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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (24769)	5/31/2009 3:38:37 AM
From: garrettjax	Respond to of 36917

See your 2 charts and raise you one... Message 25682336 -G

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (24769)	5/31/2009 12:15:44 PM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

EDITORIAL: Small cars kill Obama's fuel-economy standards are unsafe By \| Sunday, May 31, 2009 President Obama's push to force Americans into smaller cars ignores one big problem -- small cars are less safe than big cars. Ignoring this fact will cost lives. Mr. Obama announced new miles-per-gallon regulations on May 19 that mandate that automobiles achieve 42 mpg by 2016. During last year's presidential campaign, Mr. Obama's Web site boasted that his positions on fuel economy were "science-based." Rep. Henry A. Waxman, California Democrat, said on Jan. 15 that efforts "to reduce global warming and our dependence on foreign oil ... must be based on the science ...." Apparently, this faith in science does not apply to the science of auto safety. The scientific evidence on car size and safety is overwhelming. The National Academy of Sciences, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the Congressional Budget Office, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and numerous academic studies are all in agreement on this point: Higher miles-per-gallon requirements lead to more deaths from car accidents. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety noted in its April 14 report that "some mini-cars earn higher crash worthiness ratings than others, but as a group these cars generally can't protect people in crashes as well as bigger, heavier models." A 2002 report by the National Academy of Sciences found that, in 1993, federal fuel-economy standards resulted in 1,300 to 2,600 additional deaths per year. The question is one of simple physics. Smaller, lighter cars do not offer occupants the same protection as larger, heavier vehicles when they collide with other objects. More than 43,000 Americans died in car crashes in 2005 and 2006. Setting aside auto safety will only make the roads more deadly. The latest numbers from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety released in April show that small cars have a 55 percent higher death rate than midsize ones. Occupants of small cars that run into large cars are more vulnerable to fatalities in such impacts. Accidents involving two small cars are more likely to involve fatalities than crashes between two large cars. Large cars that collide into trees or fixed barriers are also much safer. The mania for higher fuel economy is driven by environmentalists who think that this is the most efficient way of conserving energy and cutting down on carbon emissions, which they claim contribute to global warming. Whatever the benefits -- if any -- of fighting global warming, they must be weighed against the costs of proposed policies. In addition to the loss of life, there is a significant price penalty to the consumer. The Obama administration estimates that the new fuel-economy regulations will increase the cost of producing each new car by at least $1,300. On May 12, the White House withdrew the nomination of Chuck Hurley to head the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Mr. Hurley had a long record of backing hyperregulation as chief executive officer of Mothers Against Drunk Driving and as a board member of the National Campaign to Stop Red Light Running. Environmental groups reportedly opposed his nomination because he had said that increased Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards made cars less safe. Contradicting environmentalist orthodoxy carries a price. A May 13 headline in the National Journal explained the politics of Mr. Hurley's political demise: "Enviros Forced NHTSA Nominee to Withdraw." This saga shows that even proponents of the nanny state take a back seat to greens in the Obama administration.

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (24769)	5/31/2009 11:57:23 PM
From: average joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

Is it just me or does David Suzuki's daughter sound drunk here? youtube.com Here she is preaching to the hallelujah choir. video.google.com It is only after Armageddon, the Old Testament teaches us, that children become leaders. Severn Cullis-Suzuki has been doing her best to save her planet from environmental catastrophe since she was knee-high to a grasshopper. At age six when most girls would be playing with their Barbie dolls Cullis-Suzuki was selling her father's hardcover books at lawn sales for 25 cents each to raise money for native land claims in British Columbia. By age 10 she had co-founded ECO, the Environmental Children's Organization, with a group of like-minded grade six girlfriends at Lord Tennyson Elementary School in Vancouver. Their first project was to buy a water filter for natives in the Malaysian tropical rain forest whose water supply was threatened by over logging and the effluence of an ever-encroaching population. In 1992, when she was only 12, she brought world leaders to tears with a speech at the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in which she chastised them for failing to protect her and her friends from the looming environmental catastrophe. "I'm afraid to go out in the sun now because of holes in the ozone. I'm afraid to breathe the air because I don't know what chemicals are in it," Cullis-Suzuki said in a six-minute speech heard around the world. "I used to go fishing with my dad in Vancouver until just a few years ago. We found the fish full of cancers." Then she read out a checklist of the things the adults had failed to do to protect and preserve the health of the planet and urged them to get on with the task of making it fit for 5 billion people, or get out of the way. "I'm only a child and I don't have all the solutions, but I want you to realize neither do you...if you don't now how to fix it then please stop breaking it," she pleaded with the delegates. All parents should be able to comfort their children at night by assuring them that everything's going to be all right. "But I don't think you can say that to us any more." Cullis-Suzuki and her ECO pals got to Rio by holding bake sales and making and selling hand-made earrings and beaded necklaces. After the speech, Al Gore, the soon to be U.S. vice-president rushed to congratulate her on what he said was the best speech he'd heard at the summit. That performance brought her instant fame and propelled David Suzuki's daughter on to the world stage. Overnight she was transformed into a media darling and a much sought after environmental speaker. Today at 24, with a Bachelor of Science degree in ecology and evolutionary biology from Yale, Cullis-Suzuki travels the world preaching her passion -- and getting paid for it. Wake up and smell the ecological devastation in the air, move to save our forests, and stop polluting our lakes and oceans. It's a message she fears often falls on deaf ears now that the applause in Rio has long since died down. "I've seen a major disconnect between talk and action," she says adding that activists must find new ways to get their message heard and acted on. "The real innovation is at the grassroots level. Things can only get better through a lot of little habit changes." And that means convincing young people that by making small changes to the way they live their lives can have a huge impact on the environment. Riding a bike to work or taking public transit, drinking coffee from a mug instead of a disposable cup and resisting the urge to buy things you don't really need, to name just a few. She acknowledges that it's a big challenge to protect the environment while maintaining economic growth but believes it can be met by making industry and commerce understand that what's good for the environment is also good for business. Healthy fish populations are essential to supporting a fishing industry, just as trees and parks are needed for tourism and life itself. She talks of the importance of eating locally produced food and how environmental problems must be framed as social issues. "We need to identify what the new vision is, what the alternatives are to our current destructive lifestyles," she said in a recent interview. "I'm particularly interested in asking young people this question. "What do they want for the future?" Her own immediate future calls for a return to university in the fall to pursue her studies at Victoria University on Vancouver Island to keep harping on the environment until we all get it, that there is only one planet Earth, and it is worth saving for grasshoppers and people alike. Cullis-Suzuki is one of the environmental heroes featured in The Great Warming, a three-part television documentary on the devastating effect of climate change. Filmed on four continents the Canadian produced series travels to four continents to tell the story through the words of real people-from nomadic herders to inner-city dwellers. It premiers on Earth Day, April 22, on the Discovery channel. thegreatwarming.com