Did you catch Charlie Rose’s interview with Al Gore on PBS Monday night? It focused on global warming and Gore’s new movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” But Gore also argued that there is a self-destructive connection between global warming, the war in Iraq and our national debt. “We are borrowing huge amounts of money from China to buy huge amounts of oil from the most unstable region on the planet, to bring it here and burn it in ways that destroy the habitability of the planet,” Gore said. “This is a dysfunctional pattern, every component of which has to be changed, and can be changed only when we look at the overall pattern.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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45 Comments
Well it is so much easier to dismiss it as crap! You do not have to change a thing, nor deal with any reality. Nope we can just let the future generation handle it…What there will be no future generation? OH there will be no future! I see now, well then let go out and drive around waiting for the end then!
What is the alternative? What is the plan to turn it around? I hear a lot of talk about the problem but nothing concrete to solve it.
We can’t just stop borrowing money, because there is too much demand for government assistance, oversight, services, and pork over tax reciepts. The politicans aren’t going to restrain themselves.
We have millions of automobiles, trillions of dollars in petrochemcial based businesses and infrastructure.
We can’t extract new oil resources that is left in control of the USA.
We can’t say that corn will be our saviour, because it won’t.
Hydrogen is still many years away.
Al Gore keeps on racking miles on his personal jet and his caravan of SUV’s to transport him and his entourage, and that doesn’t help.
I would like to know a solid plan. There should be enough smart and intelligent experts that can come up with something viable, especially since the Earth is meeting it’s doom in the near future. You would think we would be acting quite quickly on the matter.
Let’s compare Bush to Gore, shall we?
Bush is asked, “what’s your greatest achievement as president?” and he says, “catching a big bass.”
Gore, as a private citizen, creates a speaking tour to warn folks about global warming, complete with charts, evidence, and actual grammatical sentences.
Gore: articulate, intelligent, caring.
Bush: an idiot.
Joe. the scientific community worldwide is trying desperately to provide a realistic solid plan for turning things around.ONLY TO BE SHOT DOWN BY BUSHCO AT EVERY LEVEL.
I think we pretty much broke a ‘dysfunctional cycle’ in 2000 when the pantload from Tennessee was unable to win his home state.
Hank
Hank–non sequitur.Look it up.
I have to disagree with you Tracy.
Under the Bush Administration their energy policy for more diversified energy sources, such as clean coal and nuclear and tax rebates for hybrids, and a great amount of money going into Hydrogen Fuel Cells.
Under Clinton, I guess energy demand for oil and the enviroment wasn’t a priority for that administration. Where was Gore during those 8 years as VP doing? Why did they agree to vote against the Kyoto Protocols?
“We can’t just stop borrowing money, because there is too much demand for government assistance, oversight, services, and pork over tax reciepts.”
Oh yeah, it is government assistance (whatever that means, like subsidizing the airlines?) oversight (yeah, those damn meat inspectors trying to keep us safe) services (well whoever thought we should have public schools and hospitals) and pork (ya mean like tanker todd brings home?).
Of course, THOSE are the reasons government spending is out of control.
And the HUNDREDS of BILLIONS of dollars we pissed away on bush’s pissypants war in iraq has NOTHING to do with it.
“We can’t extract new oil resources that is left in control of the USA.”
No, joe, you cant drill in wildlife reserves and environmentally risky areas.
You are free to drill in other areas. I am aware of NO ban on extracting new oil, just laws to protect the environment.
I wonder if a plan was presented if joe would even recognize it through the froth on his screen about ANWAR, Leftists, democrats, farmers, and anyone else who doesnt fit his big business, love of corporate welfare, war is good mentality.
Here we go again…….BLAME CLINTON!
Bush’s energy policy was written by Cheney’s “secret” energy task force. The profits of the energy companies have never been greater.
Joe, your post was not a non-sequitur. Hank’s was.
heheh when they are so full of crap you can see the brown in their eyes… who they gonna call?
Clinton did it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Of course, the preznit, in a big pandering move to big oil, says the high price of gas can be blamed in large part on “boutique” gas blends states mandate to meet environmental protections standards.
That damned environment. Why do joe williams and the preznit hate nature? hehehe
Looks like they are wrong, AGAIN, that “tree hugging” environmentalists are the problem with gas prices. Read it if you dare.
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/06/new-epa-study-finds-bush-is-wrong.html
And before you whiz on americablog, he is reporting an AP story, and links are available to the original reports.
But of course, the truth here will prompt crys of “tinfoil” or better yet….”why do you hate america”? hehehehehe
the RW claims global warming is “junk science”. Sounds like a typical Rove stratrgy……if the answer isn’t what you want, try to discredit it.
Using Hank’s logic, Clinton was a great president because he won in a landslide against Dole in ‘96.
Someone should clue in the conservatives–once you win, you have to govern.
At least Al Gore is out of Dick Cheney’s house.
Which one of the six houses do you mean?
I think Gore is on target, you have to look at what underlies a problem before you can resolve it. Now how do we resolve it? It’s a pretty overwhelming problem, throw in the greed and power of the big oil companies and it seems impossible.
General Motors had fully operational electric car prototypes in the mid-90’s which they abandoned and destroyed due to oil company pressures.
Now they’re going broke.
Big surprise.
Edison had a fully functional electric car in the 1900’s Diesal’s orginal engine in 1890’s ran on peanut oil, 1920’s henry ford made a car out of plastic using hemp and flax. Brazil meets most of their energy needs by converting cane sugar into gasoline and burning cane pulp in power plants. The techology’s been around 100 years it just isn’t used. You want solutions; use bio-diesal fuel, you can even use old french fry grease, rendered animal fat ect. Even if only 20% of diesal engines run on biodeisal that alot of oil saved.Use plants to make plastics George Washington Caver used peanuts 100 years ago.
Well, as long as we’re (more-or-less) on the subject, this was in today’s Eagle:
http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/nation/14883124.htm
Emigrating to Mars doesn’t particularly appeal to me, either, Randy.
P.S. Oh, please PLEASE someone tell me all about the NAS “political agenda”!
Sorry, it’s SECRET.
No wonder Tipper is so interested in mental health issues.
Oh my gosh,
I see that AMC is showing “An Inconvenient Truth” in OLATHE. But it’s not being shown in “Kansas’s Largest City.”
It’s being shown in most states’ largest cities including all the states bordering Kansas.
Such as, fer instance, Omaha and Oklahoma City; NINE theaters in Denver, FOUR theaters in St. Loui. Also Albuquerque.
Des Moines opened it in TWO theaters last week.
For second-largest cities in our surrounding states, An Inconveninent Truth is being shown currently in KC, Overland Park, and Tulsa, plus Iowa City. Not yet in Colorado Springs, but three theaters in Boulder.
Let’s see…Arkansas isn’t “ultra liberal”. But AIT is showing in Little Rock, Fayetteville, Ft. Smith and Jonesboro have it.
Peoria and Rockford IL opened it this weekend.Okay, so it’s coming here next week, with Moline IL, Springfield MO and Dulute MN. Why do you think that Wichita is being left behind? It might be good to start thinking about this question.
It IS being shown in Wichita on June 29th at the Premiere Palace I believe.
That’s Late, isn’t it.
Apophis, your problem is I figured you out a long time ago. Like, you’re not a free thinker. I have a Howard Dean sweatshirt, because I gave him some money to see what a true grass-roots campaign could do. The Establishment crushed him. We got Skull-and-Bones Yalie John Kerry vs. Skull-and-Bones Yalie George W. Bush. I have a son who has a “Stewart/Colbert 2008″ bumper sticker. I love both of these characters. You see, I did something you weren’t allowed to when I was a kid. I read MAD magazine.
“Like in James Bomb”.
“Oh James, were surrounded by 20,000 enemies”.
“There just going to have to take their chances.”
Or like “Bonanas” (Bonanza) , with”Pop”, (Paw), and his three sons, “Horse (Hoss), “Short Mort” {Little Joe) and “Yves” (Adam). “This is our family home, the Ponderosa. Other people call it TEXAS.”
Or like the octogenarian Superduperman: “Superduperman, why didn’t you catch the bullets with your teeth?”"What teeth?”
Free-thinking. You don’t have any idea what that is.
Let’s talk about teaching evolution in hs. Bruce Lahn, a professor at the University of Chicago, proposed the genetic evolution of intelligence. Scientificallly, his findings were airtight. But the soshes said, “You can’t do that. That would create too much controversy. That would take us back to eugenics, one of the primary corollaries of Darwin’s theory. Teaching evolution is RIGHT except when talking about biologic brain evolution. We can’t do that because that is POLITICALLY INCORRECT.”
Some “scientists” have said, “There are some questions we SHOULDN’T ASK.” What kind of SCIENCE is this? I personally am willing to support the 1060’s beat/hippie movement’s “multiple intelligences” construct, which Harvard’s Howard Gardner picked up and introduced to the academic community, two decades late.
Small-scale change in education is happening. The states that mounted total vouchers for everybody saw crushing defeats by tacking the NEA. The states that proposed small-scale experiments in vouchers for really poor kids and”disabled” kids, achieved success, and are now getting more money for experiments’ expansion.
Every reader here knows I have described that small-scale experiments will bring change.Mass-educated robots like you will not bring change. You are a product of the Industrial Age. It is just a fact that when Industrial Age high school counselors chose the next generation of teachers, they were not asked to pick the smartest, different-thinking people in your graduating class to be the next generation’s teachers. They were told to pick above class-average (C+/B- in your generation), majorly-confused students who could be melded to Industrial-Age thinking, and pass that obsolete paradigm on.
You support paying math-and-science teachers the same seniority-dependent salary scales as language arts and social studies teachers who didn’t work half as hard as math and science degree students who earned the same GPA’s in college. What you want is to promote is intellectual LAZINESS which means CONFUSION. Too bad for Wichita’s young students.
I note that Bill Warren (Republican) is the operator of the only theater to show the important movie “An Inconvenient Truth”
I note also that he is giving it the same treatment that he did “Fahrenheit 911″ Namely placing it in a second hand venue long after it was screened elsewhere.I’ve seen this before. It was a published editorial to the Eagle from me that helped get the film “Bowling for Columbine shown at a Warren theater. Also after it was mostly seen elsewhere and again in a second hand format.Though I am pleased to be able to see the film, I question whether Warrens second hand treatment of it is more politically expedient than not showing it at all which would have GUARANTEED calls of “censorship” for ideological reasons. Again I am glad for the oportunity to see it, but the presentation smacks of “well here this is , for what it is worth”
heartlander…………..your hate for the public school system is obvious. I make a simple, informative comment and you go off on your asinine diatribe. What gives heartlander?
You know nothing about me, yet you continue to mount personal attacks. You still don’t get it. I do not care what you think.
Your opinion of public education is definitely extremist. You will never get your changes babbling on about scrapping the system.
The only bloggers who even rarely jump to your aid are the ones who are also obviously whack jobs.
You are irrelevant.
Apophis, of course I know a lot about you–because you are a simpleton. I figured out you were a pub ed teacher a long time ago. When you called me a “wacko right winger” which was totally erroneous–I’m not even a “conservative” according to things like making campaign contributions to Howard Dean and a Hispanic Wichita candidate, envelop-stuffing for other D candidates, but NEVER doing such for any republicans, my last R vote being for Reagan, et al–but it’s okay. You’re a dumb hinterlander. You’ve never been taught how to ANALYZE FACTS.
You don’t support 21st century public education. You support early 20th-century, industrialist-capitalist-designed public eduation. These aren’t the same thing. But you are too uneducated to understand the difference. You were enticed to be a public school teacher because you weren’t very smart.
You want to be an alpha-male ram in a sheep herd, letting the wolves tear up most of the flock, including all the lambs. Too bad for the lambs in your flock. It doesn’t matter to you, does it, you big sheep stud you. Oh you have such big horns. What a leader you are. Go ahead and say it, like you always do, “Baaah. Baaah.”
Or maybe you are a manly bull. Did you ever figure out why there are far fewer bulls in a cow herd, and far fewer rams in a sheep flock than females? Just like public education. Gee, why do we have so many more females than males in public schools, but males dominating at the top, when in the general human population the sexes are about equal in number? I guess that is a little over your head. Nobody ever taught you how to do research. Go ahead and say what you normally say, “MooAAH.”
heartlander……you are SO full of shit it’s pathetic.
Apophis, I’m just pointing out facts.
In brainwork fields, including accounting, archeology, architecture, art, astronomy, chemistry, computer science, economics, engineering, geology, journalism, law, materials science, mathematics, medicine, nanotechnology, paleontology, physics, politics, et al, males predominate. They also predominate in the humanities and in administrative leadership in universities and in corporate executive leadership.
My point here is not that women can’t excel in these things, because they can and do. Rather I would direct you to consider that with the opening of the economy to women after WWII, and particularly after the 1960’s, smart women were given a cornucopia of career opportunities denied their mothers and grandmothers. The teachers’ talent pool has been substantially brain-drained, not because I am rabidly anti-public education, but because women have exercised choices that their forebears were denied.
Now consider, if half of new lawyers and doctors, as well as more than half of all new college students and graduates, are women, then shouldn’t half of new teachers today be men? That we haven’t seen this economy-mirroring evolution in public education informs any analyst that education’s staffing paradigm, designed in the late 19th century, is archaic in the 21st century.
This is corroborated by half of new public school teachers abandoning the field within five years of starting teaching. They realize, “This system isn’t working.” If 10% of new teachers quit, one could convincingly argue that the system was sound, but the exodists made wrong early-career choices. But when you lose 50% of your young faculty, it means that the system itself is unsound. These lost teachers are people in whom society has made substantial investments, and who have spent years training to be teachers. Something is seriously wrong here.
You yourself could support giving young teachers leadership positions and redesigning public education. But you don’t do that. No, you’ve “paid your dues”, while they haven’t, so you deserve a leadership position and they don’t. Besides, they have so much to learn before they can become effective leaders. But, whether you realize it or not, you want them to become inured to the system, and to lose their original insights, and young-adult energy that are necessary to make substantive change possible
This is why your insistence that public educators will guide the development of a 21st educational system is obviously wrong. When major change is called for, the least qualified people to lead change are middle-agers who as young people accepted the old system, and then became comfortable in it after they mastered its rules and regimens. It’s a lot harder to LEARN NEW THINGS when you are older, which is a necessary predicate to overhauling outdated systems.
You are an ardent unionist. Unionism is designed to aid people who work in low-tier occupations who who must collectivize to negotiate with management because they are not respected as individuals. Most of your fiftysomething peers haven’t personally negotiated their own contract terms for a job in decades. Indeed, for those whose only past employment outside of teaching consisted of high school and college hourly-wage jobs, they have never engaged in a personal job-contract negotiation, other than listening to a hiring manager list the job description, rules of conduct and pay, and accepting the terms.
Negotiation is an extremely important skill in this century. If you don’t have the skill, but instead let others negotiate your job description and pay rate by proxy, and then when you are in class, you don’t have to negotiate with kids, because you command them, then you can’t instill personal negotiating skills in children.
You have shown this ineptitude on these web pages, because you have to make cogent arguments to consummate successful negotiations. You don’t make cogent arguments. You also have to understand the other side’s thinking, in order to navigate to a point of mutual consent. Your ranting against me shows a clear absence of this quintessential insight as well.
If take a position, but do not know how to cogently argue the merits of your position, and make honest concessions from time to time, then you aren’t doing children a service by being their commander in the classroom.
I have previously argued for differential pay to attract talented math and science teachers. Since you aren’t one of these teachers, it isn’t your problem if schools do not have qualified math and science teachers, but it is a serious problem for Wichita, Kansas and the United States.
Your cohort would rather import Filipino math and science teachers, because they are willing to work for the uniform seniority-based salary scale that you insist is nonnegotiable.
But you aren’t even considering the fact that this scheme will siphon math and science teaching talent from the Phillipines, a country that has paid to train this talent. You want to exploit a resource that somebody else has invested to create. You are so obsessed with “equal salaries” that you’re willing to rob another country to maintain an obsolete “equal salary” paradigm in your public school system.
For that matter, you aren’t even considering the fact that if math and science teachers were paid their open-market value, so that talented people could be brought into our schools, it would encourage more American kids to study math and science–knowledgeable teachers have this kind of impact on children–and even encourage many math and science-talented kids to become teachers.
There are things that you don’t comprehend, such as if you design systems wisely, there are beneficial future consequences.
Achieving sound math and science instruction isn’t your area of interest. But if people like you deny the problem, and obstruct change, do you think that society at large is going to adopt your view, just to keep you happy? Not likely. So other people will lead change, while you fume and rant against it.
Change will occur through small experiments. Some will work better than others, and people will enlarge the ones that work well.
The educational system you understand is not designed to accept and foster innovation. But we need major innovation in education. This is what you really fear most, seeing innovations happening that you cannot grasp, and that therefore make you feel marginalized as these innovations take root and grow.
Private education has grown enormously in the past decade. Home schooling has evolved from an ex-hippies-led exercise in fundamentalism to an amazing intellectually-rich endeavor that, using modern telecommunications technology and academic summer programs, is getting kids into every public university in the country. Emporia State, Kansas’s oldest teachers college, says this:
“Emporia State University is proud to be enrolling an increasing number of home-schooled students.” http://www.emporia.edu/admissions/homeschool.htm
Why would a PUBLIC university, A TRAINING INSTITUTION FOR PUBLIC EDUCATORS be PROUD to enroll home-schooled students? Perhaps “this does not compute” in your brain. But there is a reason for it–ESU’s faculty have found that home-schooled kids, by and large, are good to excellent students. They are act maturely. They are focused in class. They are self-disciplined consistent-studiers, because their parents didn’t train them to procrastinate and cram for exams.
ESU’s support of home education, along with every other public university in Kansas, may dismay you, but it’s reality. Get used to it.
Write all the garbage you want on this blog………………it matters NOT, you are never going to change a thing.
You just keep telling yourself that you make a difference. LOL
Things have ALREADY CHANGED Apophis. When I was born, the average Caucasian American woman’s age of first childbirth was 19. It’s now 25. In Europe it’s 28. There are numerous private schools and affluent-suburban public schools where most first-born kindergartners’ parents are over 35 years old.
This demographic shift means many things. It implies that schools have to respect parents, who have a lot more knowledge and maturity than their forebears. Public educators can’t patronize them as it did their parents and grandparents. If you say, “Well I don’t see this demographic shift in my school,” then maybe it’s because privatization has taken these people from the publics.
In several states, public schools are campaigning for private corporate donations in lieu of raising taxes. If this trend increases, private corporations will ultimately exert pressure on schools to “play ball” if they want to be paid. The MATHCOUNTS competition, with more than 1000 public schools participating, is a private-sector-led campaign. Raytheon is spending $1 million a year on it. Raytheon’s CEO expects to influence public school math instruction. I wouldn’t bet against him or his CEO friends. These are really smart people who don’t drive to Topeka to rally. They work with leaders around the globe. Their horizons are a lot wider than you can imagine.
Just because you don’t see external forces reshaping education doesn’t mean they aren’t. It just means that Kansas is 20 years behind the leading edge, and you don’t get out much, but Kansans like you can’t halt the forces of change.
you’re missing the point heartlander……………YOU will never be part of any changes.
Apophis, don’t you read you own posts?
You should not be accusing anyone of making personal attacks.
Most of what you write is a personal attack. Don’t you realize that?
Here’s a personal attack……kiss my ass O Steve.
I guess I’ve been put in my place!
Yes, you have.
Sigh…
Don’t worry. The president said today (6/26), Hey, I’ve got a plan for greenhouse gases. Finally, the sixth year into his presidency, it’s never too late. I’m so relieved. The president keeps his word, right? At least he’s no longer saying 1) what greenhouse gases? or 2) I can’t do anything about greenhouse gases.
GEORGE BUSH:When you rearrange the letters:HE BUGS GORE
Apophis, I am already a proactive change agent. I bought the first-generation Mac in 1984. Got a computer into my kids’ hands in 1986. Did I have a computer growing up? No. I taught algebra I to a 6th grader and geometry when he was a 7th grader. Not my own child. A brilliant mind. Did I take algebra I in 6th grade and geometry in 7th? No. I had to work 80 hours a week to do this. And he responded. So he’s attending a summer program, taking a physics course with gifted mostly 9th-grade completers in one of the nation’s top-10 universities. Why? Because I can recognize extraordinary talent. I know how to feed it.
Have you done these things? No, because you aren’t a change agent. You’re a relic of the past. You are obsolete, and revolution is freaking you out.
Why do you even bother heartlander?
Why do you continue to respond to me if I am such a “relic from the past”?
No one really cares what you think, either on this Blog or in the real world. You are irrelevant.