Re: “Which candidate has the most green cred?”

Another example of the eco-blind reporting on the eco-blind?

The overriding killer, there is not even a close second, of the American environment are the current U.S. policies, supported by almost all elites, including the Bush Republicans, the Democratic leadership, corporate America, academia, the media, and of course the Hollywood playpen, that make possible today’s endless redoubling of the American population, by way of mass illegal and legal immigration, including descendants, a binge that began in 1965-70. As long as such virulently anti-environment (and ultimately anti-people) policies continue, all of our comically feverish efforts on “cap-and-trade,” biofuels, carpooling, windmills and the like, are simply pressed into service of the overarching goal: to see how many more hundreds of millions of people we can cram into America in a way that increases our resource use and our pollution production not quite as steeply as would otherwise be the case, until the U.S. arrives at a population crash, which, conveniently for future empire builders, is always camouflaged by all sorts of other overpopulation-influenced events, such as wars, disease, corruption and the general malfunctioning of people, their societies and their governments. At least Easter Islanders were merrily logrolling their giant stone heads around and destroying their once lush island with a certain amount of good old honest environmental ignorance. But now we’ve got the science. So who is the most to blame? Politically correct environmentalists who ignore the immigration-overpopulation-env­ironment connection. They are willing to take a great big blanket of people and smother the environment dead, so long as they will never ever have to appear “intolerant.”

Tom Andres writes with all the style and egotism of a Marxist.

Andres' EcoGod, Al Gore, meanwhile flies around and around and around the world, telling all his Eco-Sycophants who drive tens of thousands of "polluting" cars to hear his hypocrisy.

Gore tells EVERYBODY ELSE NOT TO DO AS HE DOES.

Then we have the United Nations Environmental Gods flying to ... Bali Indonesia in numbers exceeding 10,000 to be like Al Gore.

HELLO!

You think THIS is a recession, wait until we cut back on carbon dioxide gases by 50% as worldwide population GROWS by almost that much in 2050.

I mean, not that any Eco Extremist gives a damn about recessions and depressions mind you....

While Tom may be a tad blunt, he reports an issue that is essentially at the crux of the environmental problems the world is doing a good job of ignoring - to damn many people.

It's not the US that's breeding in between each breath, look around. The US population would be close to stagnant if it weren't for recent immigrants and their children. Third and fourth generation US folks don't propagate nearly as much or as fast.

People, well intentioned or not, create environmental problems just trying to survive. Of course we in the developed world know how to survive better and at a much higher cost than many, but don't kid yourself; they would if they could figure out how to do it.

There's nothing wrong with this planet that a huge famine, (non-nuclear) war or other natural catastrophe wouldn't help.

If we have to get rid of some people to save the planet, I think dirtybird should go first. After all, it is his idea.

The comforting thing about Mother Nature dong the culling is that politics don't come into the equation. Otherwise, the fittest survive to propagate and the rest are selected for extinction. Such an elegantly simple system. Too bad we keep screwing it up by letting physically inadequate and mental nitwits reproduce. That's civilization for you.

Uh, so what are you saying DB? Humans are bad? I like TJ's idea. You go first.

But seriously, look at the facts. Without illegal aliens flooding the borders, our population would be holding just about steady. Be that as it may, I'm not one to suggest that humanity is a scourge that needs to intentionally scale itself back or otherwise be eliminated. I value human life, and I see freedom and liberty as the solution to the human condition. This puts me at odds with many environmentalists that want to do everything from tax us, stifle economic activity, or in some cases, "remove" humanity from the equation.

It gets back to something I've said here countless times, and that is that we should be good stewards of the planet. Perhaps if so-called developing nations were to be free of tyranical warlord dictators, they may also develop the technology that we have in western civilization to improve their living conditions and clean up after themselves. Sure, there are always steps to be taken to improve, as nothing is perfect. Yet, this idea that humanity needs to be "managed" from the top down because it is some kind of blight to the planet is utter nonsense to me. Would it be possible to use a little common sense and accept some bad with the good, and keep developing better ways to be cleaner while we continue to live our lives?

Ford,

You have your head in the clouds. If people were angels...

Sorry, they're not. Enlightened self-interest is the prime mover for too many of us. Some, a very small portion of us, are good stewards, but we've (they're) overrun by the rest of us.

Your argument falls on deaf ears when you're preaching to someone trying to build a fire to feed his or her kids, sell some fire wood to make enough to buy a cup of rice or beans for the family pot. And of course there are those despots who don't give a rat's butt about the environment or the people they enslave.

I hate to break it to you, but God's good intentions aside, we ARE a scourge on the planet and I'm convinced we will eliminate ourselves in one fashion or another and except for a really, really bad atomic/nuclear war, Mother will shrug us off and move on. The next round of evolution may see monkeys or insects taking the lead. No big deal. Dinos were an experiment that didn't work out and they had longer than we've had thus far to adapt.

It's ironic that our intelligence will be the weapon we use to cause our own destruction. The problem as I see it is our intelligence has outpaced our evolution so we're constantly fighting urges and instincts that served us well eons ago but are contrary to how society would like us to live now. Biology will come out on top in most cases.

You can keep you head in the clouds, but reality will bite you in the butt.

Head in the clouds, eh? I suppose I should start hating humanity too. It might make me feel better. Good Lord, you need a drink. In fact, have two.

You're imputing motives and emotions to me that are inaccurate. I don't hate humanity, I just see us as we are. Get a good book on the ancient philosophers and see the problems they saw with humanity; then compare the problems that we have today. Except for the leverage we get from technology (which makes us even more dangerous) the issues are exactly the same. We haven't advanced one inch in 2000 years in too many ways and those ways are imprinted in our DNA because they allowed to survive and reproduce back when we were forming. Our emotional and instinctive evolution is progressing at a much slower pace than our intellectual evolution. That is not a good situation and it will most likely turn out badly. It's not my fault.

I will have a nice dry, cold Martini tonight. Thanks for the reminder.

I was thinking a triple shot o' bourbon, but either way...

So, your whole point is that humans aren't perfect...Yeah, and? "Imperfect" and "two-legged death" aren't exactly the same thing. You seem like a nice guy, so I hate to phrase it this way to you, but if you seriously think that humanity is that bad, then please, go first. I've heard a lot of people crying the blues about just how awful we all are, but they're not the ones that cast themselves off of cliffs or set up a meeting with Smith and Wesson (that's always the disturbed 16 year olds with 60 or 70 years of life ahead of them...interesting).

You say that our "emotional" evolution isn't keeping up with our intellectual evolution. On the contrary. As a society, we're very in touch with our feelings, but most in-duh-viduals couldn't think their way out of one-way corridor with a map. In fact, most of this screaming about global warming is based on feelings, not facts (like the steady cooling of temperatures for each of the past 12 months, expansion of the southern ice cap, known failures of computer modelling, and other interesting meteorological data). We could talk all day about that. Interestingly enough, a week or so ago, about 500 meteorologists and climatologists did just that in New York, but no one paid any attention to it because they all were skeptics of global warming. Very, very interesting, indeed.

I guess the biggest difference between you and me is that you see each baby born as one more burden on the Earth and society, one more mouth to feed, one more slice of the pie gone. I see each person as an opportunity, a chance for new talents to be used to serve others, and a way to make society better. I see life as a great gift, not just to ourselves, but to each other. But then, maybe that's just the right wing, Christian-conservative extremist in me talking.

I'm afraid a triple-snort of any liquor would be good-night for me, but don't let me stop you.

I'm not getting my attitude across very well. I think people are not intentionally evil. I try to look as history and how our better natures have improved and took control over our baser natures. It isn't out there. Greed, power, sex are the urges that usually take us down. They are the same drives that allowed us to prosper and develop thousands of years ago. They are built into our genetic code because the ones with the most powerful drives are the ones who won and reproduced. It's basic and it biologic and you can't defeat it and you can't refute it. I look at it not with hate, distaste or anything else you might want to ascribe to my motives, but with an academic interest and wondering if we'll be able to turn it around, save the planet before the next big rock usheres in a new chapter.

You may be like a friend of mine with whom I have engaged in a discussion of these issues for years now. He, like you perhaps, is a hopeless optomist. I'd recommend you read a Book (if you haven't already) titled "On Agression" by Konrad Lorenz. Also try Guns, Germs and Steel. These will offer an understanding our how we evolved as we are now and what causes to be unable to control these urges that too often control our behavior beyond all reason. Ask Eliot Spitzer.

Martini time!

Well, the Spitz is a whole book all by himself, but either way, I don't think it's hopelss optimism that short-circuits my doomsday thoughts. Look, people have been forecasting Armageddon since the dawn of time. If those forecasts were correct, the end of the world would have happened 47 times over by now. One thing that I think we need to realize is that the planet isn't going anywhere.

To quote George Carlin, "The planet is just fine. The people are f***ed." I'll be the first to say that humans are imperfect, myself especially. None of us are God, and that fact isn't going to change. However, history has shown again and again that humanity lives on, and so does the rest of the world. Big meteors hit the ground and wipe out species, but things keep moving forward. I'm not saying we shouldn't do our best to keep a clean house, but I just don't buy the idea that we're going to obliterate the Earth.

Maybe we're not that far apart. I think if you look at our "progression" in geologic time you realize we've come an awful long way in becoming dominant in ways that have never happened before (that we know of).

But, we've got a tendency to monkey with nature and biology long before we know the potential for what we are doing. We have developed weapons that can obliterate everything but we haven't developed the control of our primal urges that will keep us from using them.

Thus far, we've been lucky. But there are way too many who would launch an Armageddon for relatively petty reasons if they could only get their hands on the weapons. We need a parent like in "The Day the Earth Stood Still" to tell us we better get ourselves under control, or else.

Your comfort in the fact that we haven't vaporized ourselves yet is cold comfort to me when I reflect on our very, very short tenure as leading species on this rock.

Have a good weekend.