Semi OT: Wacko Environmentalist Now Wants Sports Cars Banned in Europe

I knew it was just a mater of time before some nut job(s) made this suggestion. What's next? We will be executed on the spot for farting green houses gases? Here's the article:

"Cutting CO2 or a Sneak Attack on Porsche, Ferrari?

By Doron Levin

July 10 (Bloomberg) -- If one of the more extreme responses to global warming comes true, driving a sports car anywhere but on a racetrack might be relegated to history's dustbin.

Fast, powerful cars within a few years may be outlawed in Europe, an idea that has been raised ostensibly because Ferraris and Porsches produce too much carbon dioxide. For those who abhor sports cars as vulgar symbols of affluence (along with vacation homes, furs and fancy jewelry), such a ban could be a two-fer: Saving the planet while cutting economic inequality.

Who are these people anyway who decide on behalf of everyone what car is proper to drive? In the U.S. they're members of Congress, which is considering fuel-efficiency standards that will affect vehicle size. In Europe, it's the ministers and parliamentarians of the European Union, which wants to limit how much CO2 cars can emit as a proxy for a fuel- consumption standard.

Chris Davies, a British member of the European Parliament, is proposing one of the most-extreme measures -- a prohibition on any car that goes faster than 162 kilometers (101 miles) an hour, a speed that everything from the humble Honda Civic on up can exceed. He ridiculed fast cars as ``boys' toys.''

The proposed ban would take effect in 2013. Davies told the Guardian newspaper that ``cars designed to go at stupid speeds have to be built to withstand the effects of a crash at those speeds. They are heavier than necessary, less fuel-efficient and produce too many emissions.''

His last point is telling, even though there are many reasons why cars are heavier, including safety measures such as air bags and steel-reinforced crumple zones.

Focused on Cars

The idea is to limit CO2, a so-called greenhouse gas blamed for causing the earth's temperature to rise.

But the debate isn't just about how much carbon dioxide to allow into the atmosphere and whether the amount actually matters. It's also about disdain some hold for the size or speed of the cars others drive.

``Automobiles always seem to be the focus, even though they only consume

15 percent or 20 percent of energy,'' said Csaba Csere, editor of Car & Driver magazine. If politicians really cared about the atmosphere they might concentrate first on power plants or factories, he said.

The folks against sports cars in Europe and big sport utility vehicles in the U.S. often are same ones who hate McMansion-sized homes, corporate jets, jumbo freezers, yachts, 60-inch flat-screens TVs, overnight-delivery services and other trappings of Western-style wealth and energy use.

Do people demonize these goods because they can't afford them? Or because they think others shouldn't have them? Proposals to limit carbon dioxide often sound like basic opposition to prosperity and rising living standards.

Planet in Peril?

Outside of a handful of command economies, few today would agree that a central authority ought to regulate who owns what. But attacking those who ``waste'' energy achieves the same goal.

Many ardent environmentalists are convinced that the planet is in peril. Why can't they be just a bit cautious, humble or skeptical in their advocacy of reduced energy consumption, which in turn must mean reduced global economic growth?

The main reason I'm wary of Al Gore's call for radical, immediate reduction of worldwide energy consumption is that he's way too sure that the human race is on the cusp of catastrophe. With no credentials of his own, Gore relies on scientists who insist we must hurry because we're approaching a point of no return.

But how about other scientists, ones who aren't sure we're on the brink? Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a leading climatologist, says that even if nothing is done to limit CO2, the world will heat up by 1 degree Celsius, or a couple of degrees Fahrenheit, in the next 50 to 100 years.

Move Inland

We know from everyday experience that weather forecasting is a notoriously inexact. And if the world got a bit warmer there might be more arable land and longer growing seasons in northern latitudes. Is it heresy to suggest that if seas rise, moving back from the shore might be more practical than trying to change the weather?

The polar bear population, supposedly close to being wiped out, is ``not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present,'' Mitchell Taylor of the Department of the Environment, Government of Nunavut, told the Toronto Star last year. One population in the eastern Arctic has grown to 2,100 from 850 since the mid-1980s, he said.

A half-century ago Rachel Carson popularized the modern environmental movement with ``The Silent Spring,'' a book claiming that the pesticide DDT was destroying America's wildlife. The book's impact was reduced use of the pesticide DDT, thereby leading to the unintended consequence of more mosquitoes and more malaria deaths in developing countries.

One Little Bite

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies noted an alarming rise of malaria in places like South Africa and Peru after DDT was banned in the late 1970s. Since the mid-1990s, when DDT spraying resumed, the incidence of the disease has fallen.

Calls for limits on carbon dioxide ignore a basic point. People are likely to be better judges of the benefits of fast cars, TVs, air conditioners, and jets than government planners.

Besides, the brunt of government limits on energy use may well fall on the world's poorest nations, which need more energy -- thus generating more carbon dioxide -- to provide lighting, refrigeration, harvesting, water purification and transportation.

What right do environmentalists in rich countries have to deny residents of poorer ones the benefits of higher living standards?

I have a hunch that a ban on sports cars won't be enacted soon in Europe, largely because the Italians love their Lamborghinis, the British their Bentleys and the Germans their Porsches. But this won't be the last time that anti-consumption crusaders come disguised as guardians of the Earth."

Reply to
Michael Johnson
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SNIP

They can scrap the idea. Al Gore just wasted far more to produce Live Aid or whatever it was called (reports indicated ir was not watched by a lot of even his supporters). It's pretty much all Hype for Dollars.

Parts of the globe are getting warmer. They fail to report that other parts are getting colder. They also fail to report that the sun is getting hotter (and leaving the planet with only about 5 Billion years before it is incinerated). These so called experts keep leaving things out of the equation. Clearly, man has an impact, but man isn't the only cause. For example, another major volcano just erupted in Indonesia, spewing what? GREENHOUSE GASES!

Oops! I just became a "traitor" because I don't toe the party line on "global warming"! Damn! Ruined my day!

Reply to
Spike

You just hit on the overwhelming reason global warming is being hyped to gargantuan proportions. It is a money grab by scientists to get idiotic studies funded year after year after year, politicians who are salivating at the thought of taxing the hell out of us and dictating nearly every waking action we take and most of all it is the cash cow AlGore (yes it is one word) could have never envisioned in his wildest dreams. The rock stars that have any minute amount of self respect know this and steered clear of the so called "benefit" last weekend. The only thing it was meant to benefit was the pocket books of liberal politicians, environmental alarmist scientists and the wacko liberal musician's egos. I predict we witnessed the beginning of the end for the whole global warming movement this weekend. It is quite literally running out of steam (pun intended). :)

You know I always hear that it hasn't been this hot or there hasn't been this much CO2 in the atmosphere for (fill in the blank) thousands of years. Not one person can answer the question "Why were the CO2 levels that high and exactly what made the temperatures so high?" It certainly wasn't SUVs, power plants etc. burning fossil fuels or millions of cows farting green house gases. They can't even predict the weather tomorrow with 100% accuracy or the severity of the 2008 hurricane season but somehow they know, without a doubt, that we are going to be roasting on a spit in 100 years, all of Florida will be under five feet of water and the new summer vacation hot spot will be Antarctica.

Look at the fluctuation of the oceans just in a short span of human history. It has risen around 400 feet in just the last 18,000 years!!! This is the equivalent of 1" every 3.75 years! You really want to know how to screw up the planet? Try and keep the climate at a constant level year after year. Mother Earth has controlled the thermostat for

4.6 BILLION YEARS and now WE think WE can do a better job? Talk about arrogance in the extreme. Let these wackos have their way and the results very likely will be worse than letting Mother Nature make the adjustments.

I won't even get into the Sun's impact on global climate. You know Mars has been mirroring the Earth's temperature rise? Now what does that tell you? It isn't that the Martians are driving too many SUVs. ;)

You should be ashamed of yourself. AlGore has spoken and who are you to question his statements or motives?

Reply to
Michael Johnson

Is this the same AlGore whose electricity bill is 20 times higher than the average household, who has a heated olympic-sized swimming pool and dozens of gas burning yard lights around his mansion, and has many gas-guzzling limos at his disposal?

Oh wait, I forgot. He gets all of his electricity from "clean" sources. Me bad.

Reply to
Kruse

Didn't you get the memo? He is too important and wealthy (thanks to revenue from global warming lectures and books) to adhere to his own advice. Sacrificing for the "cause" is the responsibility of us common folk living paycheck to paycheck in our $1,500 sf ramblers that has utility bills, totaling for the year, that are a fraction of his MONTHLY bills. The hypocrisy of people like him, Madonna, Barbara Boxer etc. is mind numbing. You know just the performers in last weekend's concert collectively flew more than 220,000 air miles relating to the event? Hell, that one event is probably responsible for raising global temperatures 0.1 degrees Celsius all on its own! Don't worry though, they all bought energy credits to offset their indulgences made possible by massive burning/use of fossil fuels. I guess sometimes the end justifies the means?

Reply to
Michael Johnson

For those who are sick of the staus quo, Sam Waterson (yes, the same Same Waterson who stars on Law and Order with Fred Thompson)is sick of it, too, and has begun a grass roots, independent, 100% online third party movement called UNITY08. His views are centrist. He wants no funding from buisness or other special interests. He wants the people to submit who they want for a candidate and have the convention online. For more information, go to

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PS: It was suggested that perhaps Angie Harmon should run :0)

Reply to
Spike

They'd just have to start making sports cars like this. And why they haven't is beyond me!

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We are a very wasteful nation though. (And the reason we're billions of dollars into Iraq.) If every country used as much energy as we do, gas prices would be about 100 bucks a gallon.

They have increasingly become a smaller and smaller minority.

I'd like to see how that would go. 'My home is now under water so I'm going to want to live on your property. You won't mind, right?'

How about fish stocks? We're cleaning out the oceans. Or native birds? They're being decimated. Due to lse of habitat they numbers have fallen sharply.

Malaria probably has fallen off. But the trade off is DDT getting into our food sources. Would you feel comfortable eating fish that has toxic levels of DDT?

I agree this plan to ban sports cars is wacky. But don't lump all environmentalist together in one group and label them all wackos. Environmentalist have done many great things over the years -- saved endangered species, cleaned up river and lakes, started energy conservation, cleaned up the air, fixed the ozone layer, started pick up litter campaigns, to name just a few.

The problem is human population. Our numbers have grown too large and at some point the things we need to live will become scarcer and scarcer.

Like any group, not all their plans are sound. But like the list I have above, many of their ideas have been good. And the good ideas are the ones that get accepted/implemented.

Don't worry, Mike this plan won't go any where...

Patrick

Reply to
NoOption5L

SNIP

Berkley! You have my condolences! :0) It's a beautiful place, or was the last time I was there. A friend of mine is the ONLY conservative professor at Humbolt State. Like Christ on the Cross, or Gen Custer at the Little Big Horn.

As for the zealots. I take exception and umbrage with Al Bore and his stooges (particularly RFK Jr). They keep telling us there is no questioning "their" 2500 scientists who reached a concensus. BUT, those scientists didn't. Several of them sued to have their names REMOVED from the "concensus". Most of them upheld the part they wrote (each being on a different aspect of the problem) but disagreed with the results other members postulated.

And RFK jr, with his, "if you don't agree with us, you're a toadie of Big Oil, or you are a traitor". What the ????.

Is Al the new Adolf or Stalin? Is he going to burn all the books of those who don't agree with his view? Will the ones who don't belong to the "party" be shipped off to the camps? These people are more nuts than the nuts. They're absolutely rabid. And why is it that so many of them are the affluent ones with the BIG homes, and all the toys?

When was the last time a person on a fixed income could afford to buy a hybrid auto? Convert their home to solar power, etc? It's bad enough that the government wants to force everyone to switch to HDTV which the masses can't really afford. What will happen when they government mandates the rules Gore wants instituted? They can't afford to scrap their present transports and buy new, and there is no infrastructure for mass transport to cover the entire nation. The gap between the "haves" and the" have nots" will be so immense that I would expect to see a revolt.... in which case we'll be rid of 1/10th of the problem. :0)

Reply to
Spike

That thing is a motorcycle with two extra wheels. I've watched that before. High fun quotient but more restrictions on when you can pull it out of the garage than a Cobra.

Comes with a high standard of living to which I've become quite attached. :)

Not really. There is more and more data accumulating that says the doomsday predictions aren't viable. Why is Mars warming up along with the Earth? You know the ocean has risen almost 400 feet in the last

18,000 years? That is the equivalent of 1" every 3.75 years. For the last 100 years it has risen only 0.058" every year. Climate change is the norm not the exception and it has changed far more rapidly in the recent past than it is at present. This whole global warming rant is a money and vote grab of biblical proportions.

Everything I have is for sale at the right price. There's plenty of land for all those displaced. Plus for every property that gets a bath someone else gains water front property. ;)

There is more forest in the USA today than in well over 100 years. Not that good stewardship of our natural resources isn't important. If we rock the boat too much then Mother Nature will sneeze and we will be a memory. Then in a few million years its business as usual. There have been several mass extinctions that have decimated life all over the global far worse than any human has managed to achieve or mankind as a whole ever could achieve. Life bounced back from each one with more variety than before. In fact, this is the reason we are here today. Why deny the next group of new species their day in the sun?

It depends on whether I would feel more uncomfortable dying from malaria. ;)

The problem is that the wacko environmentalists are the ones getting all the press. Sensible environmentalists are labeled too conservative and thrown overboard by the Democrats, liberals and media. ;)

That will happen if we keep screwing without using birth control. Wait until science figures out how to stop aging. You think we have problems now?!?!

I don't expect it to get traction. There are too many limousine liberals that won't give up THEIR toys and posh lifestyle for the cause. Add them to the conservatives and, at least in this country, this idea is DOA.

Reply to
Michael Johnson

How do you think AlGore bought all the shit he has and can pay a $20,000 per month electric bill? It's by wacko environmental book royalties and giving paid lectures about how we are all going to flash fry like ants under a magnifying glass unless we do EXACTLY as he says.

>
Reply to
Michael Johnson

NEVER say never, not where the Church of Green is involved.

In addition to the ethanol, landfill methane sequestration, and R134a retail sales ban that CARB has already fast-tracked for regulations with an effective date of January 1, 2010, here is the list of additional targets that remain under consideration for inclusion in that same fast-track list:

Manure management (methane digester protocol) Electrification of stationary agricultural engines Specifications for commercial refrigeration Reduction of perfluorocarbons (PFCs) from the semiconductor industry Reduction of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) from foam production/ installation including extruded polystyrene and block foam Guidance/protocols for local governments to facilitate GHG emission reductions Guidance/protocols for businesses to facilitate GHG reductions Detection, repair, and recycling equipment for sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) Light-covered paving, cool roofs and shade trees Replacement of high global warming potential (GWP) gases used in fire protection systems with alternate chemical(s) Forestry protocol Reduce venting/leaks from oil and gas systems Strengthen light-duty vehicle standards Heavy-duty vehicle emission reductions, efficiency improvements Cool automobile paints Port Electrification Transportation refrigeration, electric standbyEnforce federal ban on HFC release during service/dismantling of MVACs Truck stop electrification with incentives for truckers Tire inflation program Promote telework policies/incentives TBD Require low GWP refrigerants for new MVACs Add AC leak tightness test and repair to Smog Check

This list is from CARB's professional staff report that was issued prior to the June 21 CARB meeting. See it for yourself at

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Also, here's a list of regulatory packages that were already underway at CARB prior to the passage of the GHG statutory scheme. Staff included these in its report because these packages also will have GHG- reducing effects. The dates indicate each regulatory package's projected effective date:

Diesel - Commercial harbor craft rule 2007 Diesel - Privately owned on-road trucks 2008 Diesel - Vessel speed reductions 2007 or 2008 Diesel - Offroad equipment (non-agricultural) 2009 Diesel - Port trucks 2007 Diesel - Vessel main engine fuel specifications 2008 Standards for off-cycle driving conditions 2007 Gasoline dispenser hose replacement 2008 Portable outboard marine tanks 2007 or 2008 Evaporative standards for aboveground tanks

Remember, these two lists of targets are merely the opening wedge of GHG regulation in America. There is already a group of me-to states ready to adopt anything that CARB comes up with. There are independent efforts underway in every statehouse, as well, with Greenie "stakeholders" proposing similar regulatory packages to fellow- traveler assemblymen and governors. They provide complete turn-key packages, with all the "consensus" science, all the glowing studies showing no pain, all gain regulatory schemes, and enlisting the aid of private business dupes to help to reach the not so Green members of the state government. If you think the utilities and the financial industry are not salivating over the prospect of an all-new shadow economy of GHG credits applicable to every facet of economic activity, I have a couple of bridges to sell you.

In any event, if you can look at CARB's staff's lists and still believe that there is any area of modern life that the global warming alarmists would consider off limits to state command and control, you are, I am sorry to say it, you are NUTS!

Also, if you read Al Gore's Pledge Number 1 -- about the 90% reduction in man-made GHG emissions -- (I linked to it already in my previous post) you'll notice he's framed it in terms of an international treaty. In other words, it won't even be our state Legislatures, our Congress, our EPA, our President, or our courts who decide what and who is in the gunsights. It will be the politically appointed representatives of our own international economic competitors!!! Insane actually does not begin to cover it.

180 Out
Reply to
one80out

On Fri, 13 Jul 2007 10:05:27 -0700, snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com puked:

And before long, count on a Greenism tax for not being more like Al Gore says to...

-- lab~rat >:-) Stupid humans...

Reply to
lab~rat >:-)

I wonder why Gore's jet isn't powered by an electric motor or at least burn some of the alcohol he drinks.

Reply to
Les Benn

On Wed, 18 Jul 2007 18:38:54 -0700, "Les Benn" puked:

With all the hot air he blows out, he could fly by a balloon of Hindenburg proportions...

-- lab~rat >:-) Stupid humans...

Reply to
lab~rat >:-)

As porky as he is looking (reminds me of Ted Kennedy) it should be manually powered, and he should ride the bicycle that powers it.

Reply to
Spike

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