Environmentalists are fucking liars or Al Gore Shut the hell up

I was just thinking back over the last twenty years of Environmental doomsday predications and it occurred to me...

Every five years we have another glamorous cause supported by media and celebrity that disappears when the new cause comes along. It begs the question, did we fix the problem so we were able to move on? OR was the problem so overblown that Environmentalists were proven liars and we had to find a new cause?

Personally I think it is a column A and a column B situation. Environmentalists, like everyone else, have an agenda and lie to get their point heard.

Let's recap shall we, I don't know where to start exactly for reasons of a faded memory, but let's say that 20 years ago industrial smoke stack pollution was going to ruin us first. The government of Ontario and Canada passed regulations requiring scrubbers on smoke stacks to remove large percentages of the pollutants. GREAT news, it worked - that is what we will put in column A, legitimate pressure brought about change and things got better.

But to add something to column B, at the same time (roughly) we were told the real issue was acid rain. Remember acid rain? It was going to burn the trees and eventually water would fall from the sky and burn your skin. That is why this is a B, the alarmists told us this tale and then within ten years the issue disappeared. Is it over? I have no fucking clue because nobody talks about it anymore.

Then we were told that CFC's were going to kill us all. In truth I think it was kids huffing cans of Pam that brought an end to CFC's, but let's say for arguments sake that it was a "hole in the ozone issue". Fuck the rain in the sky, the atmosphere is literally disappearing.

Okay so on this issue we have a column A and a big, fucking huge column B issue.

Column A gets the end to harmful CFC's and wasteful Styrofoam etc, but this all hinged on this "hole in the ozone theory". You remember back until say 1992, every year they told us fucking daily about a hole in the ozone. It's bigger, it's moving, and to quote a Jean Claude VanDam movie “oh my god there are two of them”, etc. Well that was blamed at least in part on CFC's. Every time we broke up a Styrofoam cup we made the hole bigger, Remember? That is how they brought the point home, it was your fault coffee drinker. Inn addition to all that we all had to change our air conditioners and fridges etc. CFC free was on everything we bought.

The issue was so heated, particularly the Styrofoam problem, that McDonald’s stopped using Styrofoam packaging. The issue actually cost the world a sandwich - The McDLT - hot side hot, cold side cold deal. This was "THE" issue, THE FUCKING OZONE HOLE.

Then guess what, surprise surprise, the issue disappeared. Did we solve it? No not really, but one year, for reasons nobody properly explained, the ozone hole disappeared. Seriously, it went away. At the time scientists told us that this was a normal occurrence that has probably happened before we were ever aware of the problem, but that we shouldn't be overconfident because it could come back just as easily as it left.

So what's the status? How the fuck should I know? Like everything else once it isn't a hot issue people stop talking about it. So scientists and environmentalists are as guilty if not more so of dropping the ball on this one because they scared us shittless, the thing disappeared and then boom they never talked about it again.

Note: There is something called credibility you scientists and environmentalists. Creditability, now I remember, speaking of, Sting, yeah the guy from the police.

It isn't all Stings fault, Bruce Cockburn is guilty too, but these two douche bags scared us on a nightly basis with a commercial that told us the worlds "lungs" were being burned and cut down at a rate on an acre a second or something and that by 2010 the Amazon rainforest would be gone.

This unfortunately is a Column A and B, I wish it was just a B, but world financial institutions and foreign governments puts enormous pressure on the government of Brazil to stop burning the rain forests and they did so that was a big win, except for the fact that the environmentalists were lying.

The picture of current destruction that Sting was holding up to show us what had already been done was a fabrication. There were arguments about the size of the lie, but it was basically agreed that that was a very liberal forecast of a 20 year projection. Not what the Amazon looked like today. The 2010 image was even worse. It was as though cartoon villains ruled the world. Even if they did the situation might reach one tenth of that in 20 years. They lied and lied on their lies and got caught.

So yeah, the lobbying stopped the problem, but you could argue that Brazil just burnt that fucker down to get money, so really they win, the environmentalists lied and the earth still has its lungs.

At the same time as Sting is using his fame to lie, Cockburn is singing the highly forgettable "if a tree falls in the forest" because it was cool to sing environmental bullshit and trees were HOT. Clear cutting and the death of old growth forests were on everybody’s lips. Remember when the famous Black forest (yes like the cake, thick and dense) was dying and we all had to save it? Probably not because well it’s fine now. Trees today, how are they faring? Who fucking knows, nobody talks about it. A minor column A point could be the increase in urban green space. IF nothing else our "Tree" period got us nicer parks in urban settings so that works for all of us.

But these fuckers lied and took your money for legal action in a situation where there was in fact no longer a problem. Especially not the problem they were advertising.

So we went through the acid rain, the CFC's, the Ozone hole and the collapse of the world's key forests, where were we off to next? Oil spills. That's right, remember those? Every fucking week someone ran a tanker into something and ruined the world. What happened, don't they do that anymore, or is it an issue that we are upset not because of the environment effects, but the fact that some idiot wasted a perfectly good tanker of oil? Truthfully, the effected areas that they told us “would be ruined forever” have recovered despite the fact that most of them are still covered in oil. What does that mean? I have no idea, but it makes apocalyptic statements about oil spills pretty hard to sell when we go to Alaska and see otters happily swimming beside an oily rock.

Today's issue is in development right now and the message just isn't getting through the way it once did but let's follow the progress. We can start with the dreaded UV index, basically the sun is now burning us to death. Problem is when I was 6 in 1979, I got the worst sunburn of my life. 10 years later a friend of mine got 2nd degree burns working an air show. So yeah I guess people get sunburns but what was true in 79 was true in 89, and is truer still today. You stay out in the sun all day long with no shirt and your ass is going to get burned. I recovered, I never did it again and I like to think it has more to do with judgement and experience than what some idiot tells me is environment Canada’s definition of a bright and sunny day. Now I haven't had a bad burn in years, but the UV index is suddenly a factor in my daily life.

At least I know that the sun is bad right, except that we have just been told that unprotected exposure to the sun is good for you. So that story is total bullshit too. Facts are simple, if you stay outside in the sun for too long you are going to get burned. The speed and severity depend on the person. Trust me when I say my pail English skin burnt just as easily in the 1970's as it does today I ain't lying, and when I say my friends skin with its sun enhanced Indian blood red tone is dark and ample with limited exposure to the sun, I ain't lying. He just doesn't burn, it's genetic, not exposure related. I burn, he doesn't, no fucking UV index is going to change that. This is just another fear mongering tool for assholes to sell the bigger issue.

Today's flavour is "Global Warming"

Being in Canada, this is the hardest sell the world has ever seen. Let it get warmer, I don't give a fuck, I am going to burn anyway. The bigger/real problem is that it is happening and there is really no viable solution. I say viable because the West is not a corrective solution anymore. With the economies of China on India coming on line, it doesn't matter a lick what we do because these two countries burn cow shit and coal for heat and can't wait to buy a car. In other words, we fucked the environment up and now have no power when it comes to not letting them fuck it up worse. Why? I need Chinese manufacturing more than I need cold winters.

The other big sell issue is that they say it is a big issue today, but when we talk about climactic change nobody can deny that it happens regardless of what we do. Do we speed it up or affect it? Maybe, but listen carefully to the news when they say that today is the hottest day on record because they will also say "breaking the old mark set in 1952". So what does that mean? We broke a 50 year old record by .5 degrees and we are all supposed to stop driving our cars?

I am not going to question the validity of global warming or its partner the polar ice caps, or the currents or the jet stream because I don't know anything about it, or care really. This is an old joke but a good one. The earth’s temperature has risen by 2 degrees since 1900 and they expect it to climb another 1 degree in the next 100 years. Who fucking cares, this is an issue I can solve by rolling up my sleeves or taking off my sweater, I'll adapt

That is the real hard sell. It is not a noticeable difference and I will be dead before it goes up half a degree. They try and link it, although it is not possible to do so, to major environmental catastrophes in the last ten years, except, those fucking things always happen. People right books about bad tornado seasons, or tidal waves or mudslides etc. The great storm of 58, or the flood of 31 these are the stories that our current stories will become in 50 years. These things are not new and a percentage increase in their frequency is not a reason to set off an alarm. The problem?

They do it anyway, so while they push the latest issue, I look for answers on the topics they’ve already dropped. They achieve nothing real except for scaring the shit out of us and then they just walk away. A week later they reappear and tell us to be scared of something else.

Fuck off, I am driving to the cottage to use my 100hp bass boat on my dying lake. Then I am going to use a charcoal grill with lots of lighter fluid, eat off Styrofoam plates and remember to good old days when it was too cold to swim in late august.

Point being. Leave us alone, when it's bad enough, we'll all notice. We won’t need some Poindexter to tell us that there is a problem.