Rush.jpg- Rush's stated positions on Global Warming and the environment :
- Despite the hysterics of a few pseudo-scientists, there is no reason to believe in global warming
- Mankind is not responsible for depleting the ozone layer
- The Earth’s ecosystem is not fragile, and humans are not capable of destroying it
- The real enemies of the radical environmental leadership are capitalism & the American way of life
- There are more acres of forest land in America today than in 1492
- Less-developed cultures are not kinder to nature than technologically sophisticated civilizations. The reverse more often is true
- Big-government regulation is not the best way to protect the environment
- Many environmental groups have adopted their cause with all the enthusiasm of a religious crusade, abandoning reason and accepting many faulty premises on faith
- Mankind is part of nature and not necessarily the enemy.
- Animals have no fundamental rights; only people do
- Priority should be on people, not on spotted owls
- Animals have no fundamental rights; only people do
- Rush Riffs on Global Warming - April 15, 2008: We've accepted the liberal premise that CO2 is a pollutant and it's a greenhouse gas. Then what we're going to try to do here is to, at the same time we've done that, tell people who already believe that -- I guess the thinking is that 50% or more of the people, particularly young people, if you're under 35 today, you probably believe because of the Saturday morning cartoons and other media assaults, if you're between 18 and 35 you probably believe that greenhouse gases are a pollutant and are causing the climate to warm up and that we may have lost the battle to inform them otherwise. Okay, so the apparent objective here is to go ahead and accept the premise and then delay as long as possible the implementation of the Algore-type fixes and, in the process of delaying this, try to change people's minds about how to go about this rather than changing their minds that it exists in the first place. There's a bill called Lieberman-Warner. Harry Reid's got 60 votes, he says. Bush is promising to veto this. But the Fish & Wildlife Service will be able to determine who can open up a Wal-Mart in Tennessee, whether somebody can build a shopping mall in Chicago. We have judges been making those decisions and we've got bureaucrats deciding these kinds of things.
What I think the administration wants to do, there's some sort of a meeting in Paris tomorrow, and the nations getting together and try to battle this, and the administration is willing to accept the premise but they don't want another Kyoto to come out of this so they're going to insist that any new restrictions include China and India, who are exempt and China is the biggest polluter on the planet. If China and India will not accept, will not go along, then the hope is that we can scuttle the whole thing. But this is where we have come now with liberals. We accept the premise, rather than shoot it down, because we've lost the opportunity to do that, and now after accepting the premise, we have to tell the American people, "Well, there's a better way of dealing with this rather than the Algore method." Now, that's sad.
RUSH: Let me finish this global warming riff as it has to do with the theme I established in the previous half hour, and that is liberalism is the greatest threat this country faces. Not Islamofascism, because if the liberals dominate and win and are in power for four or eight years or more, they don't take Islamofascism as a threat and we know this because the Islamofascists are actually campaigning for the election of Democrats. Islamofascists from Ahmadinejad to al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden, whoever, are constantly issuing Democrat talking points. So liberalism is the big threat. One of my big pet peeves, and it's more than a pet peeve, is that in addition to nobody, anywhere, Republican or Democrat, speaking about American exceptionalism, trying to inspire the American people, motivate them, be proud of their country, to tell them the truth of this country and how they live in the greatest place ever on earth and that their opportunities, even economic downturns, are greater than any other person's on this planet, rather than do that, liberals advance a premise,
and somehow in our defensive nature or our inferiority complex nature, or, in the politicians' case, a desire to get something done, to be seen as being a person of action, we accept the premise and then try to tweak it while opposing aspects of it and try to make a conservative notion out of the premise. Global warming is one of these circumstances where we have accepted the premise. Why do we accept the premise? Well, in the case of global warming, I think the reason we accept the premise is that for 20 years nobody of power, nobody with guts, nobody with a political bully pulpit has fought the premise. And in those 20 years, there are a significant number of Americans who have bought into it, particularly young people. People 18-34, if you're younger than 35, you've been educated in the public school system, you grew up watching Captain Planet and these other cartoons on TV, and you've seen Algore's movie and the teachers and everybody in the schools are showing you the movie and telling your kids how rotten the country is for what we've done to the planet and so forth, you believe it. False pictures of polar bears on little plots of ice trying to make kids think that glaciers are melting, and getting a lot of people to believe it. So a politician in a democracy will say, "Well, the people believe it, and I need to get elected so I have to act like I believe it." So you accept the premise. Then in accepting the premise, the people on our side who still oppose this after accepting the premise then try to delay the implementation of the left's fixes on this.
Now, I guess at this stage of the game that is one strategy, but I would prefer somebody standing up on a regular basis who has a bully pulpit and pointing out that this is a hoax, that when there's consensus in science, that there isn't science, that science is not up to a vote. I would point out that nothing's been proved, that both people, both sides of this, and particularly the pro-global warming people, they're relying on faith. When you challenge them, some will admit that they can't prove it, but they'll say what if we're right and we don't do anything? We have 20 years to fix this, what if we're right? That's such a straw dog argument, to say what if we're right, that's just continuing the whole basis of fear on which this takes place. So where we are now is that because of 20 years of inaction from a bully pulpit point of view and from somebody with a position of power, the premise has settled in, and way too many Americans believe this notion, and they think that they're big and good people because they're going to allow their lives to change in such a way that they think will help save the planet. As ridiculous as that sounds, there are more Americans than you think who believe all of this. So we accept the premise, and then we start saying we think that the fixes that have been proposed are ineffective and they will cost too much and they will not work. And that's where we are. Now we're going to have people try to make the case that the premise is right, but these fixes are incorrect. You ought to read Roy Spencer's book, I've mentioned this book two or three times. Climate Confusion is the title of the book: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians, and Misguided Policies That Hurt the Poor. One of the things that Roy Spencer -- he's our official climatologist here at the EIB Network -- talks about is the literal economic stupidity of trying to fix the global warming problem. All it is is a bunch of pandering to a bunch of sentiments that could be described as feel good about doing something among misinformed people. It's disgusting. No matter whether it works or not, we gotta do something, we feel good doing something, but the cost involved, the restriction on liberty and freedom, is profound. So we've gotten to this point now where the premise, apparently, has been accepted by everybody of substance in terms of political power, and this has got to stop.
We have got to stop accepting these premises. We've got to stop being afraid of what the American people think. Somebody with an electoral position of power -- look, folks, conservatism is great, and we're going to end up triumphing over all this in time, but conservatism that is loosely organized does not have nearly the ability and power to succeed as if it is in a political party. And conservatism is under assault even in the Republican Party now by a bunch of people who would rather be seen by people as moderates and open-minded types. The elites basically have gotten hold of it, and it's going to be a battle to get it back, but these things happen, you gotta keep fighting the battle. We're willing to do it here in manners and ways in which I'm describing here. So we're gonna take the premise, we're gonna accept the premise, we're gonna say these carbon offset programs are not going to work, it's too expensive and we're going to come up with other solutions to a problem that doesn't exist. If it does exist, there's nothing we can do about it. That's the next reality. There's nothing we can do about it but adapt, which human beings have done over the course of human civilization. We adapt. We adapt every day to what's put in front of us. We adapt to natural disasters, we adapt to fires, we adapt to any number of things. So we have to adapt. That's what we're capable of doing.
Every living organism has to adapt to its surroundings. We have to build houses to stay warm in the winter. We can't just survive as we are under normal climactic cycles. Anyway, Roy's book explains this stuff so well, it needs to be read. It's called Climate Confusion. You can get it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or at your favorite bookstore. You know, I, ladies and gentlemen -- well, here, let me give you another example. Liberalism on parade. And this is how slowly, incrementally this stuff happens. This is a serious news story. It's from the French News Agency. "Plants deserve respect," according to a group of Swiss experts, "arguing that killing them arbitrarily was morally wrong -- except when it comes to saving humans or maybe picking petals off a daisy. In a report on 'the dignity of the creature in the plant world,' the federal Ethics Committee on non-human Gene Technology condemned the decapitation of flowers without reason, among other sins. Still, commission member Bernard Baertsche suggested at a press conference the body weighed such cruel acts on a case-by-case basis, noting 'the simple pleasure of picking the petals off a daisy might suffice as a reason.' Similarly 'all action that involves plants in the aim to conserve the human species is morally justified.' ... Only a minority of the group's members objected to patenting plants, with the majority ruling the action did not infringe on 'their moral value.'"So, the dignity of the creature in the plant world. They condemned the decapitation of flowers without reason. Okay, so we've gone through the animal rights phase, we've gone through the spotted owl BS, we've gone through the condor, all these things, the coral reefs, you see how evil we are, we human beings, now we're decapitating roses, and that is immoral, and that is unethical. So here comes the guilt play. What happens next, are we next going to be banned from walking on our lawns? Are we going to be banned from weeding the lawns? I mean, grass is a plant. You think you want to get stepped on? How would you like it if people in your house just walked and stepped on you all the time? You think the grass likes it? You see where this stuff is going. I warned you about this, when the Sierra Club got on the SUV craze and you thought I was crazy and overexaggerating. You wait. We already cut down some trees. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness; what liberty? Now plants have greater value than we do because in certain circumstances you can decapitate a person, and in certain places you can get away with it, but decapitating a rose, big, big problem.
Boo!!!!
Boo, hiss!!!!! What's a douchebag like this doing on this site?!