Last month, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The conference organizers themselves have given the conference the nickname of Rio+20.

This is because twenty years ago, in 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development was held in Rio de Janeiro, a meeting commonly called the Earth Summit. At this original Rio conference, those who assembled decided that the future would be lost without alternative energy, public transportation, and what was called the “systemic scrutiny of production patterns.” Among the documents excreted by the conference was the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, which is mostly the typical stuffed-shirt garbage one would expect coming from a conference held by the United Nations.

However, within the Declaration …

A long time ago, somebody figured out that people were afraid of nature. With this realization, our subject set out to carve a statue of a woman with a horned head dress, and declared the idol to be Ninhursag, the goddess of the earth. Our carver then set about convincing people that if they brought their best wheat, their best grapes, and their best lambs and calves to sacrifice to the goddess then they will be blessed with plenty and the grace of the divine goddess will rain down upon them, but if they refused they would be cursed with pestilence.

And thus the people, rending their garments and lamenting of their fear of the weather and their invented devil gods, brought their best produce …

On the morning of February 17th,I was standing in line getting coffee at the little cafeteria at my day gig. Behind me were two guys that had obviously been in heated discussion for some time. I don’t know either of them. I can’t vouch for the conversation being word for word, but here it is from my memory:

So, let me understand this. Obama’s going to Denver, today… several days after the bill he was so much in a hurry to sign that none of Congress could actually take the time to read it, was placed on his desk. Why did he wait all that time after the vote? So he could vacation?

Well, no, so he could fly out to Denver, I guess.

Why

The Supreme Court (Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council) voted 5-4 to rescind bans on sonar use in training exercises off the California coast.  Those bans were implemented by lower federal courts.  The ruling states that the lower courts exceeded their authority in those actions.

The bans were in place presumably to protect sea life from the negative effects of sonar use… effects that have been researched by organizations like the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC).  I can not speak directly to the integrity of the research, but it seems the concerns bear consideration.  Perhaps not a knee-jerk response, since sonar has been in regular use for decades now, but enough careful consideration that if sea life is truly being impacted, specifically …

I don’t want to be morbid, but I’m starting to lose confidence that we can find a balanced exchange of ideas any longer.  That the patently unproven and risky hypothesis that humans, are creating environmental change on a global scale, is now becoming a point of agreement by some of those arguing on the left and right about how to deal with “global warming”, is alarming.

In a pair of pieces presented in the Wall Street Journal today, Ian McEwan and Bjørn Lomborg present differing perspectives on how to deal with global warming.  But they are not the typical side of the discussion we’ve had in the past. The perspectives shown here are answers to the question “What should Obama do about Global Warming?”.

McEwan, …

Just when you thought you couldn’t afford to go on summer vacation, just when you thought the ONLY answer to rising gasoline prices was a “gas tax holiday“, just as various states are complaining they don’t have enough tax money collected to pay for road work, now oil prices fall to a 3 month low of 121.99 for US Crude and 122.71 for Brent Crude (at noon, central time), with no end in sight. 

You heard me, the analysts, the same ones that said we were likely stuck with $4-5 a gallon gasoline or higher by end of summer, are telling us that buying oil commodities is a bad deal right now, and even OPEC anticipates oil prices could fall …

As mentioned the other day, we went to see WALL-E (which stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth Class) Tuesday night.  Although the underlying message is clearly “Take Care Of The Earth”, I don’t think I was not led to see it as a “Global Warming” statement.

What I did see was the same kind of message we’ve been trying to teach each generation for the past 40 years or so, and that’s to be good stewards of the planet.  Frankly, we’d be in a much worse mess right now if not for the continued conservation efforts of the last several decades.

Certainly, we’re into a cycle of Political Correctness regarding being “green”, some of which is not so bad, some of …

Let’s take a moment to look at the Democrat response to the President’s weekly radio address… where Energy is the issue.

Good morning. This is Congressman Joe Donnelly of Indiana’s Second Congressional District. Today it is my pleasure to talk to you about a few of Congress’ recent accomplishments on an issue that I believe will help define the future of our nation: energy independence and energy security. Like many Americans across the nation, the people of northern Indiana have felt the negative effects of an energy policy that favored big oil companies