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Global-Warming Ghouls

Why We Long for No Flush Toilets, Yearn to Adopt Glaciers, and Desire Camels Over Cars

John F. Kennedy dreamed of putting a man on the moon.

Ronald Reagan dreamed of a world without the Berlin Wall.

Barack Obama and his minions dream of . . . a world built with straw homes?

You think I'm kidding? I wish I were. But I'm not.

Alas, I present to you The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook, which is the official companion guide to the Live Earth concerts. The concerts were a prime magnet for Obama Zombies if ever there was one: they attracted mostly teens and young adults wanting to sneak a peek at their favorite celebrity icon. But, as is emblematic with this generation, while the Zombies were smitten with Hollywood fanfare and hype, they overlooked the radicalism professed by Live Earth organizers. On page 142 of the guide, that's where we first meet the idea of starting your own zoo to save the planet from intergalactic collapse. The guide is a perfect example of all that is wrong (and insane) about liberalism, wherein logic and reason are jettisoned in favor of emotional paroxysms parading as serious policy.

How else do you explain a movement that urges college kids to create their own zoos? Indeed, in a rare moment of clear thinking, the guide acknowledges that it will, in fact, be difficult for you to stock your personal zoo with every animal on the planet, even "with a dedicated team of roving naturalists" at your disposal.¹ The species the guide implores us to stash include polar bears, penguins, tigers, and pandas. "Tigers?" you say. "Liberals want us to have pet tigers?" Yep, argues David de Rothschild, the book's author.

In July 2007, Al Gore assembled the largest rock concert ever, stretching seven continents, filling stadiums, and reaching hundreds of millions more on television. He called it Live Earth. The goal was to bring awareness to the idea that man, in all his finiteness, is responsible for scorching the planet. Live Earth showcased popular entertainers including Madonna, Kanye West, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bon Jovi, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Raven-Symone, Sting, and many others to echo the liberal line on all things environmental. Barack Obama said that Live Earth would go down as one of "the most significant days of action in the campaign against global climate change,"² and a major plank of his presidential campaign was a pledge to curb the release of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. One online paper even noted that "Obama is the only presidential candidate to launch the 'Live Earth' concert on his official website," and that the symbol for Live Earth resembles Obama's official campaign logo.³ Oddly, the pre-event advertising made little mention that concertgoers would be urged to start their own zoos or shovel tiger dung.

But here again, the world of the Obama Zombie is not one of logic and reason. No, instead Obama Zombies march to the beat of emotion. The herdlike youth cult that helped propel the Messiah to the White House was more akin to a Madison Avenue ad blitz than a serious policy debate. If not, please explain the Live Earth guide's advice that one additional way to save the planet would be for you to take a trip to Costa Rica so you could add to your animal kingdom zoo. Besides sanctimonious liberals, who has the time and money to hop a plane to South America to haul back Costa Rican frogs?⁴

Never mind the carbon footprint you'd leave behind as you hopscotched across the globe. But once you've traversed the earth and assembled your animal habitat, be warned, says Rothschild: "It's not an easy venture--a menagerie of this scale will require you to spend countless hours shoveling dung--but it is a rewarding one."

But it gets even worse. In all, The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook lists "77 Essential Skills to Stop Climate Change--or Live Through It." If shoveling animal excrement isn't your thing, perhaps you and your band of merry Obama Zombies might enjoy trading in your cars for camels. Yes, "Your dog, cat, parrot, or even boa constrictor might seem like an ideal companion for today's world. But in the not-too-distant future, the camel may become the perfect pet for the environmental challenges of the 21st century."⁵

The wackiness has just begun. The eco-manifesto tells us that camels require easy maintenance (just the darn poop shov- eling again), are a good source of protein, can be milked (yes, you read that correctly), and have long life spans. But don't let camel-racing your neighbor take up all your free time, dear Obama Zombies. You've also got some adopting to do. And I don't mean adopting the starving Ethiopian kid for thirty dollars a month. No, liberals have something better for us. It's time to adopt . . . a glacier!

It's no joke. The twenty-sixth essential tool for combating global warming is to support financially a sheet of ice. From the Obama Zombie eco-bible: "Cherish your adopted ice floe by posting its picture in a prominent place and by checking on it each year."⁶ Come on, people! Do your part! There's nothing like a random trip to Antarctica to become friends with . . . ice.

When tax season arrives, and while you're not romanticizing glaciers, or cleaning up tiger crap, or milking your camel, how about you audit your garbage! The Live Earth official handbook explains that "one of the best ways to understand your environmental balance sheet is with a little personal Dumpster diving."⁷

If diving into Dumpsters doesn't get you hot and bothered, fear not. Obama Zombies have even more ways for you to get involved. Like, say, building a house made out of straw. As the book notes, "Ditch the steel and glass, forget the neo-60s geodesic dome, and get past the Cinderella castle you once drew in your notebook. Instead, think simple. Think organic. Think straw."⁸

If the ferocious tornadoes and hurricanes that Barack Obama tells us are on our way due to global warming actually do land, well, no worries. Your straw house may not withstand the impact a steel-framed home would have, but, hey, you would've halved your CO2 emissions. Just take shelter under your camel or the massive pile of crap amassing in the backyard. It's following a liberal's fragile heart, not safety, that counts.

The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook has tons more other gems in the name of combating climate change: building a bat house outside your (straw) house,⁹ giving worms a home in your home,¹⁰ and partnering up on bubble baths ("scrub-a-dub with an organically grown loofah or sensual cotton sponge").¹¹ I wish this were all a joke. But it's real. It's how the left imagines running your life, and they are doing so on the fallacious premise of global warming.

What's so alarming is how many members of my generation have bought into the eco-hoax. It's not hard to understand why. We can't escape the propaganda. It attacks us from all sides: academia, MTV, Hollywood, musicians, the media. We don't stand a chance against the Obama-worshipping army that seeks to manipulate and control our lives.

That's why I'm here. I don't dig straw homes, camels, animal crap. I want to befriend people, not glaciers. I'm not looking to waste my time auditing the Dumpster outside my apartment. And most of all, I'm not idly standing by as the left bamboozles young Americans into believing that they are saving the planet when what the leftists really seek to do is erode the personal freedoms and liberties our founding fathers fought and died for.

Regardless of what Al Gore tells you, Antarctica is not melting, but has actually cooled over the past fifty years and ice on the continent has even expanded to record levels.¹² The polar bears are safe, increasing in numbers in some parts.¹³ And if you change your lightbulb and build a straw home, you will have done nothing to "save the planet."

Liberals are duping you to satisfy their own big-government schemes.

What the minds of Obama Zombies fail to grasp is that regulating CO2 emissions is a regulation of what you do: our choice of transportation, the temperature of our homes, the length of our showers, our choice of food (cows release more CO2 emissions than other animals while belching, we're told), the Internet, washing machines, dryers, the fact that we drive instead of walk our children to school, buying food that's not locally grown, and the countless electronic appliances that make life more en- joyable.

You probably never thought your iPod would be under assault, but an article in the Seattle Times ran with this headline: "Charge Your iPod, Kill a Polar Bear?" File this away under "you can't make this stuff up." According to the article, the Paris-based International Energy Agency estimates that new electronic gadgets "will triple their energy consumption" by 2030. Gadgets include MP3 players, mobile phones, and flat-screen TVs. Paul Waide, a senior policy analyst with the IEA, lamented that the electronics industry is "the fastest growing area and it's the area with the least amount of policies in place."¹⁴

Huh? No "policies in place" for plasma TVs?

Authoritarian alert! Authoritarian alert!

In fact, Waide's casual reference to policing consumer electronics is mild compared to what one eco-princess columnist for Britain's Guardian proposes: rationing the personal carbon use of each citizen.¹⁵ Once your carbon card runs out, you've got to buy credits from someone who has used less than "his or her quota."

Folks, this is scary. A major newspaper in Britain, the birthplace of the Magna Carta--the father to our Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution--is promoting the idea of the federal government devising how much energy you're allowed to use in your daily lives. For that is what a carbon footprint is: energy usage.

Young fools like Jessy Tolkan of the Energy Action Coalition can mindlessly testify before Congress and demand that the nation's carbon dioxide emissions be cut by 20 percent by 2015 and by 80 percent by 2050.¹⁶ But when Tolkan flew in six thousand "experts" from around the country to lobby Congress, she unintentionally demonstrated how much Americans rely on CO2 in our daily lives. When asked if such large-scale mobilization was worth it, considering the carbon footprint the people were leaving, she had a confession to make: "This is an issue we struggled with. Does it make sense to encourage travel from all across the country? In the end we feel that what is going to happen over the next four days was worth it."

And there you have liberal sanctimony at work. It's okay for them to fly around the country to engage in activities that they believe in, but they are the first to condemn your own buying choices and lifestyle habits. Now, there's an "inconvenient truth."

But who can blame them? They are merely following in the carbon footprints of their leader. On Earth Day, President Obama burned through 9,100 gallons of fuel when he parachuted into Iowa to give a speech on energy conservation.

SO HOW, THEN, has the left pulled this off? How have they managed to pull the organically grown wool over the eyes of the youth vote? The first primary tactic involves the left's total domination of American college campuses.

Meet Claire Roby, a college student in 2007. Claire wanted to make a statement with her Christmas gifts. So on Christmas morning, Claire gave "handmade clocks made from discarded CDs and scavenged electronic components," all of which were wrapped in newspaper. Why? She got dropped as a kid? No. According to a New York Times profile, Ms. Roby gave the gift of garbage to do her part to save the planet.¹⁷ To her, Christmas was no longer the venue to give sacrificially of yourself, finding out what those closest to you actually want for the blessed occasion. No, instead it's an opportunity for political grandstanding. Christmas cards, you see, are evil because they waste paper. Christmas lights? Evil. They waste electricity. And as for those capitalist creations called presents? Well, what's the point of giving someone a gift they actually want when you can instead give the gift of propaganda?

"We'll see how much we can avoid a dinner table argument this year," Roby told the Times. Roby, eco-warrior princess, is not alone. At the time the article was written, Roby was an environmental studies major at American University. Bingo.

Unsuspecting students enter college expecting to be intellectually challenged. Instead, professors and administrators subject students to a blizzard of liberal global-warming talking points. What most students are never told, of course, is that the idea that man is warming the planet is relatively new. In the 1970s, the eco-drones were telling us that man was cooling the planet. In fact, the concern then was that the world might soon be imperiled by--are you ready for this?--an Ice Age! Time's 1974 cover story "Another Ice Age?" and Newsweek's 1975 story "The Cooling World" are now cult classics. But in a fashion similar to today's hysteria, these news outlets had falsely deduced that man's actions had triggered worldwide cooling patterns.

Time and Newsweek were not alone. Popular books in the '70s included The Cooling and The Weather Conspiracy--The Coming of the New Ice Age. What a difference a few decades make.

Obama Zombies now consider global warming all the rage. Their position, and the position of B.H.O., is that man's industrialization, fueled by the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, will result in a polar meltdown if action is not taken immediately.

But many of those who study atmospheric conditions believe the exact opposite: that the mild, barely noticeable warming the temperature has seen over the last hundred years is the result of normal planetary motions and natural climate changes. They understand that warming and cooling are largely a function of--drum roll, please--the sun!¹⁸ Yes, the sun, that massive fiery ball in the sky that enables life on our planet. A bombshell, I know. But if you're losing sleep over such mild warming in the last century, don't. We've now entered a cooling period, one that has brought temperatures down to where they were in 1930.¹⁹

But rather than present students with both sides of the argument, our "academic" institutions have instead pursued the path of liberal propaganda. In an effort to gobble up as many federal research dollars as possible, once-freethinking and intellectually independent science departments have instead towed the Obama Zombie line while lining up at the federal trough to receive Al Gore-sized portions of taxpayer largesse. The goal: use academicians as megaphones to blast the liberal message far and wide with the hope that graduates will soon constitute a green voting bloc that will forever change the electoral map. Hence the brainwashed likes of a Claire Roby. Poor woman . . . by the time she graduated, her mind was so scrambled she was giving garbage to loved ones for Christmas.

Think I'm overstating academia's role? This headline from the Chronicle of Higher Education says it all. "Saving the Planet, by Degrees."²⁰ The reporter, Piper Fogg, detailed how courses premised on environmentalism have been injected into curricula. So what are students learning in these "saving the planet" courses? If the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities is any indicator, nothing useful. Students there maintain a "trash journal" to catalog "every scrap of paper used or banana peel chucked." One wonders how much carbon they emit punching their sinful deeds into a computer that emits carbon. Let's pray that professors don't actually make these students print out their work on--gasp!--paper when submitting class essays!

The indoctrination runs so deep that, in a moment of candor, the Boston Globe led off a story this way: "When historians look back on this decade and at what had college campuses most fired up, it won't be the war, or the economy, Obama-mania, or even Britney's babies. It will be a color."²¹ As the Globe noted, there "is no Green Book of eco-friendly schools, but sustainability is already a campus buzzword." Ah yes, sustainability. That's the word academics use to push their green agenda these days. The Globe defines sustainability as "leav[ing] enough resources so our children can live as well as we do now."

The Chronicle of Higher Education defines a "sustainable university" as one "that promotes the concept of meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Getting past the academic gobbledygook, college administrators are using the buzzword sustainability to promote the left's environmentalism. Specifically, explained the Chronicle, they're vowing to "curb carbon emissions," "buy green energy," "reduce waste," "serve organic food," "purchase hybrid cars," "appoint sustainability directors," "build green dormitories," and "plant native shrubbery."²²

Other schools, including Skidmore College in upstate New York, are "fighting" global warming by imploring students to "Do It in the Dark."²³ How romantic. Nothing like saving the planet, one sex act at a time. Classy.

"Trayless Tuesdays" are another Obama Zombie favorite. Many institutions, including Cornell University, Skidmore, and the Rochester Institute of Technology, have banished or limited the use of trays in dining halls, all under the banner of "sustainability." The fewer trays, the less water used to wash the trays. The less water used, the less energy consumption. However, "trayless Tuesdays" have unintended consequences, as the New York Times points out: they clog up cafeteria lines and elongate dining hours, since students need to keep leaving their table to get more food than their two hands can carry without a tray.²⁴ And let's pray that all that walking back and forth doesn't make them increase their breathing, because then they might emit more carbon dioxide into the air.

But again, logic isn't the realm of the Obama Zombie. No, emotions and feeling good are all that matters.

Undoubtedly, liberal politicians like Obama have colleges to thank for young people's overwhelming support of climate change measures. Academia is whipping out an army of Captain Planets and Eco-Princesses who will stay beholden to liberal candidates if the brainwashing is not undone. It is a tall task. Many professors and administrators see it as their professional duty to preach Gore-based hysteria. For instance, Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University, has pledged to make his campus "climate neutral" and believes that his campus needs "to speak with a unified voice and to speak with action" on global warming.²⁵

At Carnegie Mellon University, administrators openly admitted that the goal behind the construction of the "New House" dorm was to teach students about climate change. How? By being notified when their classmates drop a deuce.

To "pique students' interest in the environment," campus kiosks were outfitted with monitors that register every flick of a light switch or flush of a toilet.²⁶ That way you can chastise your fellow classmates for going to the dumper and crapping all over the environment.

These "sustainability measures" would be harmless if they weren't so financially costly. Indeed, the only thing that stinks worse than waterless toilets is the cost to install them--costs that further drive up the already astronomical price of higher education.

Leith Sharp, director in 2007 of Harvard University's Green Campus Initiative, noted that Harvard employs twenty full-time staffers and forty part-time students to sustain its "sustainability" programs, and that's still not enough, according to her. "It's unbelievable how much work [sustainability] is going to be, and people are utterly blind to that fact."²⁷

Get that? Harvard employs sixty people to combat global warming on campus, and it's still not enough. Cash-flushed Harvard may have that kind of dough to squander, but other schools who sign onto buying green energy and offsetting carbon don't enjoy fat-cat endowments.

In 2008, Middlebury College opened an $11 million biomass plant that burned wood chips "to help heat and cool campus buildings and produce electricity."²⁸ The high-priced plant was claimed to "reduce the college's consumption of fuel oil by 50 percent" and to "cut the college's greenhouse gas emissions." Tucked away in the eco-warriors' notepad is this bit of fine print: Middlebury needs "20,000 tons of wood chips to replace one million gallons of fuel oil each year."²⁹ The creation of twenty thousand tons of wood leaves one humongous carbon footprint. Extra trees need to be chopped down, reducing the plant life, which consumes carbon from the atmosphere, and the logging itself may raise greenhouse gases.³⁰

Emory University in Georgia has a whole different approach: it sends an energy bill to each individual school. According to Ciannat M. Howett, Emory's director of sustainability initiatives, different departments "have a huge incentive to get everyone in the school to reduce usage because then those dollars can go to their core mission, rather than energy."³¹ That's it: sacrifice the "core mission" of education on the altar of sustainability.

At the University of Florida, academic departments were charged three thousand dollars per parking pass in an effort to minimize car emissions on campus. Alan T. Dorsey, the chair of the physics department, attacked the policy because he had to dip into research funds in order to cover the new fees. "This cost comes at a bad time," he said.³² Ed Poppel was one of the administrators responsible for the parking rate increase, "to get people out of their cars and onto bikes or two legs." Yet he was still driving to work. "I give myself the excuse that in my position I have to be very flexible. It's difficult to tell people to change behaviors if I'm unwilling to change mine."³³

Can you say "eco-hypocrite"?

When you don't have the money for waterless toilets, sport a cactus. Pitzer College in Southern California doesn't have the money to provide organic food or construct fancy green buildings. Instead, they decided to replace their lawn with cacti. Large chunks of Pitzer's campus lawn were ripped up and replaced with prickly desert plants.³⁴ Sorry, Obama Zombies, there will be no more studying on the lawn. And if you do decide to study on the lawn, you dare not bring your iPod!

Yet, overall, in their efforts to "green" campuses, American colleges and universities combined to buy close to "1.1 billion kilowatt hours of green electricity," which is enough to power eighty-seven thousand homes for an entire year, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.³⁵ Ironically, every time "green" power is purchased, colleges are merely paying higher prices for energy, because they have no way of knowing whether the energy they buy is actually alternative. This again underscores just how goofy all this hyperemotional eco-claptrap truly is, and why only an Obama Zombie would not take the time to actually research and think.

Here's how it works: When a wind turbine produces renewable energy, it sends electrons into the electricity grid, where green energy blends with nongreen energy. Thus, colleges that buy energy produced at a wind farm don't actually purchase the electrons that came from that wind farm. Instead, as the Chronicle clarified, "they buy standard electricity and then pay a premium for wind renewable energy credits, providing an incentive for utilities to build more green power facilities."³⁶ (Emphasis added.) New York University, for instance, bragged that it bought 118 million kilowatt hours of green energy, but in reality, the school received "credits" for wind power while the campus was being serviced by a standard electricity grid.³⁷

The Obama Zombies have been swindled by those evil energy companies that have the audacity to provide humans with life-sustaining energy yet again.

Much of this would be funny if it didn't directly affect parents' and students' wallets. Green energy isn't cheap. In fact, it's considerably more expensive than traditional energy sources, including coal, oil, nuclear power, and natural gas. There's a reason why wind and solar "account for less than 1 percent of total net electricity generation" in the United States. A single percent!³⁸

There's more. In 2007, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) calculated the total dollar amount the government spent to produce energy. These supposed alternative sources of energy received around $16.6 billion, which came in the form of direct government subsidies and loans as well as tax breaks.³⁹ Because these "alternative" methods aren't viable on their own, we the taxpayers are forced to foot the high bill. The EIA found that solar energy receives $24.34 per megawatt hour from Uncle Sam, while wind gets $23.37 and "clean coal" rakes in $29.81. By contrast, as the Wall Street Journal observes, normal coal receives 44 cents, natural gas 25 cents, hydroelectric 67 cents, and nuclear power $1.59. In other words, wind is subsidized fifteen times more than nuclear power, even though nuclear power fuels 20 percent of this country's electricity production and wind less than 1 percent.⁴⁰

Nevertheless, the only way a college can be completely carbon neutral, as many college presidents have promised, is to buy so-called carbon offsets. This of course is the scheme that pays other people to lower their carbon emissions or to plant trees to make up for your carbon production. There's nothing like outsourcing your eco-sins for cash.

Everything we do is driven by energy production, but it's quadrupled on a university level, as colleges involve housing, feeding, teaching, and entertaining tens of thousands of students. It's irresponsible for schools to jack up already expensive tuition rates and ever-growing "student activity fees" (as many are doing) to absolve administrators and radical professors of their liberal eco-guilt. That said, there are a few fiscally responsible college presidents who refuse to go along with the charade. The president of Pomona College, David W. Oxtoby, has stated that before he goes blowing students' tuition on buying carbon credits he would first have to become convinced that doing so would be "really meaningful, and not just a way for the rich to make their consciences feel better."⁴¹

Alas, a pinprick of sanity.

ANOTHER MAJOR ECO-BLUDGEON involves the left's lock on youth-targeted media.

Consider the following. When Drew told Cameron that she took a crap in the forest, Cameron burned with envy. "I am so jealous right now," said Cameron. "I am going to the woods tomorrow." Drew laughed and boasted: "It was awesome." I was "hunched over like an animal" when I "took a poo in the woods."⁴²

There you have it, folks, two of the most famed celebrities--Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz--euphoric about the idea of taking a dump in the forest. And this is precisely the primitive world they envision for you, too.

Barrymore and Diaz's animalistic adventures were part of the MTV 2005 series Trippin', which the New York Times described as Diaz's unscripted "travelogue with a save-the-planet goal." Diaz produced the episodes (ten in all) and brought her celebrity friends along for the ecological ride: Jimmy Fallon, Justin Timberlake, Eva Mendes, and Jessica Alba. The show's goal was to target young audiences: "elementary schools taught about the cycle of life, the fragility of the fauna and the importance of recycling, but that when children turned into adolescents they tended to lose these interests."

Thus, the need for Trippin'.

The Times correctly observed that since "young viewers' appetite for scientific knowledge is limited, Ms. Diaz is betting that their interest in celebrities will draw them to the show and help them [find] a world beyond the exurbs and X-Boxes." The paper, however, dismissed Diaz's extremism as just fun and games: "she dwells on excrement, both for laughs and for edification."⁴³

But we're not letting Diaz off the hook that easily. While visiting Nepal, she referred to village walls covered in cow dung as "beautiful" and "inspiring." Then she took to praising "pounding mud" with sticks as "the coolest thing."

In Chile, Barrymore told the MTV audience that spending time in a primitive village sans electricity was uplifting. "I aspire to be like them more." Barrymore, by the way, at the time of Trippin', reportedly grossed $15 million a flick.

During the Bhutan episode, Diaz remarked that she loved how the "country's wealth was not based on dollar amount but on gross national happiness." Regarding the countryside still being relegated to undeveloped forest, she proclaimed, "That is so awesome. I like Bhutan." On you Americans--you greedy Americans--Diaz, who reportedly makes $20 million a movie, said this: "It's kinda gotten out of hand how much convenience we think we need."⁴⁴

And just when you thought it couldn't get worse, it does. It turns out that local officials actually had plans to bring some parts of Chile closer to, um, the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first. There were proposals to turn significant portions of the forest into a highway and also build an aluminum smelter. But it turns out our Hollywood eco-princesses weren't too keen on these projects, because of their alleged harmful impacts on the environment. Diaz rhapsodized: "Each of us can make a difference. If everyone recycled the aluminum cans they used, there would be no need for new smelters. So stop being a fucking pig and recycle your aluminum cans," she chortled.

Now, if you're wondering how these celebrities found their way around the jungles of South America, you're a very astute reader. While Diaz and her team were celebrating the lifestyle of a caveman, Trippin' shows them flying on multiple carbon-spewing airplanes and chartering pollution-puffing helicopters and even gas-guzzling boats to reach their site locations. The cringe-inducing irony was made complete when the series also showed the celebrities being "chauffeured to the airport in a full-size Chevy SUV," notwithstanding multiple public service announcements aired on Trippin' trashing the use of those same big, bad SUVs.

Ah, the hypocritical life of the eco-celebrity: raking in millions of dollars per film, being chauffeured around in private jets and SUVs, vacationing in the jungle, all while praising primitive life in parts of the world that can't provide basic infrastructure and sanitation for their own people. Forget hypocritical. It's depraved, perverse, and downright cruel. But it's a perfect if small example of how Hollywood continues its radical, hypocritical environmentalism onslaught against those of us who consume but a tiny fraction of the energy that celebrity mansions and car collections suck up.

Kind of like Live Earth. Remember that? As we discussed, it was the biggest, most detailed and intricate concert, stretching seven continents, filling stadiums with thousands, and reaching millions more on television to raise awareness about global warming.

Again, celebrities who have the biggest carbon footprints of us all--with their mansions, private jets, spending sprees, vacation homes, movie productions, and concert tours--are telling ordinary folks like you and me that we need to cut down on our own carbon footprint. As those world-renowned climatologists the Red Hot Chili Peppers explained, "The climate change situation is the No. 1 problem facing humanity."

In a rare moment of journalistic integrity, even the New York Times was suspicious. "If less is more," the Times wondered, "then why is biggest better?" According to the Times, "this seven-continent, multimedia eco-extravaganza was colored by the very complacency it vowed to combat: No matter how dire the problem, the solution can be small and painless."⁴⁵

The Times pointed out how the emcee at Giants Stadium, musician David Holmes, was "discussing alternative eco-products while balancing an Apple computer on his lap." Um, David, how on God's green earth do you think your laptop was produced? Wasn't through wind power, brother . . . and it definitely wasn't at the hands of a barefoot Chilean boy rubbing sticks together in his hut.

NBC, which is in the tank with the green agenda, televised the Live Earth concerts. And, as expected, their "reporter," Today's Ann Curry, asked softball questions, such as the one to Trudie Styler: "Why do you care so much?" Hey, Ann, a better question, maybe to Kanye West and Ludacris, might have been: "Your lyrics gratuitously praise big cars, fat wallets, extravagant homes, bitches and hos, excessive partying, and big guns, and you tour the globe on concerts. Why do you think you're in a position to lecture the rest of us about cutting back?" If only Ann Curry were a real reporter. Then we might get an answer.

"So much star power assembled in so many places," notes the Times, "to assure fans that all they need do to save the planet is change a light bulb, choose paper over plastic or, as Cameron Diaz recommended, turn off the shower while shaving their legs."⁴⁶

The New York Times wasn't the only news outlet to point to the extravagant hypocrisy of Live Earth. The London-based Daily Mail estimated that the total footprint of Live Earth was 31,500 tons of carbon emissions, given all the energy consumed while traveling to the concerts and powering the productions. The paper's investigation revealed that "far from saving the planet, the extravaganza generated a massive fuel bill, acres of garbage, thousands of tons of carbon emissions, and a mileage total equal to the movement of an army."⁴⁷ Add to that the estimated television audience and the carbon footprint exceeds 74,500 tons! In case you're curious (which you should be), the average Briton's carbon footprint is around 11 tons . . . per year. An interesting way for left-wingers to address a planet that is on the precipice of environmental Armageddon--to blow past a year's worth of carbon footprints, by 6,777 times. Makes sense, no? Come to think of it, adulterers should try this kind of lefty logic when pledging renewed fidelity to their wives: Cheat more--not once, not twice, but 6,777 times further!

If celebrities truly bought into all the climate meltdown talk that they spew, they would stop filming movies immediately. Their lifestyles and vocations produce more than triple the carbon footprint of the average household. Madonna can forgo simulating sex onstage and Cameron Diaz can crap in the forest without the cameras rolling. Diaz, prone to gross confessions, described to Jay Leno the type of life she pictures for the rest of us: "I do follow the 'If it's yellow leave it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down.' I believe in that 100 percent."⁴⁸ So, if you ever happen to be invited to one of Diaz's cocktail parties, don't be surprised that her bathroom reeks of urine.

THE FINAL TOOL used to lobotomize aspiring Obama Zombies involves the "scientific" shell game promulgated by the left against America's youth.

If a lie is repeated often enough, it's thought to be true. And nowhere is this more true than in the false notion that a "consensus" of scientists is that man is responsible for warming the planet. It's not true. But Obama Zombies don't want a real debate. They want an Al Gore slide show that leaves folks feeling all warm and fuzzy about saving polar bears.

U.S. senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma has himself assembled a growing list of more than 650 top scientists from around the globe who have challenged the global-alarming hysteria proffered by the liberal machine.⁴⁹ Consensus? What consensus? Slowly, even the reliably liberal media are noticing. Politico conceded that a "growing accumulation" of atmospheric data could signal that the "science behind global warming may still be too shaky to warrant cap-and-trade legislation,"⁵⁰ and the New York Times's environmental reporter Andrew Revkin acknowledged that "climate science is not a numbers game (there are heaps of signed statements by folks with advanced degrees on all sides of this issue)."⁵¹

Interestingly, the Times, which editorializes with the belief that man is in fact warming the plant, still felt compelled to call out Al Gore and Barack Obama for sensationalizing the threat of global warming. On February 25, 2009, the paper ran a story with the headline "In Debate on Climate Change, Exaggeration Is a Common Pitfall." As they pointed out, Gore was forced to remove a slide from his presentation that correlated global warming to a sharp spike in "fires, floods and other calamities around the world," after the research group Gore quoted said he had misrepresented the data. The Times explained that "while climate scientists foresee more intense droughts and storms, there is still uncertainty, and significant disagreement, over whether recent patterns can be attributed to global warming."⁵²

When the New York Times is scolding you as an eco-exaggerator, you know you have problems.

So let's get to the basics. Is carbon dioxide a pollutant that is causing the earth's temperature to rise?

I'm gonna go with no.

Here's why: Try this experiment. Breathe in the air that you exhale. Now, let me know if you faint, feel nauseous, or as if you're about to die. After all, we human beings exhale carbon dioxide, for crying out loud! Perhaps Barack Obama forgot, but carbon dioxide is essential for life. Plants and crops depend on it. Some farmers even deliberately generate increased levels of CO2 to bulk up food production.⁵³ More "pollution," anyone?

In any event, there's no need to become apoplectic over CO2. Geologist Dudley J. Hughes published a paper for the Heartland Institute pointing out that rising carbon dioxide levels are nothing to worry about, since it comprises less than 1 percent of the atmosphere. Nitrogen and oxygen, by contrast, cover about 99 percent. Hughes gives us a workable analogy to understand how absurd it is to say that CO2 has any meaningful effect in our vast atmosphere. "For simplicity, let us picture a football stadium with about 10,000 people in the stands. Assume each person represents a small volume of one type of gas. . . . Carbon dioxide is represented as only about 4 parts in 10,000, the smallest volume of any major atmospheric gas."⁵⁴

Basically, our world doesn't have a thermostat that liberals can toy with. Our climate is always changing, from the Medieval Warming Period to the Little Ice Age, which followed that. There is no such thing as a global mean temperature. Besides, the infinitesimal "warming" that certain parts of the world are experiencing--over the past hundred-plus years--is nothing to write home to Mom about and is a far cry from saying kids in Jamaica are going to burst into flames one of these days.

But the Jamaican kid can relax. In fact, let's buy him a sweater, because we may be experiencing global cooling now. In 2008, outlets that track global temperatures worldwide released data showing that the earth faced cooling cycles large enough to negate the warming documented over the past hundred years.⁵⁵ Baghdad, for instance, experienced snowfall for the very first time.

Which is it, Obama Zombies? Warming or cooling? I've got to know! You see, folks, meteorologist Obama can't predict the weather tomorrow, but he can predict a global climate catastrophe? Even Al Gore's most ardent believers have come to realize this fact, which is why now they prefer the term climate change to global warming. It's more vague that way.

Not only is 1934 the hottest year on record, but five of the ten warmest years transpired before World War II--well before we started pumping globs of CO2 into the atmosphere.⁵⁶ So what was causing global warming in 1934?

Interestingly, environmentalists can't even make up their minds on whether to abandon fossil fuels for the much-hyped biofuels. One activist group is urging the British government to halt rules that require a percentage of transportation energy to consist of "green" fuels. According to Friends of the Earth, cutting down forests to plant and harvest crops for biodiesel purposes has the unintended consequence of generating an extra 1.3 million tons of CO2.⁵⁷ Similarly, one study by professors at the University of California-Davis found that it could be more eco-friendly to drive an SUV than to take a train. Oil, gas, and coal, for instance, are used to produce electricity to power and build trains as well as the building of transportation infrastructure. When all is said and done, sticking with your SUV may actually be better for the environment.⁵⁸ Recycling may absolve you of inner guilt, but the process of cleaning and cataloging materials requires using an abundance of--gasp--energy.⁵⁹ Funny how that works, eh? And let's not forget about those second rounds of trucks that bulldoze through neighborhoods like tanks to pick up our color-coded recycling bins. The emission that comes out of those bad boys is no joke.

Move past the idea that mild warming in the earth's temperature is catastrophic (especially while we're cooling down now) and go find whatever mode of transportation you want. Recycle if it makes you feel better. Adopt a glacier. Befriend sheets of ice. Plaster your walls with cow dung. Choose to buy doofy-looking hybrids. It's called freedom. But please spare the rest of us the self-important chest thumping about how you're saving the environment. And above all, don't tread on our God-given freedoms. You do have the right to be duped by the "scientific" shell game, but you also have the right to think for yourself and not act like a Zombie.

IN THE END, I actually agree with Obama on one key point: global warming will affect my generation. But what we need protection from is not the warming (now cooling), but rather an authoritarian cult of blind followers who will attempt to remake our lives for the worse. Liberals like to speak of leaving their kids a better planet than what was given to them. If Obama Zombies don't wake up from their slumber, we will be paying for B.H.O.'s climate schemes, not only in higher taxes but also in less output as a nation; in lighter, less safe vehicles; in less innovation; and most importantly, in a loss of freedom.

Republicans, in many ways, have only themselves to blame for the plight we face. John McCain was a worthless candidate, in particular on the subject of climate change. His efforts to reach out to young voters amounted to little more than an embrace of the cockamamie eco-hype while cobbling together his own stack of government-run solutions.

Sorry, Barack. We want to keep our homes at whatever temperatures we choose. We want to drive whatever we decide. We want to eat whatever we damn well please. And we reject you and your liberal machine's attempt to create a perennial voting bloc of young people scared out of their minds that they are ruining the planet.