Michele Bachmann (R-MN): Carbon Dioxide Not A Harmful Gas
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Michele Bachmann (R-MN) opens her mouth on Earth Day.
Michele Bachmann (R-MN) opens her mouth on Earth Day.
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I'm sure she inhales a whole tank of CO2 every morning.
and too much of it will also kill you.
bachmann really has been quite the bullshit factory lately.
watch your back, boehner. someone's gunning for your job.
I certainly would be in favor of some sort of science-savvy rating for congressional members (all public officials frankly) to help guide decision-making come election time.
Is there such a thing already?
We're getting to the point that we really need to have congress members and candidates tested on their knowledge of and/or ability to understand science. These people shape our policy and impact the trajectory of society as a whole and to have individuals that wouldn't understand a seventh grade science quiz (let alone pass it) in these positions is as irresponsible as it is misguided.
I certainly would be in favor of some sort of science-savvy rating for congressional members (all public officials frankly) to help guide decision-making come election time.
Is there such a thing already?
Not an unreasonable idea really, actually a really good one. Most if not all individuals that run for office already have to take the "are they a christian" test. Why not a little science quiz while they're at it?
But that's not what really bothers me about her speech. What really annoyed me was phrases such as
"...a natural byproduct of nature."
"...so if you take a pie chart, carbon dioxide is perhaps 3%..."
- And if you don't take a pie chart, how much is it then?
"human activity contributes, perhaps, 3% of the 3%. In other words human activity is maybe 3% contributing to the 3%"
- Funny, those don't sound like other words; they sound like the same words in a different order.
about 3% of 3% according to my pie charts.
stupid bitch.
God, I hope she gets voted out in 2010 - I could use a Representative with an IQ higher than her shoe size.
>> ^nach0s:
I don't know this person, but she isn't necessarily dumb. She's clearly arguing against a tax on companies that produce CO2 above a certain level. She wouldn't be the first politician to exaggerate and/or obfuscate an issue for political purposes. It's pretty common--you don't have to get the facts right, you just have to strike a chord.
vitamin C is also completely natural and necessary for life, ma'am.
and too much of it will also kill you..
ha. so is water.
Were all these psuedo-intellectual, fact-hungry, critics as quick to condemn Al Gore for his made-up crap-facts about C02? Of course not. They totally excused his terrible 'data' because they were more concerned about the important of his overall message.
A person gets all upset about Bachmann's accuracy, but at the same time excuses Gore's lack of accuracy. Biased hypocrite alert! I see the reactions here as a symptom of the close-minded, zombie-like, lock-stop neo-lib groupthink of the Sifters more than anything else.
*uh hum. yeah*
I wonder how she feels about legalizing that "natural byproduct of nature"
The same level of cognative dissonance takes place when you drill down to exactness with any argument. I wish her citations were more precise but only because her central posit is reinforced by the facts. Her fundamental premise is correct.
Were all these psuedo-intellectual, fact-hungry, critics as quick to condemn Al Gore for his made-up crap-facts about C02? Of course not. They totally excused his terrible 'data' because they were more concerned about the important of his overall message.
A person gets all upset about Bachmann's accuracy, but at the same time excuses Gore's lack of accuracy. Biased hypocrite alert! I see the reactions here as a symptom of the close-minded, zombie-like, lock-stop neo-lib groupthink of the Sifters more than anything else.
Actually, I'm not a liberal. It just so happens that I'm not stupid enough to be a neo-con, either.
I'll happily give the current environmentalist-doomsday-global warming/etc bit another 20yrs until common sense clicks back in, and the scientists actually get control back of scientific organizations. While booting the politicians out, that includes the vaunted 'IPCC'.
also,
BOWTIE!!
Methane is natural too, but that doesn't mean I want to smell your farts all day, lady.
methane is odorless......fail
every clip i see her in she is just blathering pure nonsense.
anybody have a clip of her reciting something intelligent?
ill settle for something even remotely comprehensible.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/01/co2_fairytales_in_global_warmi.html
CO2 is a fundamental building block of life, and current levels are NOWHERE NEAR where they have been in the past. Moreover, the correlation of CO2 and Earth temperature is deeply flawed. It's far more likely that temperatures rise and fall in the short term as a result of solar cycles or some other phenomena, and that increased CO2 levels are a corresponding RESULT of temperature change rather than the cause. That's what gives the idiots that nice correlating graph where they can claim the opposite. A more detailed look at ice core graphs show us that temperature changes occur BEFORE changes in CO2 levels. The global warming crowd has it completely reversed that CO2 is driving temperature.
Moreover, the last century's warming trend has been a mere .8 celsius, well within natural expectations given the last 1000 years. I suppose the vikings were also somehow responsible for the even larger climactic swing in temperature known as the Little Ice Age from 1000 to 1200 AD? From 1940 to 1970, there was a cooling trend which led to a global cooling scare. We were all supposed to be frozen in ice by now.
The idea that mankind is capable of affecting earth's temperature is just laughable. If it was even possible to have globally banned coal and oil the last 200 years, the only thing you'd have accomplished is a complete eradication of 200 years of human progress towards cleaner, more efficient technologies like nuclear (which you luddites have also blocked while countries like China and France kick our freaking asses).
http://www.dailytech.com/Chinas+Nuclear+Power+Efforts+Surge+Ahead/article14911.htm
So what exactly are we supposed to do? We can't do nuclear because you boneheads don't want to recycle or store the voluminously small captured waste, you'd rather burn your fuel and disperse it into the atmosphere than put something in a single mountain for a thousand years until we jettison it into the sun. You herald wind power, which takes massive amounts of steel, land, and maintenance for relatively little power output. You'd have to cover an area the size of Montana with windmills just to meet TODAY'S domestic power demands. That's how bloody inefficient it is relative to nuclear, and unless you magically discover a magical material like steel that is way cheaper and 1% as heavy, it's going to hit a wall pretty soon. Wind is fine for the wind belt and rural areas in Iowa, solar is fine for the desert in Arizona. But to say that wind and solar can themselves provide even a majority of our national need for cheap power is pure insanity. It's pure insanity, and anyone who's looked at the numbers knows it.
Not to 'feed the trolls' too badly, but to the last poster its dubbed 'climate change' for a reason, and have you not heard of global dimming, or metric tons of climate related research you just pretend doesn't exist? Oh wait, a dozen studies can be interpreted to agree with your views, while merely thousands very clearly disagree? yeah,... ok... obviously its a conspiracy and we're all sheeples... its the only logical answer!
And then the energy note... the many ideas you avoid include reducing current demand for energy (incentives to address energy inefficiency in homes and businesses, for instance), encouraging private power generation (incentives to install solar hot-water deal on the roof), and transmitting power from areas like offshore or 'wind belt' areas, high solar areas, etc. efficiently to neighboring areas via huge, buried, crazy-insulated cables. Anyhow, I acknowledge there are misconception about nuclear, but until fusion ushers in a new atomic age there are good reasons why Americans have repeatedly rejected fission power plants dotting the country... and if you don't know them and address them in your argument its odd to even argue for nuclear in the first place. I mean, would you not agree that China and France have histories of doing dumb shit in the past?
That doesn't even touch the massive expense of green energy. Green energy is not cheap by any stretch. It is actually the MOST expensive energy that exists. In acerage, material, maintainance, production cost, and distribution - green energy is on the order of 5-10 times more expensive than coal depending on which kind you are talking about. So unless you are prepared to quadruple your electic bill, you better pray that coal doesn't go anywhere or that the enviro-nazis untwist thier panties a few notches with nuclear.
Barak Obama said he wasn't going to raise taxes on the middle/lower class. Yet is stated desire to put the coal industry out of business would put an 'energy tax' on all Americans to the tune of several thousand dollars a year.
With the increasing cost of energy, the demand for it will be reduced. Economics 101.
World & US power demands will increase. The economies, populations, standards of living, manufacturing, production, and distribution models of every developed nation depend on it. Emerging nations need it even more. Developing nations need more energy to move out of the stone age & thereby eliminate thier political instabilities.
Increasing the cost of something does indeed reduce its consumption. That is a fact that you have correctly identified. What you are not recognizing is the results of that truism when it is applied to energy.
If Obama (or anyone) successfully increases the cost of energy 4X-5X then the result will be reductions in GDP, tax revenues, manufacturing, production, and agriculture. It will create impossible debt obligations with resultant decreases in education, public works, medical care, transportation, standards of living, and (finally) population.
Only a luddite would that. The cap & trade proposals and carbon taxes would not be so much a tightening of the energy belt as they would be a disemboweling of the U.S. way of life. Maybe that's the goal given the neo-lib socialist background, education, upbringing, philosophies, and associations of most environmentalists like Al Gore et al. Though they never include themselves on the list of people that need to 'scale back'.
Maybe we should start planning for that eventuality before it happens.
Or, like a good little ultra-right libertarian wingnut, you can keep driving your gigantic SUV back and forth to work, because goddamn the govment for trying to tell you to put seat-belts on your kids. There's no problem that can't be solved by ignoring it long enough, right?
But keep blaming the SOCIALISTS! Those damn socialists! They took er jerbs!
WP your argument is based entirely on the preconception that humans have to continue to use at least as much if not more energy that we currently do.
With the increasing cost of energy, the demand for it will be reduced. Economics 101.
The global population is not decreasing, it's growing exponentially. Add to that the fact that developing countries like China and India have done a u-turn and are now more capitalist than we are. That is enabling more of them to outbid us for resources to power their new cars and homes and appliances, we didn't have to compete with that before. There is a global shift of capital happening from the deeply indebted and welfarist west to booming capitalist countries in Asia. If you tax fossil fuels here, Asia will be happy to take them off our luddite hands. You cannot artificially induce a transition to technologies that are hopelessly inefficient and expensive, you will be kicking people out of their cars, homes, off their computers.
70% of our oil is imported and we haven't built a nuclear power plant in decades to prepare for a transition to electric cars. Even if it were possible to snap our fingers and make every car and tanker electric, our electric grid is completely incapable of that load, we're getting blackouts in California already. How are we going to keep the cost of transportation and products as cheap as it is now without a massive, massive amount of nuclear power?