Think the coal supporters’ “smiling dictators†newspaper advertisement was over the top? It was nothing compared with the spoof negative ad that The Eagle’s Opinion staff produced. Our ad says that evil madmen — including Osama bin Laden and Albert Gore — are laughing about KDHE’s permit denial. And it warns that the smoking gun of natural gas could turn into a mushroom cloud. Here’s a link to a New York Times blog item about our ad.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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34 Comments
Regardless of all the various ads, editorials by the NY Times and The Wichita Eagle for that matter … KANSAS DOES NOT WANT OR NEED THE AIR POLLUTION AND UNDERGROUND WATER AQUIFER GULPING COAL-FIRED POWER PLANTS PROPOSED FOR WEST OF GARDEN CITY.
AND WE DON’T WANT NATURAL GAS FIRED POWER PLANTS EITHER IF THE NATURAL GAS IS GOING TO COME FROM THE HUGOTON, KANSAS NATURAL GAS FIELDS.
Regarding the Hugoton, Kansas natural gas fields in southwestern Kansas, the reason we don’t want those fields used for the proposed new power plants is that this would drive the price of natural gas SKYHIGH that is used for Kansas businesses and homes.
SO IF THEY WANT TO IMPORT NATURAL GAS FROM OTHER COUNTRIES, THAT IS FINE WITH ME.
The real answers to our Kansas power needs is to build more wind farms in certain areas designated by a state-wide citizens planning committee based on proposed and existing power transmission lines. Without knowing more about transmission lines, I suggest a wind farm be built on a line from Cullison or Greensburg north to Kinsley, Kansas on the Arkansas River.
And start a crash program of conservation of electrical power. The various governmental units in Kansas would be a good place to begin. Simply reducing the size of incandescent light bulbs by one notch, from 100 watt to 60 watt, from 60 watt to 40 watt, and so forth would help.
Turn lights off at night where not needed.
The coiled flourescent bulbs should NOT be used until light bulb manufacturers find a way to omit the mercury in flourescent bulbs to keep from poisoning our land fills which leech downward into underground aquifers.
I suspect a list could be developed explaining 100 simple ways to conserve energy by individuals, business and government … THIS IS NEEDED NOW INSTEAD OF MORE CARTOONS.
Hey, this is Kansas..you know we don’t do well with irony and satire. Hard to get for us common folk
Hey, when you have folks like the speaker of house appearing before college kids and says “Did anyone die?” after he opens a can of pop and releasing co2, then I say let the pro coal have all the time and energy it needs to go over the top.
Hats off to the The Eagle’s Opinion staff for an excellent spoof. And good on the NY Times for catching it. It’s about time the rest of the country sees something out of Kansas that doesn’t make us look like a bunch of ultra conservative hay seeds.
The coiled flourescent bulbs should NOT be used until light bulb manufacturers find a way to omit the mercury in flourescent bulbs to keep from poisoning our land fills which leech downward into underground aquifers.Posted by: JWink | November 10, 2007 at 03:30 AM
JWink,You’d be surprised how far light bulb manufacturers have come to reduce the amount of mercury that goes into a fluorescent lamp.
The mercury problem comes from business because business is where most fluorescent lamps are used. Companies that are environmentally responsible take advantage of programs that reclaim mercury in spent lamps.
Being environmentally responsible is good for business.
The fact that the plant would emit mecury is a problem. The problem is not Co2. Co2 is a life giving gas, people. If you reduce the Co2 in an enviroment, you are suffocating plants dependant on photosynthesis. You might as well cover them all with plastic bags.When an enviroment is Co2 rich then nature compensates with more plant life. You people do like to eat vegetables ,right? You like having plenty of oxygen to breathe? You do know that plants produce oxygen as a waste, right? To block the power plant over a debatable point is ridiculous.
To see a bunch of propaganda is idiotic, let me know when Al Gore has the balls to finally debate any of the hundreds of scientists who have challenged him.However, Alternative power should be investigated and utilized.
Kansas needs more natural gas fired power plants so our price of natural gas will go sky high. We need to build more Ethanol plants to use up our underground water reservoir under central and western Kansas. Then we can get the legislature to pass water conservation laws after the water is gone.
Great job guys.
Once again, editorial staff, you have made national news with your video.
Thanks guys, keep up the good work.
I’m waiting on their spoof of the Wichita Wingnuts. Damn, could there BE a more appropriate name for the capital of Wingnuttia?
XXX: I switched a few incandescent bulbs to the new small “coiled” flourescent light bulbs. Then I noticed the warning on flourescent bulb packaging, “contains mercury.” Some WE bloggers claim it is
a small amount per bulb. In any case, if thousands of these flourescent/mercury bulbs are discarded into regular trash, they will currently go to the Harper County landfill.
You might recall that Harper County landfill proponents, mostly trash collection companies that use it, said, “Don’t worry, the bottom of the landfill will be covered with a thick vinyl covering to stop downward leeching of liquids.” However, within a short time after that landfill began to be used, some agency inspected the lining and found that it had already been punctured and penetrated.
So the towns and cities downstream from the Harper County landfill along the Chikaskia River and eventually the Arkansas River will potentially get mercury in their drinking water. This includes some communities in Sumner County (county seat, Wellington) and, of course, Tulsa on the Arkansas River.
JWink – re: Hg in bulbs. That is why we recommend RECYCLING. Just like with the lead in car batteries.
So how to dispose of the dangerous mercury-containing fluorescent light bulbs, both the long tubular bulbs and the new small coiled fluorescent bulbs?
I discussed this with Lloyd Bonham, I believe an operations manager, at Sedgwick County’s “Household hazardous waste facility.” This is located in the county public works complex about one long block south of the Wichita West High School. Their telephone # is 660-7464.
Mr. Bonham showed me they have special insulated containers which they use to collect these mercury-containing fluorescent light bulbs. He then sends them to a recycling facility in Phoenix, Arizona.
Sounds like a good business for someone to start in Wichita to serve the midwest.
JWink – the bast thing locally will be to get larger retailers to accept the bulbs and return them to ‘the system.’ I would not really want to see a local company try to get involved in the processing itself. It has to do with technology and scale economies.
Ben: Hg, Pb, NaCl, Sn, Ra, etc. AS YOU KNOW, WE DON’T NEED THEM IN OUR DRINKING WATER SUPPLY.
warmachine,
Plants are in no danger of “suffocating”. The CO2 level today is higher than it’s been in over 600,000 years — and rapidly climbing.
Climate science is “debated” in credible peer-reviewed science journals. Tell your “hundreds of scientists” to grow some balls, and submit their papers.
WSJ op-eds, and very deceptive films like ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ are anti-science.
I believe Time magazine or one of those show the effects of microbes in CO2 rich environments decompose.
The Eagle is so happy that their video caught the attention of their heros at the New Dork Times. They had to start a blog and tell others about it. It just makes the eagle look like petty newspaper looking for some attention.
“They had to start a blog and tell others about it.”
Posted by: john_s
WE Blog seems to have started in 2005.http://blogs.kansas.com/weblog/archives.html
Confirmed the WE Blog began operation mid June 2005.
I was there. Pretty quiet place the first couple of months.
Though I have it on good authority that john s is insane and that he should say hi to aaron, I’ll offer him a break.
Maybe he meant
“They had to start aTHREAD and tell others about it.”
Yeah so? They got noticed by the New York Times! I think they’ve a right to tell us about it.
Good again guys!
J R,
Yep, the Eagle’s spoof ad is great. I liked their use of “clean coal”(sic). And the young children, whose lives will be impacted both by global warming, and unwise investments in new coal plants.
Plus the giant sunflower growing out of the smokestack! :)
To those who whine about the Eagle’s spoof I would point out that they have also skewered Sebelius. And, in prior years, Bucky Walters did a great job on Joan Finney.
And they didn’t spare Dennis in the “I’m my wife’s grampa” bit either.
Humor. For the right, it is a difficult concept.
In fact, I think the Right loved the spoofs at Kucinich and Sebelius.
Another great video,
‘Coal: cheap, abundent, cheap’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71kckb8hhOQ
H/T to http://desmogblog.com/
The Bar association show did a hilarious bit on Kathleen and Hillary. Kathleen was trying to teach Hillary how to be likeable. Sure, they mercilessly gored a couple on ‘my side’ but I was rolling in laughter.
Another cute skit spoofed the oldest judge locally (part-ime now I think) – and he played himself!
Sometimes we just need to lighten up a bit.
A comment about coal. About a quarter century ago the ‘next big thing’ was synfuels based on coal. There were several approaches: Solvent refined coal and liquids and in situ gasification followed by eforming and Fischer-Tropsch being the two I am most familiar with. Ignoring the CO2 issue (which I didn’t know much about back then) these would have been a clean way to utilyze coal. However, the industry finds just burning it and ’sort of’ cleaning up the stack gases to be much cheaper.
Coal gasification?
I remember that. They wanted to build a plant here for it in the 70’s.
Glad they didn’t get that done. BIG fight as I remember but I was just a kid.
JR – 70s – probably the old ‘water gas’ technology followed by FT. We improved that a lot in the early 80s before the effrts were abandoned when the company was gobbled up by Chevron. They were following an ‘oil only’ approach.
Isn’t coal gasification a relatively clean operation now? I read something about one of the coal states receiving a grant to build a plant.
No, not yet. Lots of really nasty byproducts.
The interesting thing about the SRC process is that it was designed to produce a clean liquid fuel and a by-product carbon solid fuel at the same time. The idea is that there is already a lot of hydrogen in coal; in effect it is a very complew hydrocarbon rather than pure carbon. A sort of ’splitting’ process would give one fraction at stoichiometry (CH2)n (liquid, refinable) and C. Certain other technologies were being worked on to remove hetero-atoms (S, N, As, etc)
Unfortunately it was mostly terminated upon acquisition.
Other long time locals will remember that fight on a coal gasification plant. It went on and on.
Kansas does not have a lot of coal as far as I know. So I imagine the rationale for the plant was rather weak.
It does NOT stop others from trying to build coal type plants with weak rationale for doing so.
start choking out carbon emissions and see what will happen to plant life, give it a try, take a plant, put it in a tank and block it’s access to carbon. take another plant, and put it in a carbon heavy enviroment. Then come back and tell everyone what happened to each plant.Those scientists have produced papers, but the pick and choose policies of the media don’t generally pick them up. John Stossel did a report about them, go look it up. Al Gore sourced a group of thousands of scientists who signed on about Global warming, the ones in this report had to threaten lawsuits to get their names off of it,after the fact, because they were mislead about what the Al Gore report was all about.Now, tell Gore and the global carbon tax, world government idiots to grow that same set of balls.
“take a plant, put it in a tank and block it’s access to carbon.”
Are you planning to put the entire Earth in a tank?
‘How to Fool Other People’http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/how-to-fool-other-people/“John Stossel stars in a recent TV report that’s getting a lot of exposure in the denialist blogosphere. It’s basically the same old same old denialist garbage.”
‘Stossel’s tall tales about global warming’http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/10/stossels_tall_tales_about_glob.php
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=John_Stossel
“Are you planning to put the entire Earth in a tank?”
What a way to deflect rather than debate… how the hell is that a relevant response. If you drive the Co2 emissions down and down and down, then the plants will be undernourished, which means they will get weaker, smaller and not as productive in their own right. That means less food and oxygen.
By the way, what kind of sick, egomaniacal approach is it for humans to create programs designed to take credit for a process that has occurred many times in history. Go ask T-Rex and the Wooly Mammoth about natures trends of warming and cooling. I’m am getting sick of this globalist process of turning global warming into a religion. It happens, buy a coat and some sun block, be prepared and quit trying to force your belief systems on other people.The title of the stossel link you provided is telling to the agenda , when even the title of the story is a propaganists attempt at marginalizing a story that points at a different view.That approach simply magnifies that the closeminded one way approach of Globalist warming pedal stompers are a cadre of control freaks who can’t respond to the overwhelming evidence that the Sun and other long term natural cycles are responsible for climate change and thus have to resort to vile propagandistic personality attacks to sway the court of public opinion.
Timothy Ball, Chairman of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg, penned an outstanding piece in which he detailed how the illusion is being played out and how skeptics of the farce are increasingly being made pariahs simply for having an opposing view. Ball puts it better than I ever could so I make no apologies for quoting his article at length.
Global Warming, as we think we know it, doesn’t exist. And I am not the only one trying to make people open up their eyes and see the truth. But few listen, despite the fact that I was one of the first Canadian Ph.Ds. in Climatology and I have an extensive background in climatology, especially the reconstruction of past climates and the impact of climate change on human history and the human condition. Few listen, even though I have a Ph.D, (Doctor of Science) from the University of London, England and was a climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. For some reason (actually for many), the World is not listening. Here is why.
Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science. We are wasting time, energy and trillions of dollars while creating unnecessary fear and consternation over an issue with no scientific justification.
No sensible person seeks conflict, especially with governments, but if we don’t pursue the truth, we are lost as individuals and as a society. That is why I insist on saying that there is no evidence that we are, or could ever cause global climate change. And, recently, Yuri A. Izrael, Vice President of the United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed this statement. So how has the world come to believe that something is wrong?
Maybe for the same reason we believed, 30 years ago, that global cooling was the biggest threat: a matter of faith. “It is a cold fact: the Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species,” wrote Lowell Ponte in 1976.
I was as opposed to the threats of impending doom global cooling engendered as I am to the threats made about Global Warming. Let me stress I am not denying the phenomenon has occurred. The world has warmed since 1680, the nadir of a cool period called the Little Ice Age (LIA) that has generally continued to the present. These climate changes are well within natural variability and explained quite easily by changes in the sun. But there is nothing unusual going on.
Since I obtained my doctorate in climatology from the University of London, Queen Mary College, England my career has spanned two climate cycles. Temperatures declined from 1940 to 1980 and in the early 1970’s global cooling became the consensus. This proves that consensus is not a scientific fact. By the 1990’s temperatures appeared to have reversed and Global Warming became the consensus. It appears I’ll witness another cycle before retiring, as the major mechanisms and the global temperature trends now indicate a cooling.
No doubt passive acceptance yields less stress, fewer personal attacks and makes career progress easier. What I have experienced in my personal life during the last years makes me understand why most people choose not to speak out; job security and fear of reprisals. Even in University, where free speech and challenge to prevailing wisdoms are supposedly encouraged, academics remain silent.
No one disagrees with the notion that global warming is occurring, but to discount the fact that it has anything to do with that giant flaming ball of fire in our sky that we can barely look at without being blinded is ignorance unparalleled.
How do we square the fact that almost every planet in our solar system is simultaneously undergoing temperature change and volatile weather patterns? Does this not suggest that global warming is a natural cycle as a result of the evolving nature of the sun and other celestial phenomena? Can Al Gore fill me in on this one?
Mars, Pluto, Jupiter, Saturn, Triton and numerous other nooks and crannies throughout the solar system are experiencing warming trends and volatile weather patterns. How many SUV’s are there on Jupiter?
The earth and its celestial counterparts are getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time in the past 1,000 years, according to a study undertaken by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany.
In addition, cosmic rays from exploding stars have now been found to contribute substantially to cloud formation and the greenhouse effect as the London Times has reported.
The simple fact is that throughout the ages the earth has swung wildly between a warm, wet, stable climate, to a cold, dry and windy one – long before the first fossil fuel was burned. The changes we are now witnessing are a walk in the park compared to the battering that our rugged planet has taken in the past.
This is not a defense of the oil cartels or the Neo-Con wreckers, who would have every motivation to ignore global warming whether it is man-made or not.
Nor is it a blanket denial of the fact that the earth is getting very gradually hotter, but how do we reconcile global warming taking place at the farthest reaches of the solar system with the contention that it is caused by human activity? Have our exhaust fumes left earth’s atmosphere and slipped through a black hole to Triton?
Countless other heroes of science have put their reputation and careers on the line in the name of truth to expose the man-made fraud and challenge the creeping fascism being engendered by means of using political correctness to hijack the debate. They have bucked the orthodoxy and risked being stripped of their credentials, as the Weather Channel’s most prominent climatologist would have it. Here are several insightful statements from these brave individuals.
I have been in operational meteorology since 1978, and I know dozens and dozens of broadcast meteorologists all over the country. Our big job: look at a large volume of raw data and come up with a public weather forecast for the next seven days. I do not know of a single TV meteorologist who buys into the man-made global warming hype. I know there must be a few out there, but I can’t find them. Billions of dollars of grant money is flowing into the pockets of those on the man-made global warming bandwagon. No man-made global warming, the money dries up. This is big money, make no mistake about it. Always follow the money trail and it tells a story. Even the lady at “The Weather Channel” probably gets paid good money for a prime time show on climate change. No man-made global warming, no show, and no salary. Nothing wrong with making money at all, but when money becomes the motivation for a scientific conclusion, then we have a problem. For many, global warming is a big cash grab. The climate of this planet has been changing since God put the planet here. It will always change, and the warming in the last 10 years is not much difference than the warming we saw in the 1930s and other decades. And, lets not forget we are at the end of the ice age in which ice covered most of North America and Northern Europe.ABC-TV Meteorologist James Spann.
“It’s not 2,500 people offering their consensus, I participated in that. Each person who is an author writes one or two pages in conjunction with someone else. They travel around the world several times a year for several years to write it and the summary for policymakers has the input of about 13 of the scientists, but ultimately, it is written by representatives of governments, of environmental organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists, and industrial organizations, each seeking their own benefit.”MIT’s Professor of Atmospheric Science Dr. Richard Lindzen on the IPCC report.
“Climate keeps changing all the time. The fact that climate changes is not in itself a threat.”Dr. S. Fred Singer, Atmospheric Physicist at George Mason University.
Man-made global warming feeds into humanity’s arrogant self-importance in thinking that it has become the master and therefore the decider of the earth’s destiny. On an individual level, it also helps a person stroke their ego and feel good about themselves for recycling a few beer cans or wine bottles in the belief that they’re saving the planet, and also gives them the excuse to exercise their judgment against anyone who doesn’t do likewise.
Fearmongering about an imminent climate doomsday also hogs news coverage and important environmental issues like GM food, mad scientist chimera cloning and the usurpation and abuse of corporations like Monsanto flies under the radar.
Global warming is cited as an excuse to meter out further control and surveillance over our daily lives, RFID chips on our trash cans, GPS satellite tracking and taxation by the mile, as well as a global tax at the gas pump.
The extremist wing of the environmentalist movement, characterized by people like Dr. Erik Pianka, advocate the mass culling of humanity via plagues and state sanctioned bio-terrorism, in order to “save” the earth from the disease of humanity. Nazi-like genocidal population control measures and the environmental establishment have always held a close alliance.
The world is laboring under enforced adherence to a program of mass deception while scientists who attempt to blow the whistle on the fraud are silenced, tarred, ridiculed and fired. The biased control freaks at the United Nations and their intellectually spayed cheerleaders, whose goal it is to use the hysteria of climate change to impose draconian control measures on society and centralize world power, have declared “case closed” on the man-made origins of global warming. However, their foolish attempts to zealously mute mere expression of an opposing view betray the inherent flaws of their own mantra and will ultimately lead to its downfall.
Have A Nice Day.