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The old button from the Environmental Club days which I just happened to find on Earth Day! It is a little beat up (particularly the ends of the ribbon), but no worse for the wear, I think. And it is one of the few items that I have left from those days, so it carries a lot of great memories for me! Nothing Changes Until You Do!
"Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf." - Terence McKenna
"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed."
~Mahatma Gandhi
"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future."
~John F. Kennedy
Recently, Senator Inhofe from Oklahoma, and prominent member of the generally climate change denying Republican party, spoke before a crowd at a conference organized by one of the leading global warming denying think tanks, the Heartland Institute.
He spoke with an air of authority, and generally with the assumption that everyone (assuming it was everyone in the room) knew that global warming was essentially a hoax, a concoction made up by the United Nations in order to assert more control.
“The United Nations is the reason that this all came along. We all know that,” Inhofe said.
“They want independence. They don’t want to be accountable to anybody, to the United States or any other country,” he said, explaining that global climate change policies would give the United Nations its own funding source and make it unaccountable to its member countries.
“Two states, including my state of Oklahoma, have formally announced their intent just to say ‘no,’ because what they’re trying to do is illegal. And despite this, the president is choosing to ignore the will of Congress,” he said.
Despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of the world's scientific community agree that climate change does indeed appear to be caused by human activity, Inhofe has infamously refused to believe this, and refuted these arguments time and time again.
It should be noted that Senator Inhofe's top five corporate sponsors are Devon Energy, Boeing, Murray Energy, American Trucking Associationns, and General Dynamics. Take a look at that list of companies. Historically, he has been backed particularly by major players in the gas and oil industry.(Source: https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00005582)
Inhofe claims that measures designed to curtail human activity, particularly those that produce carbon emissions, such as the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, are more about “about leveling the playing field for big business worldwide,” and if bureaucrats control carbon emissions, “you control life.”
So, he states concerns about the United Nations conspiring for ever more control, and in order to combat this, he takes huge funds from major polluters and corporations with a vested interest in continuing the massive pollution activities that produce the same carbon emissions that scientists fault as most responsible for global warming. In other words, let's combat what he seems to believe is growing control by the United Nations by giving ever more power and control to major and massively polluting corporations instead. Because corporate control is never a problem for men like Inhofe, although imaginary, fear-mongering conspiracy theories about an imminent takeover by the United Nations are always an immediate cause for concern. The United Nations has grown too powerful, according to Inhofe, and must be stopped right away!
Oh, really, Senator? Is that what the climate control battle is all about?
So, let me get this straight. The vast majority of the world's scientists have warned about the detrimental impact that human activity seems to have on the environment, and they have projected that the world's weather would get crazier. True, they made the mistake of calling it global warming, a term that is all too easily misunderstood by those who do not make much of an effort to try and understand what global warming is, anyway.
Somehow, those know-it-all bastards predicted more extreme weather, and indeed, the weather grew more extreme. That meant that the traditional argument that you and your cohorts employed was disproven. The arguments that global warming was a crock, a farce, and that those wacko, extremist environmentalists who believe in it are off their rockers seemed outdated already by the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the rest of the South. There had been a huge tsunami, after all, in 2004, which killed over 150,000 people.
Since then, however, regular floods along the Mississippi, along with record droughts in other parts of the country, plus some other huge events for those who were paying attention and could connect the dots, such as the huge earthquake in Japan and Hurricane Sandy, as well as record heat and drought in places like Australia, had made the weather seem more than a little odd.
Sure, you can bring in a snowball into the Capitol building to try and make a mockery of the whole "climate change" thing, to make it a circus act, much like your party makes a mockery of a whole range of issues that matter, including healthcare and budgetary cuts.
In reality, however, you needed to change your arguments, and quickly, in order to gain traction again, since those who denied (and mocked - let's not forget that) "global warming" had to backtrack a bit after such severe weather events. But the American people today are nothing if not gullible, and they are especially gullible when it comes to climate change/global warming. Forward an argument by a small band of scientists who argue against what the vast majority of the scientific community believes, and a large percentage of Americans will actually believe that. They will stand by like sheep when someone argues about the need to invade a sovereign nation immediately, and they do not mind when those arguments prove to be false. But tell them that the weather is getting seriously bad, and will get worse unless we begin to act more responsibly, and many of these same American people will act like detectives themselves, trying to disprove the case in every way possible. They will argue that scientists the world over are in on some huge conspiracy, and will overlook the fact that climate change denial science tends to be - surprise, surprise - funded by big oil and others who stand to benefit by continuing the very same man-made activities that scientists are warning about.
Ultimately, money talks in America, and the prime example of those to the rest of the world - what is a source of embarrassment for many Americans who actually care what the rest of the world thinks about us - is in politics. Action to curtail the worst effects on climate change, and having strong legislation to protect the environment in general, is rejected time and time again, because short-term profits by big corporations outweigh those concerns, much like short-term profits by the healthcare industry trump concerns by ordinary Americans about affordability and access to their healthcare (the only industrialized country in the world where this is a problem).
So, we come back to your point about the fight for climate change being about global control.
You suggested, as other conspiracy theorists have before you, that the United Nations is using the excuse, apparently the fabrication of the threat from climate change in order to try and gain control over the world.
And here I had long assumed that you were just creating some imaginary threat to American sovereignty in order to promote, and personally profit from, a much more real and grave threat - that of increased corporate control over people's real lives on an every day basis. I had no idea that the United Nations was preparing to essentially take over the United States, and using climate change as the excuse, rather than actually trying to promote healthier, more sensible environmental practices. It must be a really elaborate ruse, because images from cameras in isolated regions, as well as by satellites (and also our plain eyes) seem to suggest that ice is indeed melting, and that the planet is truly getting warmer. But that is just the United Nations pulling the wool over all of our eyes.
Luckily, we have you defending us from that by turning to global corporations hell bent on profit, who fund you and your Congressional coworkers, as well as all of the pseudoscience that they fund to try and discredit, or at the very least cast doubt, on climate change. And the sweetest part of it all, Mr. Inhofe, is that you are personally profiting from the same companies that are carrying on your climate change denying crusade! Everybody wins, right?
That means that we should trust you and other corrupt Senators and members of the House, who are bought and sold by corporations who themselves are clearly trying to gain more power and assert more control.
Surely, as a proud conservative, you must have uttered the words, albeit with different meaning, that come to me now. But when I think of the absurdity of all of this nonsense and conspiracy theory thinking hat dominate our politics here in the United States, I sigh, and think to myself this:
Only in America.
Inhofe: Climate change fight really about global control By Timothy Cama - 06/11/15
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