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Methane control or money generator?

January 27, 2015

cowOPINION By GARY KIRKLAND

On Wednesday, the San Luis Obispo County Air Pollution Control District (APCD) will meet to figure out how to extort more money from businesses and take away more of our freedoms all in the name of making the air safe for us to breathe.

Our glorious leader, the president, has announced that he wants more regulations on methane use. Methane is a major greenhouse gas. He says that the science is settled on global warming caused by humans.

As a science teacher, I know that science is never settled. If it was, scientists would no longer need do any more work. Climatologists would have to find another line of work.

The APCD could jump on the idea of keeping methane out of the atmosphere. Many have proposed that cattle flatulence releases a tremendous amount of methane. So, the government needs to regulate the cattle industry. I guess the millions of bison that roamed the North American plains for hundreds of years did not flatulate, or least not methane.

Humans also flatulate. The APCD could regulate human flatulence. If this tyrannical body could ban flatulating at their meetings at least the room would smell better.

Certain food such as beans and nuts increase flatulence. The APCD should ban these foods to protect the environment. I am sure these many dictators on the APCD could think of many ways to increase their power and control our lives to prevent methane from the atmosphere to stop global warming.


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Has anyone ever noticed how certain fads are embraced by either Liberals or Conservatives? I remember the people who were all fanatical about No War in the 60’s . These same people all believed we needed to all be Vegan to save the planet in the 70’s (we were going to run out of food, which we didn’t). These were the same people that were fanatical about Homeless in the 80’s. Again, these same people protested the war in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000’s. They paraded and stood on the corner silently in black with their signs condemning Bush and Cheney. (A little side, here, but I didn’t see these same people protesting when we were in Afghanistan and Iraq when Obama was president, even though more soldiers died under Obama than Bush. Weird, huh.)


Conservatives have jumped on fads as well, don’t get me wrong. They generally are more polite about it, in my subjective opinion.


Now the fad by the SAME people as the No War, Vegan, Homeless crowd is Global Warming. What is known (in my opinion):

1. Is the average temperature on earth rising? Yes.

2. Are the majority of the glaciers around the world retreating? Yes.

3. Is the CO2 levels in the atmosphere increasing? Yes.

4. Is this increase due to burning fossil fuel? Yes.

5. Has anyone died because of Global Warming? No.

6. Will taxing Methane, Carbon Credits, etc. increase the cost to consumer while lining the pocket of someone else? Yes.


Now for my subjective opinion and why:


1. Will taxing Methane, Carbon Credits, etc. reduce global warming? No. The third world countries will simply use more fossil fuel if it is available.

2. Will taxing Methane, Carbon Credits, etc. reduce the U.S. foreign trade deficit and the U.S. budget deficit? No. It will line the pockets of the Al Gores of the world, though.

3. Are we all going to die because of global warming? No. If the sea level rises, just move farther inland. If the temperature is too warm, then tremendous amount of land in Siberia would open up.

4. Am I losing sleep over Global Warming? No.


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JMO,


For your future knowledge, so as not to be ignorant, the people in question didn’t need to protest any further in mass when Obama took office because his mantra was to get the hell out of the wars that George W. Bush started under completely fraudulent conditions. In doing so, unfortunately more soldiers had to die along with Iraqi citizens while making complicated plans to clean up the horrific mess that “W” left the United States.


Take a simple refresher course in the real history subsequent to 911, and if you have even a modicum of reasoning, you’ll wonder in how Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, and others can sleep at night. Cause and effect, it will ALWAY’S be “Bush’s wars.”


You easily take the old saw of not losing sleep over global warming, essentially stating that “screw the following generations” because you’ll be dead and it won’t matter to you. How insidious can you get? Your puerile and simplistic notions that all one has to do is move around the planet when the warming effects get worse, is comical to say the least because of it’s ramifications.


Worsening global warming will impact the entire earth in many ways, and I suggest that Google be your friend in this respect of finding out “how” this will happen. Shelf your “inept subjective opinions” and enlighten yourself with actual empirical facts. You sound like a Republican.


Contrary to your belief, a carbon tax would reduce global warming in that it would force other forms of energy like wind, solar, etc. This tax in turn could be used to reduce payroll taxes or other economic entities in a way that would leave the distribution of total tax burden approximately unchanged. In this way, a global carbon tax would be easier to negotiate. No money needs to change hands across international borders. Each government could keep the revenue from its tax and use it to finance spending or whatever form of tax relief it considered best for the benefit of the planet, and at the same time, help eliminate carbon in our closed atmosphere.


Remember, a “tax” is not a four-letter word.


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Ted, I like it. I sometimes write comments from the Liberal perspective that makes it sound like Liberals are so stupid and stuck up that it is sure to upset the conservative minded. And it brings a chuckle to the unwary liberals who otherwise get all their information from “unbiased” Sierra Club literature. But you do it so much better than I can.


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Are you suckers still buying the MMGW Scam….

Geeze….even my kids at Morro Bay High School know it’s a BS scam, where have you been? Hiding in Paul Erlic’s Population Bomb Shelter?


Ha ha ha ah


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Rich,


Thank God that your kids live in the USA where they have the freedom to be totally ignorant regarding man-made global warning. Don’t forget to tell them that they’re going to have to enter the real world once they’re out of High School, okay?


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Have you been popping Palin pills ? What does this mish-mosh of disconnected observations lead to ?

Ignorance as a form of meditative therapy ?


If you were indeed alive in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s …given your examples of ‘fads’, you must have been asleep during those times.

Your ‘evidence’ is stringilly anecdotal. Perhaps those Palin pills have a hallucinatory side effect.


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Methane is 0.000179% (1.79 ppm) of the earth’s atmosphere. You ingest, government standards, more than that when you eat a bowl of cereal. P.T. Barnum was correct, now pay up suckers.


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The second sentence in my post should read;

You ingest, government standards, more than that in rat crap when you eat a bowl of cereal.


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Gary Kirkland,


This was a joke, right? Subsequent to reading your narrative, I thought Allan Funt of Candid Camera fame was going to jump out from behind my couch and shout “You’re on Candid Camera!” Wait, you’re an ex-writer for Saturday Night Live, is that it? Am I getting close? If your treatise is to be taken seriously, then in addition to your opinions, you must also be a writer for the likes of Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, Joni Ernst, et al?


To only address just one of your notions, to save you from further embarrassment, then when the bison roamed the North American plains in the time span you noted, and with their ever so atmospheric destroying flatulency, they did so without the influx of the Industrial Revolution throughout the world, and subsequent impurities since then being thrown into our “closed” atmosphere. In other words, you gave a really bad analogy as a science teacher.




Furthermore, “science” can be settled more so than not when 97 percent of real Climate Scientists state unequivocally that there is in fact climate change that is caused by man, and that is detrimental to our planet. For the sake of brevity and space, Google is your friend, notwithstanding what NASA purports to say upon this topic with those damn scientific facts.


To briefly enter your sandbox level of entertainment, that was in jest we hope, and to use your main premise that cattle should be regulated because of their flatulence, we need cattle for a food source, therefore we have to curb methane elsewhere, hence the regulations above and beyond the cattle issue. Get it?


Personally, thanks for the entertainment!


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Consensus in science, lol. Only people that do not think scientifically put faith in such things. There was a time when the “consensus” was that the sun revolved around the earth. Do a little research on many of our medical axioms, you’ll quickly find that many “facts” are anything but. And let’s not even start on the political aspects of science.


Hypothesis, theory, law; reproducible results. Consensus is not part of the scientific method.


Ted, stick to what you do best- trolling the newbies.


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tictak,


A climate of consensus, no pun intended, is easy to find in how it operates from any area of science, and the field of Climate Science is no different. Case in point, a STRONG CONSENSUS has formed about the broad outlines of climate change whether you like it or not! Yes, you’re never going to convince everyone in the field, but a variety of studies have suggested that over 97 percent of the scientists with the relevant expertise in Climate Science are on the same page about the general outlines of climate change. GET IT?


A consensus in climate change definitely exists. Does that mean it’s right at this time? NO! It may be slow to change, or not change at all, but it can eventually be shifted by the weight of the emperical evidence to the side that now exists, or to another side if warranted. Thus far, the weight and CONSENSUS of 97 percent of Climate Scientists states there is climate change brought on by man, period!


A consensus is a natural part of the process of science, arrived at by a careful evaluation of evidence. Remember, the critics of the mainstream climate consensus that you disparage as not being a part of science, are not arguing that consensus has no place in science, but just the extent of the current 97 percent agreement of the consensus. GET IT?


In turn, stick with what you’re good at, uh, I forgot what you’re good at. Sorry.


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What’s your point ? Much of quantum mechanics and even basic Newtonian physics is accepted as truth and scientific fact, yet cannot be fully explained in the lab.


If ‘consensus’ were a 50% plus one opinion, you could have an argument. But when consensus is 99.9999 % of all of the informed experts, then those that disagree are outliers and/or kooks that should be ignored.


Stick to your carny games and trolling for suckers.


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It’s a power grab.


Virtually all of the carbon grown on the prairie returns to the atmosphere. Without ruminants, the plants slowly or quickly oxidize to carbon dioxide and water. Alternately, after passing through ruminants, the plants quickly return to carbon dioxide.


The attempt to carbon tax cow gas is governmental parasitism — the gov getting their piece of the action. This is to be expected. We are accustom to the government inserting itself as friction in any ‘producer’ endeavor.


The worst is the ‘collateral damage’ inflicted by the gov in their attempts to conceal their money grab. Collateral damage in the form of useless or misguided regulation, enacted by governors and force-implemented by producers.


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Whoever you are advocating for, you are doing them a grave disservice. This is not just unfunny, it is a painful read.


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