The king is naked
What do you call someone who yells that car emissions are putting the climate in danger? A visionary? Environmental activist? Concerned citizen? Captain Obvious? For French President Nicolas Sarkozy, it's none of the above - he likes to call them nutcases.
During Sarkozy's visit to the annual car show in Paris, someone was heard yelling "Climate in danger - Sarkozy accomplice". This refered to Sarkozy and Merkel recently working on killing a climate deal that would force car makers to limit emissions of newly produced cars.
This didn't please Mr Sarkozy very much, and during the following press conference, he mentioned that person was certainly a nutcase ("un agité du bocal" for the French speakers), and that he was glad there weren't too many of those out there. Of course, considering that those allowed in had been duly filtered, it's not surprising only one person managed to yell that the king was naked. If Sarkozy had been ready to welcome all views, he would have been surprised to see that the nutcases are actually in the majority.
He finished this memorable quote by adding "the environment is a serious business." At least we agree on that much. I hardly see, though, how you can be serious about the environment when you're talking to the biggest car makers in the industry, the same that are lobbying to prevent any serious CO2 legislation from passing in the EU. It took a nutcase to point out that the king was naked, and that no matter how much the car makers were trying to paint the emperor's new clothes in green, not much has changed.
It worries me to see that the current President of the European Union should think that someone who believes car emission are endangering the climate is a nutcase. Clearly, I'm a nutcase too, and so are a lot of people. I wonder what we're supposed to call people who know climate change is happening and spend a lot of time doing nothing about it.
You can view the press conference here (in French), and take action to remind Mr Sarkozy that there are more of us than he thinks.
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Comments
Could you please provide me with scientific evidence to refute the sceptics criticism of the IPCC reports and other scientific evidence of global warming.I am particularly interested in blogs on www.lavisier.com.au.I am a teacher and this is a school/family priorty. Thank you in advance.
Answer by Juliette:
Hi Jon,
Two very good places to start are RealClimate (http://realclimate.org/), a scientists blog that spend a lot of time looking at skeptic claims, and Grist's guide "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic" that looks point by point at the claims made to refute IPCC reports (http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics).
Also, at the end of the day, the IPCC reports are often the best rebutals.
Posted by: jon | October 13, 2008 10:39 AM
Please consider that which could be a product of arrogance and also shameful behavior.
Our lexicon of business activities is being expanded daily, thanks to the "wonder boys" on Wall Street. We are learning about derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, recapitalization, puts, short selling and so on. We are gaining a new vocabulary from the recent meltdown of the financial system and expected slowdown of the real economy worldwide.
Where did this debacle begin? Well, it began in the center of human community’s banking and investment houses in the financial district of NYC. Supposedly, the "brightest and best" among us go to Wall Street, know what they are doing and do the right thing. Unfortunately, such assumptions turn out to be colossal mistakes.
How did this calamity occur and why is the human family in such dire economic straits? It appears that grotesque greed and a culture of corruption have come to dominate significant operating systems of the global political economy.
Powerful people in high offices within huge business institutions with access to great wealth are recklessly and deleteriously manipulating the unbridled expansion of the global economy in the small, finite planetary home God blesses us to inhabit.
Self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe have surreptitiously "manufactured" a sub prime "asset bubble" and perversely fostered its uneconomic growth within the world economy. Not unexpectedly, this asset bubble did what bubbles do. The sub prime bubble burst and made a mess. Global credit markets have frozen, stock prices are tumbling and the value of the dollar is gyrating.
Evidently organizers, managers and whiz kids overseeing the global economy, and the unraveling {ie, deleveraging} of the worldwide sub prime swindle, are running the artificially designed financial system of the global economy as a pyramid scheme. This is to say that the international financial system is being operated so that most of the wealth funneled pyramidally into the hands of a small minority of people at the top of the world economy where this wealth is accumulated and consolidated. Note that thirty percent of annual corporate profits end up in the accounts of a tiny number of people. At the same time, the vast majority of people on Earth, near the bottom of the global economic pyramid, are left with very little wealth. Does the economy of the family of humanity exist primarily to provide wealth to the already stupendously wealthy? The "bankstas" among us evidently think so.
In the 1980s, this extremely inequitable method of distributing wealth and arranging business activities was called a "trickle down" economy. We have been repeatedly told how this 'rational' economic scheme is good because it "raises all ships." And yet, from my limited scope of observation, the billion people living on resources valued at less than one dollar per day and the additional 2.7 billion people being sustained on two dollars per day of resources now appear to be stuck in squalid conditions. The 'ships' carrying these billions of less fortunate people {ie, more people than lived on Earth in the year of my birth} do not appear to be lifting them out of poverty.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
Posted by: Steven Earl Salmony | October 21, 2008 7:46 PM