WHEN PENGUINS FLEW AND WATER BURNED This is the true memoir of one US Air Force navigator’s journey from the schoolhouses of Air Training Command to the nuclear alerts of the Cold War to combat in a 35-year-old anachronism called the B-52. It is a first-hand account of life during the last days of Strategic Air Command, the early days of Air Combat Command and the ensuing military drawdown of the 1990s. From peacetime training exercises across the globe to combat operations in Desert Storm, Jim Clonts takes the reader inside the cockpit where life and death are seconds apart. Often comical, sometimes heart-pounding, other times tragic, WHEN PENGUINS FLEW AND WATER BURNED takes you into the world of military aviation, a crucible where warriors learn the true nature of character, conscience and mortality.

Friends of Liberty VOL 28
by Jim Clonts, 2009

10/13/09

Our Impact on the Environment

After the Soviet Union broke up, Communism was widely discredited on the world scene. The communist, socialist and anti-capitalist movements in this country had to find a new, less conspicuous home. They found it in the modern environmental movement.

Nearly every tenant of the modern environmental movement is anti-capitalist, anti-growth and redistributive in nature. The argument is that capitalism is an unfair system for the distribution of scarce resources, the same argument used when they were pure communists, but now linked to the environment and more recently the climate. They argue our capitalist economy is gobbling up the Earth's resources while our industries, power plants and automobiles are poisoning the planet. A non-growth (read: sustainable), redistributive economy will save the planet. Given the polluted and poisoned landscapes of the former Soviet Union and its satellites, socialism/communism is a hard sell, however, couch the same philosophy in the "green" rhetoric of saving the Earth and...presto...public support.

Who isn't for a clean environment? Who can honestly defend pollution? Once upon a time, there were little to no regulations concerning industrial pollution or automobile emissions and this did lead to acid rain, slaughterhouses dumping blood and animal wastes in our rivers and streams, as well as chemicals dumped into poisoned landfills. As a society we took action and the Government passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. These regulations have radically transformed our environment in the last thirty years. Lake Erie was a dead sea of pollution, but is now back from the brink, alive and vibrant. Acid rain is a thing of the past with scrubbers installed on our coal-fired power plants. Today there are tens of millions more vehicles on our highways than there were in 1970, but the particulate matter, NOx and SOx have been reduced by about 90%. Cars run much cleaner thanks to catalytic converters, metered fuel injection and re-formulated gasolines.

Our rivers no longer host dead carcasses from slaughter houses and modern sewage treatment plants discharge cleaner water to our rivers and lakes than the water companies extract. In fact, a survey done a few years ago indicates the United States is more heavily forested today than in 1900. That makes sense when you think about how much wood was burned for fuel in those days. That wood smoke is also absent from our lungs. And speaking of smoke...the replacement of residential coal furnaces with electric and natural gas has lifted the haze from our cities and the black from our lungs. We are cleaner today than ever before in our history.

How many times do you see on the news photos or videos of factories and power plants belching clouds of white smoke from their stacks? These images are always shown in relation to some environmental story and is intended to imprint in the viewers minds the flagrant abuse of our environment by corporate America. Have you ever noticed those videos are always shot in the winter? That's because the clouds of white smoke are actually water vapor condensing in the cold air, usually from non-polluting cooling towers. The same coal-fired power plants that spew heavy white clouds in winter, have little to no visible emissions in the summer months thanks to scrubbers, fluidized bed combustors and other pollution-control devices now in use. I was particularly angered by a local news report attacking industries for polluting while showing billowing white clouds of water condensation coming from a nuclear power plant, which was emitting no pollutants at all. Either the media are completely ignorant, which is possible, or they are culpable in deceiving the layman.

To the chagrin of the modern anti-capitalist/environmentalist, industry has responded and we are cleaner today than ever before with reduced particulate emissions, reduced NOx and SOx and pollutants in our waters. Under RCRA and TSCA hazardous wastes are heavily regulated and kept from our land, air and water.

The plan to curtail capitalism through regulation of pollutants has failed---so what do you do if you are a modern environmental socialist? Simple---declare carbon dioxide a pollutant. If one believes in conspiracies, this one is too good to pass up. If a group of anti-capitalists were searching for a substance upon which capitalism hinges, carbon dioxide is the perfect target. You say, why not target oil or coal? If you tell the average American coal and oil is destroying the planet, they will say bullshit, we've spent decades putting pollution control devices in place to reduce emissions. The air's cleaner today than any time in the last hundred years. But if you tell them an odor-less, colorless, non-toxic gas produced by the combustion of coal and oil is changing the climate---they just don't know. Carbon dioxide is the perfect target. It is released in nearly every human activity and that is, after all, the point---to reduce human activity.

I firmly believe that oxides of nitrogen and sulfur are pollutants. I believe heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, chromium, etc in our water are pollutants. I believe particulates (smoke and dust) in our air are pollutants. But carbon dioxide? I exhale carbon dioxide. All green plants on the planet require carbon dioxide to grow. It's part of the cycle of life. Carbon dioxide is absorbed by plants and they emit oxygen so we can breathe, the carbon molecules becoming part of their organic structure. It's called photosynthesis.

In a touch of irony too good to ignore, the new Honda hybrid actually shows green leaves growing on a dashboard display when in electric mode and leaves shrinking when the engine is burning gasoline. In nature, the exact opposite would happen. The leaves would thrive on the carbon dioxide released.

The beauty of global warming theory is it's versatility. It relies entirely on the present circumstances. According to stories I've read expounding this theory it causes extreme heat, extreme cold, floods, droughts, hurricanes, lack of hurricanes, mud slides, forest fires in California and blizzards in New England.

The data collection showing global temperature increases is also faulty. Ever notice where most of the NOAA weather stations are located? On the tarmac at airports, surrounded by heat reflecting concrete and subject to heat from jet exhaust. You say, come on, an occasional jet taxiing by wouldn't skew the data very much (unless you're talking Chicago O'Hare or Atlanta-Hartzfield, right?). Remember, the experts are basing all global warming on a .6 degree temperature rise over the last hundred years. That's point six.

Scientists routinely point to the temperatures and ice cover at the poles as an indicator of global warming. This data, too, gets perverted. Proponents say the temperature at the south pole is warming, but the station they base this on is on a peninsula and isolated from most of Antarctica. Data from other stations in Antarctica conflict with the one commonly cited. NASA even recently admitted the software they were using to decipher satellite images of the poles was flawed and vastly underestimated the actual ice pack coverage of the north pole. I did not see this on the news. I saw it on the NASA website.

By the way, the last year for rising global temperatures was 1998. There has been a steady decline every year since and that .6 degrees is nearly gone. How can that be possible, since CO2 emissions have increased in the last ten years on the order of 15% globally, thanks to China and India. How do you get a decrease in temperature with a 15% increase in CO2. Doesn't that discredit the computer modeling the "experts" are using. How do the environmentalists defend this seemingly obvious contradiction? Simple. They no longer call it global warming. It's now called climate change. Like I said, very versatile.

To assume the earth's climate, much less the output of the sun, is stable and unchanging is sheer fantasy. The scientists blaming Man for global warming are the same types who've supported all the Museums of Natural History in the country, detailing for us in vivid colors just how the earth changed through the ages. Do they really believe it's stopped evolving?

One very tangible way to understand the ever-changing climate is to look at where we get our oil from today. Oil is formed from decaying plant matter, lots of decaying plant matter, the kind you find in lush tropical rainforests. So where are some major sources of oil today? The deserts of the Middle East and the frozen tundras of Alaska and Siberia, all of which had to be lush tropical climates at some point in earth's history. Can we blame SUVs for that?

Twenty-five thousand years ago most of the Upper Midwest was covered by snow and ice, 9000 feet of ice. The glaciers migrated south during the Ice Age creating many of our famous canyons and mountain ranges. One day the glaciers began to retreat, the snow and ice to melt. I can just imagine primitive Man discussing this phenomena:

"Ug. Does it seem like that glacier is farther north than is was last year?"
"Ug. Yes. I guess it's melting."

Silence.

"Ug. You don't suppose it's because of this campfire, do you?"
"Ug. Maybe we should put it out just to be safe."

If we are in a war with our environment, it is a holding action at best. I live in a heavily forested city in the South. My city spends significant dollars and labor to keep the trees, weeds and bushes at bay. Our roads and highways are completely surrounded by the flora and fauna and, given the chance, the plants, insects and animals will take back our space in a very short time. Nature is spring-loaded, held back by our technology, but ready to pounce none the less. And nature is unforgiving, merciless.

For all those liberal bastions in California and New England who are so concerned we are destroying the planet, I issue this challenge. Cease all landscaping maintenance in your cities for five years. No tree trimming, no lawn mowing, no hedge or bush trimming, no weed removal, no removal of dead branches, leaves or grass. Cease all spraying for insects and allow your deer and wildlife populations, including rodents, to grow unrestrained. Perform no maintenance on your homes or public buildings. Forsake technology and give nature a chance.

Within five years your sidewalks, streets and basements will show the pressures of the flora with spider-webbed concrete, weeds penetrating every crevice. From season to season this will get worse as the rain penetrates the cracks and freezing and thawing cycles turn your concrete urban jungles to a rock strewn mess covered with weeds. Trees will sprout and grow, their roots upending concrete sidewalks and cracking the foundations of homes and buildings. Insects will thrive in the new environment, termites will destroy your homes, rats, mice, lice and mosquitoes will kill your children through disease. Within a hundred years there won't be a home in your neighborhood standing.

To those who say we need to return to a more simpler age, a more environmentally sustainable age, I ask this question: Do you mean we should return to the days of deforestation, the days of wood and coal smoke in the air, the days of horseshit and rats on our streets, yellow fever, malaria and typhoid putting our families into early graves? Is that "green?" Is it sustainable?

Welcome to: JimClonts.Com E-mail: b52radar@jimclonts.com