L.A. a “green” city. Absolutely laughable.

So what this means is that Big Al is playing both ends as usual. Scream bloody murder and convince the world that there is a huge problem that needs to be fixed. Then turn around and sell so called solutions, at monstrous profits.

Now of course Al Gore says he’s giving his salary from this new venture to some climate group (which he’ll then write off). But we all know that many executives these days get paid in stock options and other perks, which he’s keeping of course. For instance, Steve Jobs of Apple makes only $1 a year for his salary. Yes, that’s one dollar. I wonder why Gore isn’t making his salary figure public?

This is not a crisis, it’s a money grab plain and simple. I mean, if the fate of the world really relied on resolving this “crisis”, why on Earth is this guy doing everything he can to profit from it? That money isn’t going to be any good to anyone if the world is destroyed, is it?

Maybe he knows something we don’t?

Links:

New York Times Story

Being in the technology field I saw this same type of hysteria during the Year 2000 Bug Scare. This was a real, but manageable issue that really only affected software that depended on the date being correct. So mainly financial, payroll, those types of systems were at real risk of malfunctioning. Nobody can convince me that heart monitors were going to fail, planes fall from the sky, or defense networks fire all their missiles. However, the media saw a hot story to boost ratings, latched onto this, and they blew it into a full blown crisis.

When the people saw this, a few groups emerged. The first group, the chicken-littles, freaked out and wanted to replace everything that had a computer chip in it. The second group saw a chance to be heroes and at the same time infuse their departments, businesses and consulting firms with massive amounts of cash from the first group, and so they wanted to replace everything with a computer chip in it. Everyone else was labeled an idiot.

Of course it wasn’t the end of the world, though you’ll hear many tech people say it’s because the did such a great job. But I’m convinced that most of the work done for “Y2K”, was not done to prevent huge business losses, or to protect the public. It was done because the crisis was seen by the industry as a “blank check”.

There are so many parallels between that crisis and Global Warming it’s amazing. Scientists and governments are using it to fund programs and redistribute wealth. Companies are making huge dollars be churching out ineffective “green” versions of their products (and charging a premium for them). And everyone who disagrees is being labeled an idiot.

Nobody’s going to deny that we have an energy problem because of who owns the oil. Nobody’s going to deny that we have localized pollution problems. But to say we’ve set the entire planet off balance, or are even capable of it, is ridiculous in my opinion.

Links

MorningCoffee
OxfordMedievalist
Icecap.us