Another Quote of the Day: Two Views on Polar Bears
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 11.25.08
In his erudite analysis of the global warming issue, Don Blankenship of Massey Coal expressed his opinion about the future of polar bears:
“If Pelosi thinks that decreasing CO2 in this country is going to save the polar bears, she’s crazy. If CO2 emissions are going to kill the polar bears, it’s going to happen. What we do here [in the US] is not going to it.”
Interestingly, George Monbiot is not shedding tears for them either, worrying about the warming of the arctic and the loss of ice cover:
Forget the sodding polar bears: this is about all of us. As the ice disappears, the region becomes darker, which means that it absorbs more heat.
More gratuitous pictures of cute polar bears
Monbiot writes that this will lead to the melting of the permafrost.
The effects of melting permafrost are not incorporated into any global climate models. Runaway warming in the Arctic alone could flip the entire planet into a new climatic state. The Middle Climate could collapse faster and sooner than the grimmest forecasts proposed.Barack Obama’s speech to the US climate summit last week was an astonishing development. It shows that, in this respect at least, there really is a prospect of profound political change in America. But while he described a workable plan for dealing with the problem perceived by the Earth Summit of 1992, the measures he proposes are now hopelessly out of date. The science has moved on. The events the Earth Summit and the Kyoto process were supposed to have prevented are already beginning. Thanks to the wrecking tactics of Bush the elder, Clinton (and Gore) and Bush the younger, steady, sensible programmes of the kind that Obama proposes are now irrelevant. As the PIRC report suggests, the years of sabotage and procrastination have left us with only one remaining shot: a crash programme of total energy replacement.
I just don't know who to believe, George or Don. More at Monbiot
George Monbiot Is a "Fructivist"
George Monbiot on Flying is Dying
George Monbiot on the Pleasures of the Flesh
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As George Carlin said:
"Oh, 'save the planet! Save the planet!' The planet is FINE! It's the people that are fucked!"
The rock we call Earth will still be here. It just won't be inhabitable for us.
Lloyd, I think the quote from Don's speech is a bit hashed... the last sentence there seems to make no sense
"what we do here [in the US] is not going to ??? it"
And f**k George simply for saying "forget the sodding polar bears". I'm not ARA or anything but, thats just a really self centered, careless statement
I think Monbiot's comment is born of the frustration of seeing inaction and wanting to wake us up to the fact that this is not just the extinction of another species, but extinction of us and all life as we know it.