impeccably progressive British newspaper, editorialized: "The
> production of biofuel is devastating huge swathes of the world’s
> environment. So why on earth is the Government forcing us to use more
> of it?"
>
> You want the short answer? Because the government made the mistake of
> listening to fellows like you. Here’s the self-same Independent in
> November 2005:
>
>
> At last, some refreshing signs of intelligent thinking on
> climate change are coming out of Whitehall. The Environment
> minister, Elliot Morley, reveals today in an interview with
> this newspaper that the Government is drawing up plans to
> impose a ‘biofuel obligation’ on oil companies... This has the
> potential to be the biggest green innovation in the British
> petrol market since the introduction of unleaded petrol…
>
>
> Etc. It’s not the environmental movement’s chickenfeedhawks who’ll
> have to reap what they demand must be sown, but we should be in no
> doubt about where to place the blame — on the bullying activists and
> their media cheerleaders and weathervane politicians who insist that
> the "science" is "settled" and that those who query whether there’s
> any crisis are (in the designation of the strikingly non-emaciated Al
> Gore) "denialists." All three presidential candidates have drunk the
> environmental kool-ethanol and are committed to Big Government
> solutions. But, as the Independent’s whiplash-inducing U-turn
> confirms, the eco-scolds are under no such obligation to consistency.
> Finger-in-the-wind politicians shouldn’t be surprised to find that
> gentle breeze is from the media wind turbine and it’s just sliced
> your finger off.
>
> Whether or not there’s very slight global cooling or very slight
> global warming, there’s no need for a "war" on either, no rationale
> for loosing a plague of eco-locusts on the food supply. So why be
> surprised that totalitarian solutions to mythical problems wind up
> causing real devastation? As for Time’s tree, by all means put it up:
> It helps block out the view of starving peasants on the far horizon.
>
>
>
>
>
