Rhinocrisy

This story documents some interesting research — turns out that rather than dedicate vast tracts of land to fueling cars, it would make more sense from a carbon point of view to let the farms revert to forest and continue using fossil fuels for cars.

Lately I’ve been reading John Perkins’ “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”, which I heartily recommend if you are anxious to get steamed up about imperialism and debt slavery and the like. Anywho, therein Perkins says the following:

I recalled an economics professor from my business school days, a man from northern India, who lectured about limited resources, about man’s need to grow continually, and about the principle of slave labor. According to this professor, all successful capitalist systems involve hierarchies with rigid chains of command, including a handful at the very top who control descending orders of subordinates, and a massive army of workers at the bottom, who in relative economic terms truly can be classified as slaves.

This is a pretty powerful indictment of capitalism, if you have any kind of commitment to anti-poverty, equality, social justice, etc. And certainly many capitalist cheerleaders will promise you that capitalism will, indeed, inevitably lift everyone out of poverty and provide us all with the stable, eco-friendly utopia we’d all love to be a part of.^* This led me to construct what I call “The T-shirt Argument”, which goes as follows:
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Sorry I haven’t been writing much lately, folks. I got a paper back from review and have been busting my ass to turn it around and get it out the door again.

In the meanwhile, I was going to entertain you by writing about an incident wherein Steve McIntyre (of McIntyre & McKitrick fame) was crowing about having found an error in NASA’s GISS mean temperature records for the US; following his correction (which NASA acknowledged), 1998 is no longer the hottest year in history for the US - 1934 is. Many right-wing blogs are also crowing over this, and asking climate scientists to EAT crow over this, but it turns out to be all hat and no cattle crow.

Anyway, I was GOING to entertain you by writing about this, but Tim Lambert already did it very nicely. Read it!