• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Mark Steyn: The Ecopalypse, 96 Months Away? (Prince Charles)

Abdul Alhazred

Philosopher
A
Joined
Sep 4, 2003
Messages
6,023
Mark Steyn: The Ecopalypse, 96 Months Away?
Syndicated column via The Bulletin (Philadelphia)

According to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, we only have 96 months left to save the planet.

...


It takes a prince, heir to the thrones of Britain and Canada and Australia, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea and a bunch of other places, to tell it like it is: You pampered consumerists are ruining the joint. In the old days, we didn’t have these kinds of problems.

But then Mr and Mrs Peasant start remodeling the hovel, adding a rec room and indoor plumbing, replacing the emaciated old nag with a Honda Civic and driving to the mall in it, and next thing you know instead of just having an extra yard of mead every Boxing Day at the local tavern and adding a couple more pustules to the escutcheon with the local trollop they begin taking vacations in Florida.

When it was just medieval dukes swanking about like that, the planet worked fine: That was “sustainable” consumerism. But now the masses want in. And, once you do that, there goes the global neighborhood.

By contrast, as an example of an exemplary environmentalist, the Prince hailed his forebear, King Henry VIII. True, he had a lot of wives, but he did dramatically reduce Anne Boleyn’s carbon footprint.

...
Click to expand...

And a little something for Americans:

...

Capitalism is liberating: You’re born a peasant but you don’t have to die one. You can work hard and get a nice place in the suburbs. If you were a 19th century Russian peasant and you got to Ellis Island, you’d be living in a tenement on the Lower East Side, but your kids would get an education and move uptown, and your grandkids would be doctors and accountants in Westchester County.

And your great-grandchild would be a Harvard-educated environmental activist demanding an end to all this electricity and indoor toilets.


...
Click to expand...

Just had to share. :cool:
 
The simple solution to global warming.

1. Identify the people with the top 10% of carbon footprints, with no allowances for offsets.
2. Take them out and shoot them.

In one stroke, you get rid of probably 25% of carbon emissions and enviro-hypocrites like Prince Charles and Al Gore. It's a win/win scenario!
 
Hmmm... it sounds like you're advocating murder. My favorite anarcho-capitalist, Alex Libman, was recently banned for expressing similar thoughts, but about people who wanted to ENSLAVE him to the state.

Mark Steyn is a wretched person.
 
Brainster said:
The simple solution to global warming.

1. Identify the people with the top 10% of carbon footprints, with no allowances for offsets.
2. Take them out and shoot them.

In one stroke, you get rid of probably 25% of carbon emissions and enviro-hypocrites like Prince Charles and Al Gore. It's a win/win scenario!
Click to expand...

We could always make NASA stop shooting off space shuttles. I forget how many emissions a single launch puts in the atmosphere but it's staggering.
 
Isaac Asimov, over 30 years ago (1975) wrote a similar -- better, I think -- article, "best foot backwards".

The romantics who wish for the "golden age" before technology "ruined" the planet with its pollution always think that, without technology, there will always be masses of people -- OTHER people -- to do all the dirty, boring, back-breaking work, the "natural" way, in "harmony with nature", without "polluting the enviornment".

They always imagine themselves as lords, priests, philosophers, architects, gentlemen-farmers, whatever -- never as the slaves, serfs, peasants or servants that made up 95% and more of the population in this pristine state of technology-free harmony with nature.

Their banner is, "up with slavery!" -- or, more precisely, "up with slavery for other people!".
 
Last edited:
If HRH would consider that breeding and inbreeding are related problems in over population with stupid people, he might not be so quick to stand upon his silver soap box and wax verbose.

Too many people, the self destructive penchant for population growth inherent in human nature, coming once again to a neo-Malthusian climax. The self checking mechanisms of war, famine, and disease are under attack. He's part of the problem.

HRH ought to know that a splendid little war that kills off a few billion (of someone else) will make things right as rain for a generation or two.

Or did he miss that part of Kingship class by sleeping through it?
 
Last edited:
What I want to know is what anybody CARES what he says about anything except, perhaps, his own life.
 
Skeptic said:
What I want to know is what anybody CARES what he says about anything except, perhaps, his own life.
Click to expand...
The 24/7 media care, as they keep insisting that he makes good copy, and they need to make the rent payment.
 
Here. Have another. :)

Revenge of the Aristocrats
Brendan O’Neill in National Review

...

The British green lobby is stuffed with the sons and daughters of privilege, for whom environmentalism provides a perfect, scientifically tinged gloss for expressing in a new way their old foul prejudices against mass, modern society.

Many of the major players in British environmentalism are posh, rich, and hectoring. One of Charles’s top advisers is Jonathon Porritt, a former director of Friends of the Earth and a patron of the creepy Malthusian outfit, the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). Porritt is a graduate of Eton, Britain’s school of choice for the rich and well-connected, and is the son of Lord Porritt, the 11th Governor General of New Zealand. The increasingly influential OPT also counts Sir Crispin Tickell (who is as posh as his name suggests) and Lady Kulukundis, the wife of a Greek shipping magnate, among its patrons.

The head of the organic-promoting Soil Association, Peter Melchett, is also known as the Fourth Baron Melchett: that’s because he is the Eton-educated son of the Baron and Sir, Julian Mond — former chairman of the British Steel Corporation — and is heir to Sir Alfred Mond’s extraordinary ICI fortune. Melchett is the man who spearheaded the Soil Association’s recent attempts to prevent poverty-stricken African farmers from flying their organic produce to Britain on the basis that the “air miles” would further pollute the planet. This is what we call eco-colonialism.

...
Click to expand...
 
It must be something in the water.

I remember meeting an environmental activist British woman a bit more than 10 years ago who informed me in absolute seriousness: "We cannot allow the Chinese to have refrigerators."
 
Cain said:
Hmmm... it sounds like you're advocating murder.
Click to expand...

Yes, and Jonathan Swift advocated eating babies.

:rolleyes:

My favorite anarcho-capitalist, Alex Libman, was recently banned for expressing similar thoughts, but about people who wanted to ENSLAVE him to the state.
Click to expand...

Actually he was promising to kill federal officials who might arrest him for income tax evasion.

Mark Steyn is a wretched person.
Click to expand...

I'm sure it pains him greatly that you feel that way.
 
There is a total logical disconnect between human global warming and the proposed solutions.

Let us stipulate that environmental laws are a good thing in a general way even if it adds to the costs of industry. As it might be fire codes, occupational safety, or wage and hour laws. BTW, this is my actual position.

Now let us further stipulate that AGW exists. That it's really a serious problem.

You are now given two choices:

1) Do nothing about CO2 emissions and somehow adapt to the consequences.

2) Implement cap-and-trade so that well connected rich people can get even richer by speculating while making everyone else poorer. Eliminate the middle class (except for government workers) and make the really poor people starve. Pollute the hell out of the world (not just CO2) by exporting industry to countries that don't have environmental laws. And do nothing about CO2 emissions (except move them around) and somehow adapt to the consequences, while politicians point fingers or maybe round up heretics.

Actually there's a third choice, often combined with the second, favored by "the international community" and scientsts who happen to work for the UN.

3) Global taxes paid to the UN. Because the UN is a good outfit to control the climate. Especially in Africa.
 
Last edited:
xXMoshtradamusXx said:
We could always make NASA stop shooting off space shuttles. I forget how many emissions a single launch puts in the atmosphere but it's staggering.
Click to expand...

You probably forget because you never knew in the first place. The Space Shuttle Main Engines use liquid hydrogen fuel and liquid oxygen oxidizer. The result of such combustion is (let me know if you need help with the chemistry)... Water.

The Solid Rocket Boosters (those two skinny, pointed things stuck to the sides of the large orange fuel tank if you had ever bothered to watch a launch or check into the Space Shuttle system) use almost entirely ammonium perchlorate and metallic aluminum for propulsion, with small amounts of iron oxide and polymers. The vast majority of the combustion products? Aluminum oxide, hydrogen chloride, water. Some CO2 is produced, but it is a small fraction of the total.

Add to that the fact that there is some benefit to the occasional Shuttle missions vs., for example, delivering pizzas in some beater honda civic, I'll take the negligible carbon footprint of a shuttle launch any day (or about six days a year or so).

You could have found out most of this with 2.5 minutes worth of web-searching before posting.
 
aThis has nothing to do with Charles, but with science and how to deal with a global issue that is already affecting the earths environment.

It is interesting how such an issue can be reduced to a pitiful level of debate rhetoric by people such as Steyn.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom